It takes four things to have water in these parts - two hydrogen atoms, an oxygen atom and a piece of paper.
Without the paper, proving you have the legal right to use the water, the H2O might as well not exist. Water use is a property right that belongs exclusively to those who can prove they own it.
Things get complicated when there are more people in line than there is water to supply them and some people start cutting in line and arguing about who was there first. It gets confusing with each passing generation, as water rights get bought and sold and the people who know the particulars about when the rights were established and for what uses move away or die. That pretty much describes the situation in Montana and throughout the West. In times of water scarcity - which is often, if not always - individuals, subdivisions, utilities, businesses, towns and entire states find themselves tussling over who has the first or next claim to the water in streams and from the ground. In many areas, people have staked claim to more water than exists. Many rights claimed are disputed, unclear or unverifiable.
To use and benefit from the water that makes life possible in Montana, Montanans must have clear, verifiable, legally defensible rights to the amounts and for the uses claimed. That's the reason the Montana Constitution adopted in 1972 requires the state to establish a centralized system of water rights. Doing this involves sorting out all the competing claims, a process known as adjudication.
Three decades on, the state's still working to sort out water rights. The process has been much too slow - so slow that the state and its citizens risk losing claim to water from people in downstream states, so slow that uncertainty about water rights has the potential to undermine economic prosperity.
That's why the Legislature last year passed a bill aimed at speeding up water rights adjudication, mostly by devoting more manpower to the task. To pay for this work, lawmakers imposed fees on people who claim water rights - the very people who will directly and most benefit from completion of the adjudication. The fees are modest - $20 every other year over the next 10 years for most water-rights claimants, rising to a maximum of $400 for those claiming multiple rights. The Department of Natural Resources and Conservation just mailed out the first bills to some 100,000 water-rights claimants, prompting some complaints about a new tax on people's water.
But it's not their water, it's not Montana's water, without the paper to prove it. That's what the fee is for. If there's any reason for complaining, it ought to be that the fees should be higher so the adjudication could be done even faster.
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