Water Use Management Report Available

I'm a little late in providing this information, but at legislative interims (i.e., meetings of legislative committees while the Legislature is not in session) in November, Mike Stratton gave a report on the DEP's implementation of the Water Resources Protection and Management Act during 2008. For those of you not familiar with it, the WRPA, found at W. Va. Code Chapter 22, Article 26 , is West Virginia's attempt to exercise control over water resources in the state, and to make an accounting of most large water withdrawals (more than 750,000 gallons in a calendar month). One of the goals of the Act is to develop an inventory of the State's water resources, and to see where water is being removed and returned, diverted between watersheds, or disposed (as in an underground injection control well).

The Act is a natural result of the fact that Eastern states are beginning to experience something common in the West - an insufficiency of water, which makes determining water ownership and control a matter of increasing importance. Historically, West Virginia has been a riparian rights state - if you owned property beside a river, you had a right to use water in the river reasonably, without significant limitation other than the needs of other riparian users. While there are protections for riparian rights in the WRPA, the Act undercuts individual property rights in a way that has yet to be fully explored. As someone who participated in the negotiations over the Act, I can tell you that there was a strong desire among West Virginia legislators, particularly those in the Eastern Panhandle, to stake a claim on water so that downstream users in Virginia and Maryland could not do so. That does not bode well for real property owners.