Maricopa-Stanfield Irrigation & Drainage District v. United States

ORDER

The Opinion filed July 7, 1998 [ 147 F.3d 1168 ] is withdrawn.

OPINION

BACKGROUND

The Colorado River and its tributaries are the major-sources of water in the arid Southwest. Careful in the years of drought, the United States has established reclamation projects to channel water where it is needed most and to head off disputes among water users. But in its efforts to settle some water rights disputes, sometimes the government creates others. This case involves one such dispute. A working familiarity with the history of water rights legislation in the Southwest is essential to a full comprehension of this controversy.

Shortly after the first World War, legislators considered ways to regulate and capture for beneficial use Colorado River flood flows that annually were lost. A dam in Arizona with a canal to California was contemplated. Plans like this one worried inhabitants of the Upper Basin states (Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Wyoming), who knew that water rights might be lost forever to the states in the Lower Basin (Arizona, Nevada, and California) under the doctrine of prior appropriation. To forestall water rights disputes, Congress ratified the Colorado River…