Summary. Verify the paper, document the use every year, quantify consumptive use before transferring, and never ignore an adjudication notice.

For the doctrine — riparian and appropriative rights, groundwater, reserved rights, adjudications, and the federal overlay — see Water Rights. This guide is what to do.

Three sentences that prevent most water disasters:

  1. The priority date is the most important fact about a western water right — more important than the quantity.
  2. Document use every single year, because in a forfeiture fight the burden practically falls on you.
  3. A right transfers only to the extent of historical consumptive use, not the number on the paper.

Step 1: Due diligence before buying land with water

This is where the most expensive mistakes in rural real estate happen, and they are all preventable.

Get the paper. The permit, certificate, decree, or license — not a description in the listing. For each right, record:

  • The priority date
  • The source (stream, aquifer, spring)
  • The quantity, in both rate (cfs) and volume (acre-feet), and note which limits apply
  • The point of diversion, by legal description
  • The place of use, by legal description and acreage
  • The purpose of use and the season
  • Any conditions, subordinations, or limitations

Search the water agency's records, not just the county recorder. Search by the seller's name and against the parcel. Water rights records are usually maintained separately from land records, and a right sold three years ago may not appear in the chain of title.

Then verify five things:

  1. Has it been forfeited? Ask for evidence of use for the last several years — diversion records, photographs, crop insurance records, delivery receipts.
  2. Is there a pending change or transfer application?
  3. Is there a pending adjudication, and has a statement of claim been filed?
  4. Is the right appurtenant and does it pass with the land in this state, or must it be separately conveyed?
  5. Is the source over-appropriated, and is the right subject to regular curtailment? Ask the watermaster how many days it was in priority in each of the last ten years. A right that is out of priority every July is worth far less than the paper suggests.

In the purchase agreement: an express representation about the rights; a condition precedent verifying them; an express conveyance in the deed and any separate assignment the state requires; and — critically — check the title policy for a water rights exception, which is standard. If the water is the value of the property, that exception matters more than everything else in the policy.

Step 2: Creating a new right

First, find out whether it is even possible. In many western basins, new appropriations are unavailable — the source is over-appropriated, a moratorium is in effect, or a management area is closed. Call the state water agency and the local watermaster before doing anything else. If new rights are unavailable, go to Step 3 and buy one.

If new appropriations are available:

  1. File the application with the state agency: source, point of diversion, quantity, purpose, place of use, and season. The filing date usually fixes the priority date, so file early and amend later rather than perfecting the application first.
  2. Publish and serve notice as the statute requires; expect protests from existing appropriators and, often, from the agency itself.
  3. Address the standard criteria: unappropriated water is available; no injury to existing rights; the use is beneficial; and — in many states — the appropriation is in the public interest, a criterion that can carry significant weight.
  4. Obtain the permit, with conditions, and note the deadlines for commencing construction and completing the appropriation. Extensions are usually available on timely application and are frequently lost by inattention.
  5. Construct the works and apply the water to beneficial use.
  6. File proof of beneficial use and obtain the certificate, which fixes the right at what was actually used. Many permits never mature into certificates because nobody files the proof, and the right is smaller or nonexistent as a result.

For a well: the same sequence usually applies, plus well construction standards, a licensed driller, well logs, spacing requirements, and — in a management area — a mitigation or augmentation obligation offsetting the depletion.

Step 3: Documenting use, every year

This habit costs an hour a year and defeats forfeiture.

Keep, by year:

  • Diversion records — meter readings, headgate measurements, delivery records from the ditch company or district.
  • Photographs of the diversion, the conveyance, and the irrigated ground, dated, from the same locations each year.
  • Crop records — acreage planted, crop insurance filings, farm program records, yield records.
  • Aerial imagery, which is available free and shows irrigated acreage by year.
  • Receipts for assessments, power for pumping, and repairs.
  • A one-page annual memorandum: what was diverted, when, for what, on how many acres.

Why this matters. Forfeiture is statutory — typically five years of non-use — and although the party asserting forfeiture bears the formal burden, the practical burden of showing use falls on the right holder. The person with a folder wins; the person with a memory does not.

Also file whatever the state requires. Annual reports, water use reporting, and measurement device requirements. Failing to file is not itself forfeiture in most states, but it removes the evidence you would otherwise have.

