It will take months and perhaps even
years before final results are in, say observers.
But now that the state engineer's hearings are
over, the Forest Service appears to have little chance,
in the coming stages of the Monitor Valley water
adjudication, of winning the control over Nevada water it
has sought and claimed since the early 1980s.
Moreover, because the U.S. government is
itself a party to the current adjudication, say these
observers, major federal agencies like the Forest Service
and the Bureau of Land Management will, in the future, no
longer be able to ignore Nevada water law.
For many Nevada ranchers -- often beset by
federal land agencies seeking to control water rights
that, under Nevada law, belong not to them but to the
ranchers -- this could mean major relief.
And there's a second reason why the current
adjudication could ultimately force a broad shift in
policy by the federal land agencies---not only in Nevada
but throughout the western U.S.
If Nevada courts ultimately hold, as expected,
that the water rights at issue
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in the Monitor Valley
adjudication are the property of Nye County's Pine Creek
and R.O. ranches, such rulings will have a major impact
on takings cases the two ranches now have before the U.S.
Court of Federal Claims in Washington, D.C.
At stake in the cases are millions of dollars
the ranches are asking in compensation for U.S. Forest
Service confiscation of Monitor Valley cattle and water,
ditch and grazing rights, etc.
Already the ranches have won an interlocutory
appeal against the federal government from the Claims
Court chief judge, Loren A. Smith.
The government had argued there can be no
compensable private property in the water rights, forage,
improvements, etc. it had taken from the Nye County
ranchers. But Smith rejected that view and announced the
issue now was simply the factual question of whose water
rights in fact vested first -- a question upon which he
would hold an evidentiary hearing.
That decision, said a legal strategist for the
R.O. ranch, makes
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