KVIG Informative

Reno, Sparks and the farms of the Lahontan Valley still divide Truckee River water today under an operating agreement signed in 2008 and a court decree that dates to 1944 — the end point of a fight over the river that the federal government first took to court in 1913, on behalf of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe and the irrigation project drawing from the same river.

The Truckee-Carson Project, later renamed the Newlands Project, was authorized on March 14, 1903, one of the first reclamation projects approved under the federal Reclamation Act of 1902, according to the Bureau of Reclamation’s own history of the project. The project diverts Truckee River water at Derby Diversion Dam into the Truckee Canal, carrying it south to the Carson River and Lahontan Reservoir to irrigate roughly 57,000 acres of cropland around Fallon and Fernley, the agency’s history says. The first 108 farms were settled by 674 people during the project’s first irrigation season in 1905, though early settlers faced water shortages late in that season until Lahontan Dam was completed in 1914, according to the same source.

The United States filed a quiet-title lawsuit in 1913 to sort out competing claims to the Truckee River’s water, a case that took 31 years to reach final judgment, according to a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals opinion recounting the litigation’s history. A Nevada federal court did not issue that final ruling, known as the Orr Ditch Decree, on the river’s Truckee Division water rights until 1944, the same opinion says. A separate 1980 ruling, the Alpine Decree, later adjudicated water rights on the project’s Carson River side, according to the same source.

Before the Newlands Project began diverting water, Pyramid Lake received the Truckee River’s entire flow, according to the 9th Circuit’s account of the case record. Diversions for irrigation have since lowered the lake and reduced river flow into it, threatening the lake’s native cui-ui fish, a species found nowhere else, the court’s opinion says.

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A federal court ruling in 1973, in Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe of Indians v. Morton, ordered new operating criteria for the Newlands Project that cut its annual diversion from about 406,000 acre-feet to about 288,000 acre-feet by prioritizing Carson River water over the Truckee, according to a 2015 presentation the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe’s water resources program gave to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Regional Tribal Operations Committee. Federal recovery plans followed for the cui-ui, in 1992, and for the Lahontan cutthroat trout, in 1995, both protected under the Endangered Species Act, the same presentation says.

Congress passed the Truckee-Carson-Pyramid Lake Water Rights Settlement Act in 1990, part of Public Law 101-618, addressing Truckee River water management, according to the tribe’s 2015 EPA presentation. Under a 1998 agreement covering 6,700 acre-feet of water, the tribe acquired 2,748 acre-feet of it to support river flows for the endangered fish, the same presentation says. In 2007, the tribe obtained federal recognition under the Clean Water Act allowing it to set water-quality standards and issue certifications for its reservation as a state would, according to the same source.

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The Truckee River Operating Agreement, signed in 2008 by California, Nevada and the affected water users, modified the Orr Ditch Decree to recognize water the tribe had not previously been allocated, according to the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe’s own account of its water rights. The Indian Ditch at Nixon, built in 1917, still delivers that water to tribal irrigators today, the tribe’s website says.

The Newlands Project began taking Truckee River water years before the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe had any binding say in how much of it the project could take. A 31-year lawsuit, a 1973 federal court order, an act of Congress and a 2008 interstate operating agreement later, the river is still divided by paperwork that traces straight back to that original 1913 case.