By JENNIFER McKEE of the Missoulian State Bureau
HELENA - Mitchell Slough, the embattled little Ravalli County waterway in the middle of a showdown between 1980s rock musician Huey Lewis and a group of ardent local anglers, made an unusually quiet legal ripple last week
In rejecting their claim, Sherlock threw out the findings of Jack Stultz, administrator for the Water Resources Division of the Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, who previously upheld the couple's intentions.
The slough made national headlines last week when a group of anglers defied Lewis' "no trespassing" signs. Lewis argues that the slough is a privately owned irrigation ditch. But dozens of anglers who tossed their lines in the stream in protest argue that the slough is a channel of the Bitterroot River and covered under the state's stream access law.
The issue before Sherlock was not stream access, but water rights. In this case, the Siebels submitted applications for water rights on the channel on March 19, 1999 - just 10 days before the Bitterroot sub-basin was closed to any new water rights applications.
The Bitterroot River Protection Association, which sued the couple and DNRC over the issue, argued the Siebels filed their applications in bad faith and never intended to use the water as they described in their initial application.
What's more, the group said, the Siebels later changed their application dramatically - substantially increasing the amount of water they wanted from the stream and their reasons for requesting it. Those actions were so different from the Siebels' first application for water rights as to constitute a completely new application - one that would have been submitted after the deadline for new applications expired.
Sherlock agreed.
For example, the couple proposed to take 28 acre feet of water for one pond in 1999. In 2000, when the Siebels amended their application, they asked for 952 acre feet. An acre foot of water is 325,851 gallons. On another pond, they upped their water request from 75 to 1,025 acre feet. On the last pond, the couple upped their water usage from 45 acre feet to 899, and added fishing and wildlife as reasons for their proposed pond.
Sherlock in his decision suggested the couple submitted the original application only as a "straw man" - a sort of dummy application designed to get the couple's foot in the door before no more water rights would be allocated in the area. Then, they could "fill in the details later," Sherlock's decision read.
Sherlock wasn't the first to hear the dispute. The case was first heard by a hearings officer in March 2002, who recommended the DNRC deny the couple all their requests for water rights. That case was appealed to Stultz, who reinstated them.
The Bitterroot River Protection Association appealed that decision to Sherlock.
The Siebels could not be reached for comment.
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