Water Rights for the Dummy Property Owner

There's more to water rights than watering your lawn...

There are many corners of the internet where our researchers rarely go: with the exception of celebrity and sports news, just about any search will turn up dozens of fake websites on page two of the results; all based in Asia and all trying to sell you some product only vaguely related to your search term. Yuck: those sites suck; big time. They also usually avoid WritEdge.com, mostly because it hurts their eyes to try to avoid all the popups, ads, popunders, and other annoyances the owners of Harlow-McGaw smear all over the page. But we digress... One researcher accidentally stopped by WritEdge.com not long ago, and brought "Water Rights – What You Might Want to Know,"¹ by Lori Palermo, to the nomination table. It won...

We're pretty sure that Palermo wasn't really expecting much traffic at the post he (yes, Lori is male) wrote, a thinly-disguised ad for some law firm. We say that because of his opening line:

"Only a few people are interested in this subject. It might even seem appealing only to real property owners where a body of water exists."

Which is, of course, absolute rubbish: water rights are transparent to the vast majority of property owners, but absolutely critical to anyone who owns a ranch, farm, factory, or other large-scale user of water in the Rockies and the desert west. The problem with Lori's article is that it really doesn't say jack. We asked our house watershed management guru about it and she just laughed. "This guy has no idea what he's talking about!" she chortled.

Oh, most of what Palermo says is more or less truthful, but he seems to have missed the point by several million acre-feet. For instance, he claims that,

"You don’t own or have automatic rights to a body of water, such as a stream or river, that passes through a piece of land even if you own that land . You may have rights to that body of water but these are solely dependent on the type of body of water that gets in your property [sic]."

Well, Lori, sort of, but your rights are much more dependent on legal agreements to the water than they are to the "type of body of water," and such legal agreements are generally reserved for large rivers and watersheds, such as the Colorado and South Platte Rivers.

After some rather puzzling content that never includes the definitive phrase "in-stream flow" or the word "severed," Lori closes with the dire warning that,

"If you own a piece of land that is touched by a river, sea or stream, you have a potential to come face-to-face with water rights issues. You should get some background about it while it’s still early... ...and sends people to a moribund website for a Parker (or perhaps Boulder), Colorado law firm. Palermo clearly knows nothing about water law: he doesn't mention groundwater and groundwater recharge, doesn't mention water compacts, doesn't mention in-stream flow. In short, Lori overstates the importance of water law – a suburban homeowner with pond frontage need not be concerned – yet doesn't mention the important areas of the law for large landowners like ranchers and farmers. In our book, that makes him a Dumbass of the Day, even if he did get paid for this rubbish.

¹ This website is now defunct, but you can see the post using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   writedge.com/water-rights-what-you-might-want-to-know/

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