Dropped suit said government overcharged for water projects

By MATEUSZ PERKOWSKI

Capital Press

The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to review a legal dispute in which Washington state groundwater irrigators claim the federal government is overcharging them for water.

On Jan. 10, the nation's highest court denied a petition to hear an appeal by the Grant County Black Sands Irrigation District.

The denial lets stand a federal appeals court's decision in 2009 to dismiss the irrigators' lawsuit against the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

The agency has jurisdiction over groundwater in this case because it originally flowed from federal irrigation projects in the Columbia Basin and then seeped into the soil.

During the 1970s, the Bureau of Reclamation established a deal with irrigators in Washington's Quincy Basin in which they paid the agency $1.70 per acre-foot of water, plus a fee for operating and maintaining the irrigation projects.

The irrigators filed a legal complaint against the Bureau of Reclamation in 2006, alleging that they repaid the federal government for their share of the irrigation projects' cost several years ago but the agency is still charging for groundwater withdrawals.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit dismissed their lawsuit, ruling that under the irrigators' contract with the agency, the Bureau of Reclamation behaves as a water utility and must be paid in perpetuity.

Irrigators urged the Supreme Court to review that decision, claiming it "will have a profound effect on irrigators throughout the Western United States," according to their petition.

Farmers subject to the perpetual payments suffer from a competitive disadvantage compared to irrigators who can eventually repay the cost of federal projects, the petition said.