The Fight for Clear Water Rights

The Washington Water Code commission has recently issued a report embodying proposed water laws which will come before the next legislature. In writing regarding the report, O. L. Waller, chairman of the commission, says: 'Idaho, Oregon and Canada—on three sides of us—have excellent water laws and are rapidly bringing their arid lands under cultivation, while in Washington the inability of the water user to secure a record title to his water rights keeps businessmen and investors from risking money in irrigation and power developments. Without state supervision, the small water user is at the mercy of the big operator and unless his rights are determined before the old settlers, who generally are his only witnesses, are dead and gone, he or his heirs are likely to lose their rights through inability to produce evidence necessary to establish title in court. Within the last decade, the leading states in the arid west have revised their water laws and made some very important changes, providing for record titles to water so that abstracts of title may be made the same as for land titles; for police supervision and for safety to the public in dam construction. In the compilation of this report, the commissioners have had access to all of these revised statutes and to the court decrees thereon. The commissioners have undertaken, first, to provide a method whereby parties now using water of the state may, in an inexpensive way, have their rights adjudicated and made a matter of record; and second, to provide a way whereby parties wishing to acquire new water rights may do so under authority of the state and under the protection thereof, with full assurance that when a permit to use water is once granted that there is water to supply the amount called for, and that the title to the said water right will be as good as that to the land upon which the water is used.'