BOARD00725

• Board Meeting Date: 1/18/1973
• Description: Agenda or Table of Contents, Minutes, Memos
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Meeting

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Mr. Burr: Oh, no.

Mr. Saunders: I would like to make some comments here.

Mr. Stapleton: You had better take the microphone.

Mr. Saunders: I don't know, but I think they can hear me all right.
I am in a pretty good position here because what I am going to do
is to give you the results of a meeting among some lawyers that was
held last evening, late yesterday afternoon. Four of those lawyers
are present and I talked to two of them. They thought that it would
be worthwhile to have these views expressed there, expressed here for
the benefit of this group. I think there were seven or eight lawyers
and all these matters were discussed pretty thoroughly. The matter
that was brought up by Clarence Burr and which I believe that R?y Moses
has confirmed Burr's views that there would be a taking contrary to
the constitution of the United States unless some provision is made
for replacing the value which Mr. Moses has pointed out. It is very
valuable to be able to change the place of diversion, place of use
and character of use.

The group of lawyers that met last night are very sympathetic towards
the work that has been done by Larry~parks. I particularly feel
that he has given some real good thought to this. But they made these
comments. We have basically a hundred years of interpretations of
the constitution in its present form. Any language which would change
the constitution is going to give rise to a great deal of litigation.
The lawyers involved in this meeting last night are already fully
employed. As a result, they carne to a conclusion that within a frame-
work of the present language of the constitution there is ample room
for a legislative enactment without a constitutional amendment. I
s~arted out agreeing entirely with Larry that we had to have one to
get the job done, but after this discussion, I had to go along with
the projections that were made and they are pretty simple. We con-
sidered the present law which is the Water Rights Determination Act of
1969. And we used the beneficial use definition in that act. What
the act says is: "That beneficial use is the use of that amount of
water that is reasonable and appropriate under reasonably efficient
practices to accomplish without waste the purpose for which the
diversion is lawfully made and, without limiting the generality of
the foregoing, shall include the impoundment of water for recreational
purposes, including fishery or wildlife." I throw this out for Larry
and Ray Moses who have not read this because this was done quite late
in the evening yesterday. "And shall also include: maintain all or

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