If Scott White gets a call
today from an irrigator with an 1878 claim,
and the irrigator says he is not getting the
water he needs, there is nothing White can
do.
White, the watermaster for the Oregon Water Resources Department’s District 17 office in Klamath Falls, has the ability to regulate any water rights formally filed with the state after 1909, but cannot help anyone with claims before that.
Those pre-1909 claims are
in the state adjudication process, which
started in 1975 and is set to finish by
June 30, 2013. White hopes he will get
the final order of determination from
the adjudication, giving him the ability
to enforce water rights, by the time the
next irrigation season starts in spring.
Adjudication will give
White the ability to help that 1878
water user, he said.
“This will give this guy
the right to make that call for water,”
he said, “and we can find him some water
upstream.”
White is giving talks at
the 2012 Ag Expo at the Klamath County
Fairgrounds. He gave two talks on Friday
and is giving two more on Saturday at 11
a.m. and 3 p.m.
At his first half-hour
talk Friday, White told about 50 people
attending the basics of what his office
does and tried to convey to irrigators
how adjudication will change things.
The adjudication process
has brought 730 claims and 5,660
contests or challenges to those claims.
That is why the process has taken 37
years.
When it comes to water
law there are senior water right holders
— those with the oldest water rights —
and junior water right holders — those
with more recent water rights. Senior
water rights will trump junior water
rights.
“This will affect
everybody,” Scott said. “Like I said,
it’s going to tie the entire Klamath
Basin together. … It will all come
together and it will get regulated.”
When adjudication
finishes, there will be 700 new water
rights with more than 2,000 surface
water rights in the Klamath Basin alone,
White said. This change will require a
big transition for irrigators and for
the watermaster’s office, which will
have the job of shutting off junior
water right holders when senior water
right holders call asking for their full
allotment.
“It’s a very large
adjudication. We’ve got the Williamson,
the Sprague, the lake, the Klamath
River; all that is included in this
adjudication. It’s a lot of information.
A lot of water rights, a lot of data for
us to put into a distribution list and
make sense of it,” White said. “Who is
going to call for water? Where do we
need to go to shut it off? It’s going to
take time. There is going to be a lot of
trial and error.”