Water Rights

Mark Twain famously said whiskey's for drinkin' and water's for fightin'. But this year in Sacramento, water's also for compromisin'. It's for using as trade bait -- for applying leverage in wheeling and dealing. "People are talking about it as a chit to be played," laments state water director Lester Snow, who'd like to keep the water debate focused on water. But that's not going to happen. Problem is, water -- generation to generation -- always has been California's most contentious issue.

For the second time this year, a judge has ruled that management of California's water system is illegally imperiling fish, making it increasingly likely that the state will have to pump less water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to Southern California cities and Central Valley farms. U.S. District Judge Oliver W. Wanger issued the ruling Friday and ordered a hearing for next week at which he could issue a stay in the case, forestalling any immediate effect on the pumping operation.

Diving into California's most turbulent water dispute, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's top water appointee on Tuesday proposed asking voters next year to pay for new dams -- and, quite possibly, a canal arcing around the vulnerable Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

SACRAMENTO -- The Schwarzenegger administration Wednesday dusted off a failed dam proposal as a way to shore up California water supplies in light of a federal judge's ruling limiting shipments from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. But it seemed doubtful that the Democrat-controlled Legislature -- long opposed to new dams -- would go along in the waning days of its 2007 session.

SACRAMENTO -- It's not much longer than your pinkie, an aquatic weakling that skulks in a single brackish backwater of the West. Yet the diminutive fish is a big player in California water politics. For years, the delta smelt's survival has been a bone of contention between water managers and environmentalists -- a subject of lengthy court cases and, of late, defining judicial decrees. A decision Aug. 31 by U.S. District Judge Oliver W.

While the West burns and the Southeast bakes, there is little to suggest a large-scale, climatological catastrophe playing out any time soon in the Midwest. In fact, farmers in Iowa and Minnesota had trouble last week harvesting their corn and soybean crops because there had been too much rain.

When Rick McKee, the editorial cartoonist of the Augusta Chronicle newspaper, set out to capture the historic and severe drought that is afflicting the Southeast, he did not draw parched rivers or shriveled crops or brown lawns: He drew an oafish, bloated hulk of a boy holding up a straw to slurp up water from a smaller boy's water fountain. Above the larger boy, a sign reads "Atlanta," above the other, "Everybody else."

Federal biologists signed off on a plan to reduce the flow of water from Lake Lanier, the main water source for Atlanta and the focal point of a three-state water fight amid a drought. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided that federally protected mussels can live with less water from Lanier, which would allow Georgia to keep more water in the lake. Florida and Alabama have argued that Georgia's demands are unreasonable and that reducing the flows downstream could cripple their economies.

LONE PINE, Calif. -- In an arid Eastern Sierra region where people have had a keen appreciation for water since Los Angeles raided their supplies nearly a century ago, a new water war is brewing. But this time the combatants are locals: A hunting club is battling a geothermal plant for control of an aquifer beneath the southern Owens Valley's lava flows and desert scrub.

The federal government Thursday ushered in a new era of shortage on the Colorado River, adopting a blueprint for how it will tighten the spigot on the West's most important water source. The guidelines, more than two years in the making, come in the eighth year of the worst drought in the century-long historic record of the Colorado River, which supplies water to 25 million people and 1 million acres of farmland.