State Water Resources Control Board Cases

The history of California is written on its waters—from the Eel River, to the Saltón Sea, to the Colorado River, to Lake Tahoe. But no area has been more critical than the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers and their great Delta and San Francisco Bay estuary.

Before us are eight appeals and three cross-appeals in seven coordinated cases known collectively as the SWRCB Cases, Judicial Council Coordinated Proceeding No. 4118. These cases arose out of an omnibus water rights proceeding before the State Water Resources Control Board (the Board) that ostensibly began with notices issued in July 1995, and ostensibly ended in March 2000 with Revised Water Right Decision 1641 (Decision 1641).

In truth, however, the water rights proceeding from which these appeals arose is but a small part of a process that has been ongoing for more than four decades to solve the problems of water quality in the San Francisco Bay/Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Estuary. In the water rights proceeding, the Board sought to allocate responsibility among various water rights holders for meeting the flow-dependent water quality objectives in the Water Quality Control Plan for the Bay-Delta, which the…