And know the excuses. Most statutes excuse non-use for reasons including unavailability of water, participation in a federal or state conservation program, military service, and circumstances beyond the holder's control. Document the excuse contemporaneously, not in the hearing.

Step 4: Transferring or changing a right

Every transfer of place, purpose, point of diversion, or timing requires an application and is subject to the no-injury rule.

The four steps:

1. Quantify historical consumptive use. This is the technical heart of the proceeding and the largest expense. It requires: diversion records over a representative period; acreage actually irrigated by year, usually from aerial imagery; crop types; climate data; and a consumptive use analysis by a qualified engineer. The transferable amount is what the crop actually consumed, not the decreed rate and not the diverted quantity.

2. Analyze injury. Model the change in timing, location, and return flows. Ask specifically: does the change move depletion upstream of anyone; does it change the months when water is removed; and does it convert a partially consumptive use to a fully consumptive one, removing return flow that juniors have relied on?

3. Design the mitigation. Most transfers are approved with conditions rather than denied: a reduced transferable quantity, delivery of replacement water in specified months, retained fallowing, a dry-year rather than permanent transfer, or a subordination.

4. File and defend. Expect protests. Prepare to negotiate — the great majority of change applications resolve by stipulated conditions rather than by hearing.

Two more considerations:

  • Area-of-origin and public interest review, in states that have it, can constrain moving water out of the community where it originates.
  • The district or ditch company may have its own rules on transfers, which can be more restrictive than state law. Read the bylaws before assuming a transfer is possible.

Step 5: When curtailment arrives

A call has been made and you are ordered to stop diverting.

First, comply while you contest. Diverting out of priority in defiance of an order produces penalties and destroys your credibility on everything else.

Then evaluate:

  • Is the priority ordering correct? Errors happen, particularly for rights with complex histories.
  • Is the call futile? If the curtailed water would not physically reach the caller in usable quantity because of channel loss, the call may be unenforceable. This requires hydrology, not argument.
  • Is the senior calling for more than their historical consumptive use, or for water they are not applying to beneficial use?
  • Has the senior right been partially forfeited?

Then look for a deal, which is usually cheaper than the fight:

  • Lease the senior right for the season, or buy a subordination.
  • Provide augmentation — replacement water delivered to the senior or to the stream.
  • Join a water bank or augmentation plan if one operates in the basin.
  • Negotiate a rotation with neighbors, which watermasters often facilitate.

And plan ahead. If you are curtailed most years, the structural answers are acquiring a senior right, developing storage, joining an augmentation plan, or changing the cropping pattern. A right that is out of priority every July is an operational problem, not a legal one.

Step 6: General stream adjudications

If you receive a notice, act on it. This is the most consequential mail a water right holder receives.

  1. Calendar the statement of claim deadline immediately. A right not claimed may be extinguished.
  2. File the statement of claim, accurately. Overstating invites objection and undermines your credibility; understating locks in a smaller right permanently.
  3. Assemble the evidence now: the permit or decree; diversion records; aerial photographs by year; crop and acreage history; ditch company and district records; tax records; affidavits from people who remember the use; any prior decree.
  4. Cooperate with the field investigation. The state's investigator will visit; be present, show them the diversion and the irrigated ground, and give them the records.
  5. Read the draft report line by line — your priority date, quantity, acreage, season, and point of diversion.
  6. Object on time to errors in your right, and read your neighbors' entries too. An inflated right upstream will curtail you for the life of the decree.
  7. Join a coalition. Ditch companies, districts, and similarly situated claimants share experts and counsel; for a small claimant this is the only affordable way to participate meaningfully.

Step 7: The district, the ditch company, and the project

Most delivered water in the West arrives through an intermediary, and the user's practical relationship is with that entity rather than with the state.

Find out which you are dealing with: an irrigation district (a public entity with taxing and assessment power), a mutual ditch or canal company (a private corporation whose shares carry water), a conservancy district, or a federal reclamation project with a repayment or water service contract.

Then read the governing documents: the bylaws or district rules, the delivery schedule and rotation, the assessment structure, the transfer and share-conveyance rules, the rules on carriage and change of delivery point, and — for a reclamation project — the contract, which may restrict transfers, acreage, and use.

Practical points:

  • Shares are property. In a mutual company, water is delivered against shares, which are conveyed separately from land in many cases. Confirm the shares transfer with the land.
  • Assessments are liens. Unpaid assessments can result in loss of delivery and, eventually, loss of the shares.
  • The district's rules may forbid what state law allows, particularly for transfers off the system.
  • Governance matters. Districts and companies are governed by elected boards, and delivery decisions, rotation, and capital projects are made there.

