Central Delta Water Agency v. U.S.
| Decision Date | 26 September 2002 |
| Docket Number | No. 01-16172.,01-16172. |
| Parties | CENTRAL DELTA WATER AGENCY; South Delta Water Agency; Alexander Hildebrand; R.C. Farms, Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. UNITED STATES of America; United States Department of the Interior; Gale A. Norton;<SMALL><SUP>*</SUP></SMALL> Michael J. Spears, Defendants-Appellees, San Joaquin River Group Authority, Defendant-Intervenor-Appellee. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Ninth Circuit |
Daniel A. McDaniel, Stockton, CA, for the plaintiffs-appellants.
David C. Shilton, Department of Justice, Washington, DC, for the defendants-appellees, and Tim O'Laughlin, Chico, CA, for the defendant-intervenor-appellee.
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California; Oliver W. Wanger, District Judge, Presiding. D.C. No. CV-99-05650-OWW.
Before: GOODWIN, REINHARDT and FERNANDEZ, Circuit Judges.
Opinion by Judge REINHARDT; Dissent by Judge FERNANDEZ.
This case raises an important practical question regarding the doctrine of standing. It requires us to address the circumstances under which a party that fears that it will be significantly injured by another's actions may bring a lawsuit to prevent the possible future injury. The dispute involves one of the most contentious issues in the western United States: the management of water resources.
The Central Valley Project ("the Project") is the largest federal water management project in the United States. Originally authorized by the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1935, the project consists of 20 dams and reservoirs, 8 powerplants, and approximately 500 miles of major canals and aqueducts. The Project is located in the Central Valley Basin of California, which is roughly 400 miles long by 120 miles wide, and includes the major watersheds of the Sacramento and San Joaquin river systems. The two rivers meet at the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta ("the Delta"), where the waters mix and then flow through the Carquinez Strait into San Francisco Bay, and ultimately, into the Pacific Ocean. Central Valley Project water is used for agricultural, municipal, industrial and environmental protection purposes. The Central Valley is the heart of California's renowned farm country, and the Project provides the water that is essential to its unparalleled productivity. In any given year, the Project manages water sufficient to irrigate one-third of the agricultural land in California.
The Project is operated by the United States Bureau of Reclamation ("the Bureau"), a division of the Department of the Interior. Pursuant to permits granted by the California State Water Resources Control Board ("the Board"), the Project appropriates water from various mountain sources, and delivers it for beneficial uses to central California areas. At issue in this case is the Bureau's operation of the New Melones Unit, one of the many water management units that constitute the Central Valley Project. The New Melones Unit consists of the New Melones Dam on the Stanislaus River, which is a tributary of the San Joaquin River. The dam diverts water into the New Melones Reservoir.
The Bureau operates the New Melones Unit pursuant to federal reclamation statutes as well as under four California water rights permits numbered 16597-16600, which were issued by the Board in water rights decision 1422 ("D 1422"), rendered in April, 1973. The permits allow for various uses of the water stored in the reservoir, including power generation, consumptive use in certain counties, and the preservation of fish and wildlife. D 1422 authorizes the Bureau to release certain amounts of water from the Reservoir both to maintain local fishery populations and to limit the salinity concentration as measured downstream to no greater than 500 parts-per-million (ppm). The gauging station where salinity levels are measured is located just below the confluence of the San Joaquin and Stanislaus Rivers, at Vernalis, and the salinity standard has thus come to be called the "Vernalis standard." Water that is used for fishery habitats is released into the Stanislaus River primarily in April, May, and October. Plaintiffs contend that as more water is released for fish during this period, less water is available for releases during the drier periods of the year, with the result that salinity levels increase downstream at Vernalis, which is closer to the ocean. According to plaintiffs, water that exceeds the Vernalis salinity standard — that is, water that measures in excess of 500 ppm at Vernalis1 — has a significant negative effect on certain types of crops, and thus the Bureau's compliance with the standard determines what kind of crops they are able to grow.
