Archuleta v. Gomez

2012 CO 71, 290 P.3d 482, 2012 Colo. LEXIS 913, 2012 WL 6013798
CourtSupreme Court of Colorado
DecidedDecember 3, 2012
DocketNo. 12SA47
StatusPublished
Cited by1 cases

This text of 2012 CO 71 (Archuleta v. Gomez) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Supreme Court of Colorado primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Archuleta v. Gomez, 2012 CO 71, 290 P.3d 482, 2012 Colo. LEXIS 913, 2012 WL 6013798 (Colo. 2012).

Opinion

Justice HOBBS

delivered the Opinion of the Court.

¶ 1 This appeal from a judgment by the Water Court for Water Division No. 2 follows our remand in the case of Archuleta v. Gomez, 200 P.3d 333 (Colo.2009).1 The plaintiff in the underlying case is Ralph L. Archuleta as Trustee for the Ralph L. Archuleta Living Trust2; the defendant is Theodore D. Gomez.

¶ 2 This adverse possession dispute is between neighbors over legal interests in water and easement rights for three ditches diverting water from the Huerfano River in the Arkansas River Basin. After conducting additional evidentiary proceedings, as we directed in our first decision in this case, the water court found that Gomez had adversely possessed Archuleta's deeded legal interests in the Archuleta Ditch and Manzanares Ditch No. 1, but it also found that Gomez had not adversely possessed Archuleta's deeded legal interest in Manzanares Ditch No. 2.

¶ 3 The Archuleta Ditch extends across Gomez's upper (westernmost) parcel of irrigated land but does not reach Gomez's nonadjacent lower parcel or Archuleta's parcel, which lies immediately to the east of Gomez's lower parcel. Manzanares Ditch No. 1 cuts across the southeastern corner of Gomez's lower parcel and the southern part of Ar-chuleta's parcel. Manzanares Ditch No. 2 runs across the northern part of Gomez's lower parcel and previously extended to the northern part of Archuleta's adjoining parcel until Gomez plowed it under, severing the connection to Archuleta's property.

¶ 4 The water court ordered payment of costs in favor of Gomez but denied Gomez's request for a partial award of attorney fees. The water court enjoined Gomez from interfering with Archuleta's interest in Manza-nares Ditch No. 2, and, in an order entered after the time for amending the water court's judgment had run, the water court provided additional details for the injunction, ordering Gomez to reconstruct Manzanares Ditch No. 2 across the northern part of Gomez's lower parcel to Archuleta's property.

¶ 5 We affirm the judgment of the water court in part, concluding that Gomez adversely possessed Archuleta's legal interests in the Archuleta Ditch and Manzanares Ditch No. 1. We reverse the water court's judgment in part, ordering it to enter an infunetion for reconstruction of Manzanares Ditch No. 2 and an easement across the northern part of Gomez's lower parcel to Archuleta's adjoining parcel, so that Archuleta will receive the flow of water his legal interest in this ditch entitles him to divert.

a

¶ 6 We turn to a discussion of the facts and the law pertinent to this appeal.

[485]*485A. Standard of Review

¶ 7 We accept the water court's factual findings on appeal unless they are so clearly erroneous as to find no support in the record. Burlington Ditch Reservoir & Land Co. v. Metro Wastewater Reclamation Dist., 256 P.3d 645, 660 (Colo.2011). The sufficiency, probative effect, weight of the evidence, and the inferences drawn therefrom are for the water court to determine, and we will not disturb them on appeal. Matter of Gibbs, 856 P.2d 798, 801 (Colo.1993). We review the water court's conclusions of law de novo. San Antonio, Los Pinos & Conejos River Acequia Pres. Ass'n v. Special Improvement Dist. No. 1 of Rio Grande Water Conservation Dist., 270 P.3d 927, 985 (Colo.2011); S. Ute Indian Tribe v. King Consol. Ditch Co., 250 P.3d 1226, 1232 (Colo.2011).

B. Adverse Possession Water Law Requires Quantification of Historical Beneficial Consumptive Use

¶ 8 In our prior opinion in this case, we held that, to succeed in his adverse possession elaim to Archuleta's legal interests in the Archuleta Ditch, Manzanares Ditch No. 1, and Manzanares Ditch No. 2, Gomez must prove by a preponderance of the evidence that, behind the headgate, he-hostile to the owner and under claim of right-notoriously, adversely, exclusively, and continuously made actual beneficial consumptive use of all or a portion of Archuleta's deeded water interests on the Gomez lands for the eighteen-year adverse possession period, not just that he intercepted water from the three ditches belonging to Archuleta's legal interests. Archuleta v. Gomez, 200 P.3d at 337, 342, 345.

¶ 9 Quantification of the use Gomez and Archuleta actually made of the deeded interests in dispute is required because the mature limit, seope, and measure of a water right is not equivalent to the flow of water diverted (typically expressed in cubic feet per second (e.f.s.)) but, rather, is the amount of water needed and consumed annually in making beneficial use of the water-in this ease, for crop production (typically quantified by number of acre-feet). See Daniel S. Young & Duane D. Helton, P.E., Developing a Water Supply in Colorado: The Role of an Engineer, 3 U. Denv. Water L.Rev. 378, 384, 379-80 (2000). Diversion of water, by itself, cannot ripen into a water right if the water is not beneficially used. Archuleta v. Gomez, 200 P.3d at 343.

¶ 10 We have previously explained the difference between rate of flow and quantifica tion of actual beneficial consumptive use, as follows:

[P]rior to the modern trend of implementing express volumetric limitations in decrees, most water rights were quantified by a two-part measurement. First, a decree contained a flow-rate of water, in cef.s., which the owner was entitled to divert from the stream. Second, a decree stated the use to which that diverted water could be put, such as irrigation of erops or municipal uses.
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With the advent of improved engineering techniques, courts began to utilize another approach to prevent injury to juniors in change proceedings. Under the modern method, courts now translate the petitioner's historical consumptive use into a volumetric limitation stated in acre-feet.

Farmers High Line Canal & Reservoir Co. v. City of Golden, 975 P.2d 189, 197-98 (Colo.1999) (citations omitted).

¶ 11 Stated differently, the flow of irrigation water through a canal into a farm lateral and then applied to an agricultural field results in crop production that involves consumption of an amount of water belonging to the legal interest in the water right; water not consumed in applying a flow of water to a field becomes surface and/or subsurface return flow that is part of the public's water resource available to fulfill other adjudicated water rights, in order of their decreed priority. A diversion flow rate specified in a decree is neither the measure of a matured water right, nor conclusive evidence of the appropriator's need for which the appropriation was originally made. Burlington Ditch, 256 P.3d at 665. Indeed, our cases relating to the "duty of water" are founded on this principle-that any given acreage of cropland needs and is limited to a productive amount of water. Archuleta v. Gomez, 200 P.3d at

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Bluebook (online)
2012 CO 71, 290 P.3d 482, 2012 Colo. LEXIS 913, 2012 WL 6013798, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/archuleta-v-gomez-colo-2012.