Before you start: find out which system you are in

Every question below has a different answer depending on the state, and the first ten minutes should establish where you are.

Ask five questions:

1. Is this an appropriation state, a riparian state, or a hybrid? Appropriation states run on priority and permits; riparian states on land ownership and reasonableness, increasingly overlaid by a permit system; hybrid states honor pre-statutory riparian rights and appropriate thereafter.

2. Who administers water rights? A state engineer, a department of water resources, a natural resources agency, or — in a few states — the courts. Find the office and the local field office, because the field office is where practical answers live.

3. Is there a watermaster or a decree on this stream? If so, that person administers priorities day to day and knows more about the operational reality of your right than anyone.

4. How is groundwater treated here, and is it managed conjunctively with surface water? Absolute dominion, reasonable use, correlative rights, or appropriation — and whether pumping is subject to a management area, a moratorium, metering, or an augmentation requirement.

5. Is there a general adjudication pending on this system? If yes, everything else is subordinate to the adjudication's deadlines.

Then make three calls. The state agency's local field office; the watermaster if there is one; and the ditch company or irrigation district if water is delivered through one. These three conversations, which cost nothing, will tell you more about the practical value of a water right than a week of research — including the fact that determines value more than any other: how many days in a typical year the right is actually in priority.

Five situations

The hobby farm with a spring

A buyer wants forty acres with a spring and a small orchard. The listing says "water rights included."

What that phrase means legally is: nothing. The diligence questions are the same as for a large ranch:

  • Is there a paper right? Springs are frequently used without one, on the assumption that a spring on your land is yours. In most appropriation states, it is not — a spring feeding a stream is part of the stream system and its use requires a right.
  • Is there a domestic exemption? Most states exempt small domestic and stock use from permitting, with a stated gallonage and sometimes an acreage limit for lawn and garden. Find the exact limit, because it is usually smaller than people assume and an orchard may exceed it.
  • Is the use recorded anywhere? Some states require registration even of exempt uses.
  • Is the spring on the property, and is the conveyance to the point of use across someone else's land? If so, an easement is needed, and a handshake with the neighbor is not one.

The fix is cheap if done before closing: a title and water rights search, a conversation with the state agency's local office, and either confirmation that the use is exempt or an application for a small right.

The developer discovering "will serve" is not water

A residential development needs proof of supply. The city issues a "will serve" letter.

Many western states now require a demonstration of adequate supply for a subdivision of a certain size — a finding, before approval, that a physical and legal water supply exists for the projected demand over a stated horizon.

What that demonstration requires: identification of the specific rights or contractual supply; evidence they are physically available in dry years, not just on average; the infrastructure to deliver them; and often a hydrologic report and agency review.

Where it goes wrong: relying on a municipal letter that is not backed by a dedicated right; counting a right that is out of priority in dry years; counting a groundwater supply in a basin where a management plan will reduce pumping; and failing to dedicate the rights to the development, so the developer's water leaves with the developer.

The lesson for a buyer of a lot in a new subdivision: ask what the supply is and whether the finding was made. The answer is public.

The pumping neighbor and the dry well

A domestic well goes dry after a large agricultural well is drilled nearby.

The available theories depend entirely on the state's groundwater doctrine. Under reasonable use, the question is whether the pumping is for a reasonable use on the overlying land and whether off-tract use is harming a neighbor. Under correlative rights, whether the pumper is taking more than a proportionate share. Under prior appropriation, whether the pumper is junior and whether the doctrine protects a means of diversion — many states protect a senior only in a reasonable means of diversion, meaning a shallow well may have to be deepened rather than the neighbor curtailed.

The practical steps:

  1. Document the well's history — the log, the static and pumping levels over time, and the date it failed.
  2. Get the neighbor's well permit and reported pumping from the state agency; both are public.
  3. Complain to the state agency, which in most states has authority to investigate, and which may have a mitigation program.
  4. Ask about a domestic well protection program — several states require large pumpers to mitigate impacts on domestic wells, sometimes by paying to deepen them.
  5. Evaluate deepening against the cost and likelihood of litigation. In many cases, deepening is the practical answer even where the legal claim is real.

The irrigator offered a dry-year lease

A municipality offers to pay an irrigator to fallow in dry years and lease the water.

