By Lisa McEwen, SJV Water
The United States Supreme Court officially declined to hear a case alleging the federal government illegally stiffed water contractors, including the City of Fresno, when it gave them zero water during the crushing 2014-2015 drought.
The Bureau of Reclamation instead gave supplies from Millerton Lake during those years that would have gone to Fresno and other contractors in the Friant Division of the Central Valley Project to a collection of agricultural water districts known as the San Joaquin River Exchange Contractors.
The impact was devastating.
More than 25% of crops, mostly citrus, in the Lindsay-Strathmore Irrigation District died, according to grower and board member Cliff Loeffler.
“We are utterly dependent on that surface water supply,” he said.
A group of Friant contractors sued, saying the Bureau had breached its contract with them and they alleged the water was a property right that was taken without just compensation.
In 2022, a Federal Claims Court ruled against the Friant group stating that, “At all times the Exchange Contractors have a superior claim to CVP water than do the Friant Contractors.”
Attorneys for the Friant group had hoped the U.S. Supreme Court would take up the issue because of what they saw as a conflict between the lower court’s findings and prior Supreme Court rulings that had upheld Section 8 of the Reclamation Act of 1902, which states that owners of irrigated lands hold a property right in federal Reclamation project water.
The high court extinguished those hopes with its Dec. 12 denial.
Chris White, executive director of the San Joaquin River Exchange Contractors Authority, said the agencies have been working with the Friant Water Authority to avoid a repeat of what happened in 2014 and 2015. That includes investing heavily in new infrastructure to capture and store water to strengthen supply reliability.
In fact, Reclamation did not pull supplies from the Friant Division’s share during the devastating 2021-2022 drought.
Friant Water Authority chief operating officer Johnny Amaral agreed that collaboration has been helpful.
One key piece of that collaboration is the South of Delta Drought Resiliency Framework, a memorandum of understanding (MOU) signed in March 2024 between Friant, Reclamation, the San Luis Delta Mendota Water Authority and the Exchange Contractors, that will help avoid future calls on Friant supplies while also improving reliability for contractors on the Westside of the San Joaquin Valley and those along the eastside, which are served by Friant.
The somewhat fraught relationship between the Exchange and Friant contractors was created when the federal government built the Central Valley Project in the 1930s.
The government took San Joaquin River water from existing users and moved it to farms and towns from Madera south to Arvin via the Friant-Kern Canal.
In “exchange,” the federal government promised the original river users it would provide them water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
During the extreme drought years of 2014 and 2015, the government couldn’t get enough water out of the delta to satisfy its obligation to the Exchange Contractors.
Instead, it took San Joaquin River water out of Millerton and delivered that to Exchange Contractors, leaving the Friant side of the project with a zero allocation.
