Transcript

Jeff Fassett: You need to use "prior use" to serve new purposes

I am an advocate for [the view that] if you show up at the first meeting and you want to throw away all the rules, you are just not going to open up dialogue with anybody. And so you need to get past that and begin to look for practical solutions and ways to do [things]. I had the pleasure of being a State Engineer, a state official who made the water rights distribution decisions in Wyoming for many years and I liked the fact that we did have flexibility. There are also some places that I wish I had more flexibility, because I think Dave makes the point that you need to take the doctrine, the prior appropriation doctrine, and begin to move with that doctrine and use that to meet a lot of these new uses. I think that's the way to solve these problems, whether it is endangered species or other sorts of challenges that [lie] ahead. One of the ones that we have tried is to access markets -- to use the marketplace to allow the movement of water in perhaps a freer manner than it is [moving] right now. Those issues are very controversial as we saw in the piece earlier today about instream flow. A legislator introduced a bill to allow even temporary one-year sorts of arrangements and it did not pass muster. But I think that pressure is coming. The pressure is for the prior appropriation doctrine and the laws that each state has that fit each state's situation to move with the times, to move with the needs of the citizens and the challenges and the new interests that are on the horizon.

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