This is usually a good arrangement for both sides, and there are five terms to get right:

  1. The trigger. What defines a "dry year" — a reservoir level, a snowpack index, a declaration? It must be objective and verifiable.
  2. The quantity. Expressed in historical consumptive use, not the decreed rate, with an agreed method for calculating it.
  3. The frequency cap. How many years in ten, and no more than a stated number consecutively — because permanent fallowing damages soil, equipment, and the local farm economy in ways a lease should not quietly accomplish.
  4. Protection of the right. Express provisions that fallowing under the lease does not constitute non-use for forfeiture purposes, with a citation to the state's protective statute, and that the underlying right remains with the irrigator.
  5. Approval. Whether the state agency must approve the temporary change, and who bears the cost of the application and any protest.

And the district's rules may require consent, which should be obtained before signing.

The right that has not been used since 1998

An heir discovers a decree in a parent's papers. Nobody has irrigated in decades.

Assume it is at risk and act quickly.

  1. Check the state's forfeiture period and whether any statutory excuse applied — conservation program participation, unavailability of water, or circumstances beyond control.
  2. Check whether a forfeiture proceeding has been initiated, and whether an adjudication is pending in which the right was never claimed.
  3. Gather any evidence of use in the relevant period, however partial. Partial use often preserves the whole right or a portion of it.
  4. Consider resuming use immediately. In several states, resumption of use before a forfeiture proceeding begins preserves the right.
  5. Consider filing an application to change or transfer, which in some states demonstrates intent and preserves value — but be aware that the change proceeding will itself examine historical use, which may be the moment the weakness surfaces.
  6. Get local advice. This is the kind of question where the answer is basin-specific and where a local water lawyer's knowledge of the agency's practice is worth more than the statute.

Working with the engineer

Water cases are engineering cases with a legal frame, and the single largest determinant of outcome is usually the quality of the technical work.

When you need one: any change or transfer application; any injury analysis; any groundwater depletion question; any futile call argument; any adjudication involving contested acreage or quantity; and any storage or augmentation plan.

What to look for: a water resources engineer or hydrologist with experience in your state's administrative practice and in this basin. The state agency's staff engineers apply particular methods and accept particular data sources; an out-of-state expert applying an unfamiliar method loses time and credibility.

What to give them, at the outset:

  • The decree, permit, or certificate
  • Diversion records for as long as they exist
  • Aerial imagery by year, which is available free from federal sources
  • Crop and acreage history, including farm program and crop insurance filings
  • The ditch company or district's delivery records
  • The point of diversion and place of use, mapped
  • Any prior engineering work on the right or the basin

What to ask them to produce:

  • Historical consumptive use, by year and averaged over a representative period, with the method stated
  • Irrigated acreage by year, mapped
  • Return flow timing and location
  • The injury analysis, quantified by month
  • Proposed mitigation — the replacement schedule that makes the change approvable

Three practical cautions:

Pick the representative period carefully. Including years of drought-forced non-use lowers the average; excluding them invites challenge. Agree on the period with the agency early if you can.

Beware the "paper right" instinct. Clients consistently believe their right is what the decree says. It is what they used. Delivering that news early is cheaper than delivering it after a protest.

Expect the analysis to be attacked line by line, and build it so that each input is documented and each assumption is stated. An analysis whose inputs cannot be traced will not survive a competent protest.

Protesting someone else's application

You will more often be a protestant than an applicant, and protests run on very short deadlines.

Watch for notice. Applications are published — in a newspaper of general circulation, in the agency's weekly or monthly resume of applications, and increasingly online. Subscribe to the agency's application list for your basin. Many state agencies email it free, and it is the only reliable way to learn about an upstream application before the protest period closes.

The protest deadline is short — frequently thirty days from publication, and jurisdictional. Missing it forfeits the objection entirely.

File a protest that states a ground. A bare objection is dismissed. The recognized grounds generally are:

  1. Injury to my existing right — specify the right by its decree or permit number, its priority, and how the proposed change would injure it: reduced return flow, changed timing, moved depletion, or increased consumptive use.
  2. No unappropriated water is available in the source.
  3. The applicant's claimed historical use is overstated, with the basis for saying so.
  4. The proposed use is not beneficial, or the works are inadequate.
  5. The application is contrary to the public interest or to area-of-origin protections, where the state recognizes them.

