Bill Description: Senate Bill 1304 would significantly shift the balance of cooperation between landowners and holders of irrigation easements.
Rating: -1
Does it violate the spirit or the letter of either the United States Constitution or the Idaho Constitution? Examples include restrictions on speech, public assembly, the press, privacy, private property, or firearms. Conversely, does it restore or uphold the protections guaranteed in the US Constitution or the Idaho Constitution?
Idaho law grants landowners without direct access to a water source to which they have a water right a right-of-way through the lands of others for a ditch, canal, lateral, drain, or conduit to convey the water.
This right-of-way allows entry for basic use and maintenance, but some tasks, such as “relocating a ditch, canal, lateral, drain, or buried irrigation conduit,” require written permission from “the owner of the servient estate” (the underlying landowner).
Senate Bill 1304 would amend, renumber, and add sections to Chapter, 11, Title 42, Idaho Code, which deals with “Irrigation and Drainage — Water Rights and Reclamation” to change this balance of cooperation.
It would add a new subsection saying that, in addition to operation and maintenance, the holder of the easement may “construct, install, modify, maintain, or relocate any structure, headgate, siphon, measuring device, road, fence, gate, or other appurtenance within the right-of-way that facilitates the delivery or drainage of water or is used to access, protect, inspect, operate, clean, maintain, or repair the ditch, canal, lateral, drain, or other conduit.”
It would further say that “a servient estate owner's permission shall not be required to exercise the rights described in this section.”
In another section, it would clarify that the servient estate owner's written permission is only required prior to relocating or piping the conduit outside of the easement or right-of-way, but any actions within the easement or right-of-way do not require permission.
While issues involving water rights and competing or overlapping property rights can be complicated, this bill is a one-sided attempt to shift the balance of cooperation entirely toward the easement holder and away from the underlying landowner, no matter how large or disruptive the project involved might be to the landowner, who, in many cases, lives on the affected property.
(-1)