The permits to operate the New Melones project have been modified over the years in various ways, and those modifications reflect the intense competing demands for the reservoir's waters. Most relevant to this appeal, in 1995 the Board issued a new Bay Delta Water Quality Plan ("the Bay Delta Plan"), which included general objectives for the water quality of the Central Valley Project waters. These objectives were agreed to by the state and federal governments, as well as by urban, agricultural and environmental interest groups. Soon thereafter, the Board issued water rights decision WR-95-6, which resolved some relatively minor inconsistencies between existing permits and the requirements of the Bay Delta Plan. The new plan, inter alia, changed the unit of measurement for the salinity reading at Vernalis from a ppm standard for total dissolved solids to an electrical conductivity measure. It also established a lower salinity standard for the April August peak irrigation season, and a correspondingly higher standard for other months.2
In 1992, Congress enacted the Central Valley Project Improvement Act ("the Act") as Title XXXIV of the Reclamation Projects Authorization and Adjustment Act of 1992, Pub.L. 102-575, 106 Stat. 4600, 4706-31 (1992); the law took effect on October 31 of the same year. The passage of the Act followed significant lobbying efforts by environmental groups and consists primarily of provisions designed to ensure that the Project is managed to further the protection and restoration of the natural environment. See §§ 3402, 3406.3
The Act provides generally that the Central Valley Project shall be operated in accordance with all obligations under state and federal law, and specifically mentions the requirement of compliance with decisions of the Board that impose conditions on applicable licenses and permits governing the project. Id. Three specific aspects of the statute are relevant to this appeal, all of which relate to requirements that the Project divert water so as to provide flows to enhance the habitats of various aquatic life forms. First, § 3406(b)(1) requires that the Bureau:
[D]evelop within three years of enactment and implement a program which makes all reasonable efforts to ensure that, by the year 2002, natural production of anadromous fish in Central Valley rivers and streams will be sustainable, on a long-term basis, at levels not less than twice the average levels attained during the period of 1967-1991.4
Second, to implement this goal, § 3406(b)(2) specifies that the Bureau is required to manage 800,000 acre-feet of Project waters "for the primary purpose of implementing the fish, wildlife, and habitat restoration purposes and measures authorized by this title." § 3406(b)(2) also states that in so managing the Project, the Bureau must comply with "flow and operational requirements imposed by terms and conditions existing in licenses, permits, and other agreements pertaining to the Central Valley Project under applicable State or Federal law existing at the time of enactment of this title...." Third, the statute authorizes the Bureau to "develop and implement a program in coordination and in conformance with the plan required under [§ 3406(b)(1)] for the acquisition of a water supply to supplement the quantity of water dedicated to fish and wildlife purposes under [§ 3406(b)(2)]." In short, the Act demands that the Project implement a significant fish habitat protection program, but that it do so in accordance with the applicable state water use permits.
Soon after the passage of the Act, the Bureau adjusted its operations so as to comply with the statutory directives. The Bureau began diverting for fishery habitat purposes water from the New Melones Reservoir that would otherwise have been available for other purposes. Nothing in the Act requires the Bureau to take water from the New Melones Reservoir, as opposed to the many other Central Valley Project reservoirs, in order to comply with the fish habitat restoration requirements of § 3406(b). Nevertheless, as part of its efforts to meet those requirements, the Bureau exercised its discretion to divert water from that source. In 1999, the Bureau adopted the New Melones Interim Operations Plan, which provided for the release of water from the New Melones Reservoir in April, May and October to supplement fishery flows in the Delta, as well as the purchase of water from other users for the same purpose.5 That operations plan remains in effect at present.
This lawsuit was brought by four plaintiffs, two agencies chartered by the State of California and two private parties. The state agencies, the Central Delta Water Agency ("Central Delta") and the South Delta Water Agency ("South Delta") are political subdivisions of the State of California, created by the legislature in 1973 to ensure that the lands within their respective jurisdictions have a dependable supply of water of suitable quality sufficient to meet present and future needs. The charters of the two agencies allow...
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