Then behave like a party who intends to settle. Most protests resolve by stipulated conditions rather than by hearing — a reduced transferable quantity, a delivery schedule, a subordination, replacement water in particular months, or a monitoring and reporting obligation.

Practical advice:

  • Protest first, negotiate second. You cannot negotiate from outside the proceeding, and the deadline will not wait for a conversation.
  • Coordinate with other protestants. Sharing an engineer across five protestants makes competent technical work affordable for all of them.
  • Be specific about your own right. A protestant who cannot describe their own priority, quantity, and historical use is not credible about anyone else's.
  • Do not protest reflexively. A pattern of protesting everything costs credibility with the agency, and agencies remember.

And note that you may withdraw. A protest resolved by stipulation is withdrawn, the conditions are written into the approval, and everyone moves on. That is the normal and desirable outcome, and it is worth entering the process intending it.

When you need a federal permit too

A water right permits you to use water. It does not permit you to do physical work in or near a waterway, and confusing the two produces expensive enforcement.

When a federal permit is likely required:

  • Building or modifying a diversion structure, headgate, dam, or weir in a stream.
  • Placing fill in a wetland or a waterbody — the classic Section 404 trigger under 33 U.S.C. § 1344.
  • Channel work — realignment, armoring, dredging, bank stabilization.
  • Crossing a stream with a road, pipeline, or utility.
  • Any discharge from a point source, which requires a permit under 33 U.S.C. § 1311.

The jurisdictional question has narrowed. After Sackett v. EPA, federal jurisdiction over adjacent wetlands requires a continuous surface connection to a relatively permanent water. Many wetlands that were federally regulated are not now.

Which makes the state question more important, not less. Some states regulate wetlands and stream alterations independently and as strictly; others do not. Check the state program, plus any local floodplain, shoreline, or stream-alteration ordinance.

The practical sequence for a project involving physical work:

  1. Determine the water right you need, and whether it exists or must be obtained.
  2. Determine the physical permits: federal fill or discharge permits; state water quality certification; state stream alteration or dam safety approval; local floodplain and grading permits.
  3. Screen for endangered species and cultural resources early, because both can add a year.
  4. Sequence the applications. Some approvals are prerequisites to others, and the water right and the construction permit are frequently on different tracks with different agencies that do not coordinate.
  5. Budget the time honestly. A structure that takes two weeks to build can take eighteen months to permit.

And the enforcement point. Unpermitted work in a waterway generates penalties, restoration orders, and — for fill — some of the largest civil penalties in environmental law. Ask before you dig, not after. A pre-application meeting with the regulating agencies is free and is the single most useful hour in the process.

Storage, and why it changes everything

A direct-flow right entitles you to divert when water is running and you are in priority. Storage entitles you to keep it. In a system where the right is in priority in May and out of priority in July, that difference is the whole operation.

Storage rights are separate rights. A reservoir requires its own appropriation — a right to store water, with its own priority date, its own quantity, and typically a "one fill per year" limitation. Storing water under a direct-flow right is not permitted.

What a storage project requires, beyond the water right:

  • Dam safety approval from the state, with design review, construction inspection, and continuing operation, maintenance, and inspection obligations that never end.
  • Physical permits for construction in a waterway.
  • Land and easements, including for inundation.
  • Refill and carryover rules — whether unused stored water may be carried into the next year, and whether a second fill is permitted after the first is used.
  • Delivery and release rules, including any minimum release or bypass flow requirement.

Alternatives to building a reservoir, all of which are cheaper:

  • Buying storage capacity in an existing reservoir, or shares in a storage company.
  • Contracting for project water from a federal or state project.
  • Aquifer storage and recovery, where the state authorizes it — injecting or infiltrating water in wet periods and recovering it later, which avoids evaporation and the dam.
  • Exchanges, in which you deliver water at one location in return for taking it at another, subject to agency approval and the no-injury rule.
  • Water banking, where a basin operates one.

The recurring legal problem with storage is the same as with everything else: evaporation and seepage are consumptive, carryover affects downstream rights, and a new reservoir changes the timing of flows for everyone below it. A storage application will be protested on exactly those grounds, and the answer is the same engineering work described above.

And a caution about small ponds. Many landowners build a stock pond or an ornamental pond without realizing it requires a storage right and, often, a dam safety review. Impounding water is appropriating it, and an unpermitted pond is a common and easily avoided enforcement matter.

