Wide-sweeping Water Rights Bill Sparks Debate
A bill protecting landowners from state seizure of private water rights on state lands has begun debate in the Senate, but not without concerns about school funding, water rights cases and public land access.
On Friday, March 21, Speaker of the House Brandon Ler, R-Savage, brought his House Bill 676 to the Senate Judiciary Committee after a series of tight votes in the House.
Ler’s bill would prohibit the state land board from seizing private water rights used to irrigate or otherwise service state-owned, leased land. The bill would also mandate the sale of publicly inaccessible state land and dissolve the state water court in five years.
Jocelyn Cahill with the Senior Ag Water Rights Alliance supported the bill and said ranchers could be scared off from using their water rights on state land in fear of seizure.
“When ranchers stop improving their lease lands, the state leases and the school trusts that rely on them lose out on significant benefits,” Cahill said. “If this frustration continues, more ranchers will opt out of leasing state land altogether.”
Brian Thompson with the Senior Water Rights Coalition said his main concern with the bill is the termination of the water court. The court was established in 1979 to make decisions on more than 240,000 state water rights claims.
But Thompson said abruptly ending this process, possibly before the work is done, could cause serious fallout.
“This is a system and a process that we set in place many decades ago,” Thompson said. “A lot of people’s water rights are dependent upon this system. They’ve invested in this system. They’re counting on this system to continue and to work and to protect their rights into the future.”
Other opponents said they worried about the impacts on the education funding that comes from state-owned lands and the required sale of state lands, saying the legislature should instead focus on ways to provide access to the nearly 1.5 million inaccessible acres.
Clayton Murphy is a reporter with the UM Legislative News Service, a partnership of the University of Montana School of Journalism, the Montana Broadcasters Association, the Montana Newspaper Association and the Greater Montana Foundation. Murphy can be reached at clayton.murphy@umconnect.umt.edu.
