PFAS in Focus: Forever-Engineering With Trent Stober, HDR - Reflections on Water Podcast
On-Demand Webinar | Flood or Drought? A Discussion of the Election’s Potential Legislative Impacts on the Water Sector
[WEBINAR] Fairly (or Unfairly?) Traceable: Are Discharges Through Groundwater Subject to the Clean Water Act?
Water Rights with Eric Garner: Prescriptive Rights
Context is Crucial in Examining BLM’s Proposed Rule for Fracking On Federal Land
Farmers in southern Tulare County will face greater scrutiny for groundwater pumping after the state placed the region on probation following a lengthy hearing in Sacramento on Tuesday....more
What Happened? On June 21, 2024, the Supreme Court narrowly held that three states could not enter a consent decree to settle their interstate water dispute without the support of the intervening federal government. The...more
Update: The Washington Department of Ecology (Ecology) officially kicked off the Nooksack adjudication, a legal process that will determine the priority of water rights in Whatcom County and portions of Skagit County....more
The Alberta government has identified, and is taking proactive steps to address, the looming threat of a severe drought this year. As negotiations unfold to secure water-sharing agreements, a cascade of legal and economic...more
The Washington Department of Ecology (Ecology) announced it will begin an adjudication of water rights in Water Resources Inventory Area 1 (WRIA1), including the Nooksack River system, in April 2024. An adjudication is the...more
An ongoing, historic drought in California has compelled California state legislators to rethink the state’s long-standing treatment of water rights. While the recent heavy snowpack and wet spring and summer have alleviated...more
Last week, leaders from a range of industries convened for two days in Los Angeles for Brownstein and WestWater’s inaugural Sustainable Water Investment Summit....more
How water rights are granted and managed in the United States has always been a challenge. Unlike land grants, which are finite areas, water knows no boundaries and flows freely. How water is distributed, managed, and...more
According to the National Center for Environmental Information, about 51 percent of the continental United States has been experiencing drought conditions in the summer of 2022. More than 70 percent of the western U.S. faces...more
A California Court of Appeal held that the EIR for a public water authority’s river diversion and water storage project adequately described the unadjudicated waters to be diverted and adequately analyzed impacts to water...more
As severe drought conditions continue across the western U.S., Allen Matkins will begin publishing a quarterly newsletter focused on recent legal, regulatory, and policy issues impacting water users and suppliers in...more
On April 19, 2022, Clark County District Court Judge Bita Yeager issued a decision vacating the Nevada State Engineer’s (State Engineer) June 15, 2020, Order 1309. Under Order 1309, the State Engineer merged seven...more
On Feb. 23, 2022, the Third District Court of Appeal issued an opinion in Dow v. Lassen Irrigation Company et al, C091965 as to what it believed to be an issue of first impression—whether a watermaster appointed by the trial...more
In a landmark ruling signaling a new lens with which to view the treatment of interstate water allocation, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision on November 22 in Mississippi v. Tennessee, et al., 595 U.S. ___ (Case No....more
In case you missed it while preparing for your Turkey dinner, on November 22, 2021, the United States Supreme Court decided 9-0 that the Equitable Apportionment Doctrine, which had prior to this decision been held to apply...more
The decision could complicate states’ ability to pursue groundwater natural resource damages actions. On November 22, 2021, the US Supreme Court held that equitable apportionment applies to a dispute between states about...more
On November 22, 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Mississippi v. Tennessee, holding that water in an underground aquifer that flows across State lines is subject to equitable apportionment between the States, in similar...more
In August 2020 we previewed four notable interstate water rights cases that would soon be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. The case of Mississippi v. Tennessee is now one step closer to a decision. On 5 November, 2020, the...more
As climate change accelerates, clashes between states over water rights are heating up due to this resulting strained resource. The only court with authority to adjudicate these interstate disputes is the U.S. Supreme Court....more
In Environmental Law Foundation v. State Water Resources Control Board, the California Court of Appeal for the Third District on August 29, 2018 affirmed a district court’s application of the Public Trust Doctrine to the...more
On August 29, 2018, the Third Appellate District published its long-awaited opinion in Environmental Law Foundation v. State Water Resources Control Board (“ELF”), a case involving a challenge to Siskiyou County’s (“County”)...more
After five parched years, substantial winter rains and Sierra snowpack have brought California a long-sought reprieve from drought, though not without presenting a new set of challenges. In February, nearly 200,000 residents...more
In early May, the Fourth District Court of Appeal took an important step toward helping to secure Orange County’s water supply. It issued several opinions in response to challenges to a proposed public-private partnership...more
Nearly two years after passing the Water Sustainability Act (WSA), the province of British Columbia has quietly brought it into force through the registration of five new regulations. Together, these implement a new regime...more
On October 21, 2015, the California Water Commission (“CWC”) adopted emergency regulations formulated by the Department of Water Resources (“DWR”) that establish a process by which local agencies may seek groundwater basin...more