Hanford Farmers Seek Security in Long-Running Water Rights Battle
After years of litigation and uncertainty, Hanford Valley orchardists find hope in a court ruling regarding their rights to the Priest Rapids power plant water supply.
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What is a Hanford water right worth? Is it transferable? What will the maintenance charge be next year? These and a hundred similar questions have been bandied back and forth in the valley for the past week. The final decree in the case has not yet been entered, but it must be in accordance with the decision of the Circuit Court of Appeals rendered last spring, which says that the water right owners have a property interest in all of the 'instrumentalities' used in furnishing water to the land, including the power plant at Priest Rapids. Since the appeal by the Black Rock Power Irrigation company was denied by the Supreme Court of the United States recently, the water right owners are more optimistic than they have been for years. Two meetings of the water right owners have been held in Hanford during the past week to devise ways and means for financing the litigation. A committee consisting of John McFee and Robert Nitzsche of White Bluffs, and Manley S. Haynes and J. C. Syfford of Hanford, was appointed to make a house-to-house canvas of all resident water right owners to collect an assessment of $4.00 per acre to cover legal fees.
“The water right owners have been more optimistic over the future than they have been for years, for they feel that the prospects are brighter now than ever.”
The struggle for water rights in the arid Hanford-White Bluffs basin was the defining civic battle of the region long before the federal government seized the land for the Manhattan Project. Today, the entire area is part of the Hanford Reach National Monument and the Hanford Site, representing a total reversal of this mid-1920s push for permanent agricultural infrastructure.
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