WSP05845

• File Number: 8507
• Description: Rio Grande Project
• State: CO
• Basin: Rio Grande
• Date: 7/1/1997
• Title: Water Management Study: Upper Rio Grande Basin part 2
• Water Supply Pro - Doc Type: Report/Study

Water Management Study: Upper Rio Grande Basin

e. Resource Owners' Rights and Responsibilities Remain Ambiguous.-
Owners of natural resources in the Basin have both rights regarding the use
and disposition of the resources and responsibilities not to exercise these
rights in ways that unreasonably restrict the rights-whether private or
public- of others (McElfish 1994). There always has been controversy over
the delineation between rights and responsibilities of owners of water and
related resources and efforts to implement the Endangered Species Act and
other resource-conservation laws in the Basin (and elsewhere) have
highlighted the ambiguities underlying this controversy. It is generally
acknowledged that, when an upstream property owner exercises her property
right to degrade the water quality of a stream, she has a responsibility not to
infringe upon downstream owners' property rights to have clean water. Does
she also have a right to adversely destroy the water-related habitat needed
by an endangered species, or the responsibility not to do so? If her neighbors
already have destroyed habitat on their property, thus contributing to the
endangerment, do they bear any responsibility for helping her maintain the
remaining habitat on her property?8

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Ambiguity about the rights and responsibilities of resource owners can
seriously interfere with efforts to allocate resources efficiently. For example,
it might create incentives for owners ofresources that contain habitat for a
species that might come under the protection of the Endangered Species Act
to destroy the habitat deliberately in an attempt to escape the Act's
restrictions. Learning more about the extent to which everything is
connected to everything else within the ecosystem can decrease ambiguity in
some instances, but increase it in others. Additional ambiguity can arise as
ecologists develop a better, but still incomplete, understanding of how
ecosystems work and develop the ability to show that actions modifying the
ecosystem at one location can lead to changes elsewhere. Destroying
(creating) some components of riparian habitat, for example, might drive

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8 The issues raised by these questions are not unique to endangered species and
environmental protection. Analogous questions arise relstive to extractive uses of water and
related resources, e.g., under the prior-appropriation doctrine where one's rights do not
necessarily relate to one's position on the stream. Instead, the doctrine says that a junior
appropriator has a right to assume that stream conditions will remain substantially the same
as when he first estsblished his beneficial use. Thus, if a senior appropriator (who is, in every
other way, dominant to the junior in exercising rights) wants to change the timing or place of
diversion, or the type of use, this will be allowed only ifit is determined not to harm any
junior appropriator. Making these determinations can be difficult.

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