Talking to the watermaster

In a decreed basin, the watermaster — sometimes called the water commissioner, the ditch rider, or the hydrographic officer — administers priorities in the field. They open and close headgates, they measure, they answer calls, and they know more about the operational reality of your right than any document does.

What they can tell you, in one conversation:

  • How many days a year your right is actually in priority, which determines its value more than the decreed quantity does.
  • Who is above and below you in priority on this reach, and who calls.
  • Whether the ditch physically delivers what the decree says, and what the carriage losses are.
  • How rotation works on your stretch, and whether the neighbors have an informal arrangement.
  • What the agency's practice is on measurement, reporting, and enforcement.
  • Whether a change application like yours has been approved here before, and on what conditions.

How to have the conversation well:

  • Go to them, in the field, outside irrigation season. July is the worst possible time to introduce yourself.
  • Bring the decree or permit and ask them to walk you through how it is administered in practice.
  • Ask, do not tell. A lawyer who arrives to explain the law to a watermaster has misjudged the situation.
  • Ask about the informal arrangements. Many reaches operate on rotations and accommodations that appear in no document and that everyone relies on.
  • Follow up in writing with what you understood, so the record exists and so any misunderstanding surfaces early.

And keep the relationship. Curtailment orders, measurement disputes, delivery problems, and calls are all handled in the first instance by this office, and a right holder who is known, cooperative, and accurately measured is treated differently from one who appears only to complain. That is not favoritism; it is the ordinary consequence of administering a shared resource among neighbors.

Twelve mistakes

  1. Buying land assuming the water conveys with it. In many states it does not, or it was severed years ago.
  2. Relying on the listing instead of the permit, certificate, or decree.
  3. Ignoring the priority date and focusing on the quantity.
  4. Never asking how often the right is actually in priority.
  5. Accepting a title policy without reading the water rights exception.
  6. Never filing proof of beneficial use, so a permit never becomes a certificate.
  7. Letting permit construction and completion deadlines lapse without requesting an extension.
  8. Not documenting use every year, and then losing a forfeiture fight you should have won.
  9. Improving efficiency or fallowing without checking whether the state protects conserved water.
  10. Assuming the decreed quantity is transferable. Only historical consumptive use is.
  11. Missing a protest deadline on an upstream application that will injure you.
  12. Ignoring an adjudication notice, which can extinguish the right entirely.

The one-page version

Buying: get the permit, certificate, or decree · verify priority, quantity, source, place and purpose of use · confirm recent use · confirm it conveys · check for a pending adjudication or transfer · ask how many days a year it is in priority · read the title policy's water exception.

Creating: confirm new appropriations are available · file early to fix the priority date · expect protests · meet the construction and completion deadlines · file proof of beneficial use and get the certificate.

Keeping: document diversion, acreage, crops, and photographs every year · file the state's required reports · know the forfeiture period and the statutory excuses · check the conserved-water protection before improving efficiency.

Transferring: quantify historical consumptive use · analyze injury including return flows · design mitigation · expect protests and plan to settle · check the district's rules.

Defending: comply with a curtailment while contesting it · test the priority ordering and the futile call · consider leasing, augmentation, or rotation · subscribe to the agency's application list and protest on time.

Adjudication: file the statement of claim by the deadline · claim accurately · gather the evidence now · read the draft report and your neighbors' entries · object on time · join a coalition.

Frequently asked questions

I'm buying a ranch. What do I check? Priority date, quantity, source, place and purpose of use, evidence of recent use, whether it conveys with the land, whether an adjudication is pending, and how often the right is in priority. Then check the title policy's water rights exception.

Will conserving water cost me my right? Historically it could. Many states now protect conserved water; check yours before fallowing or improving efficiency.

Can I move my water to a new farm? Only through a change application, only to the extent of historical consumptive use, and only without injury to others.

They've curtailed me. What now? Comply, then test the priority ordering and whether the call is futile — and simultaneously look at leasing, augmentation, or a rotation agreement.

I got a notice about an adjudication. File the statement of claim by the deadline. A right not claimed can be extinguished.

Does my permit expire? Permits carry deadlines to construct and to apply water to beneficial use, and require proof before a certificate issues. Many rights are lost by never filing the proof.

Related documents

Educational only, not legal advice. Water law is state law and varies enormously by state and by basin. Consult the state water agency, the local watermaster, and counsel in the relevant basin.