Mohr Hackett’s involvement in environmental law centers on the needs of its commercial and residential clients. Our efforts range from evaluating the sufficiency and completeness of various environmental reports to helping manage the consequences of pollutant discharges on property that is owned by or under contract by our clients. Such discharges might be from leaking underground storage tanks or other delivery sources, and the plume of contamination may or may not have contaminated groundwater. We have also advised clients on a variety of other environmental law issues, including the impact of endangered or threatened species and storm water pollution prevention issues.
Water is critical to life in the desert, and is therefore vital to the interests of our clients. We have advised our clients on surface water rights, grandfathered irrigation and non-irrigation groundwater rights and riparian rights affecting their properties. Counter-intuitive though it may seem, our Arizona clients are sometimes affected by issues concerning “navigable waters” of the United States. We have also handled a number of development and cost sharing agreements regarding development of potable (drinkable) water and wastewater treatment facilities, well agreements, and well spacing agreements.
Environmental law involves a system of complex and interlocking statutes, common law, treaties, conventions, regulations and policies that seek to protect the natural environment that may be affected, impacted or endangered by human activities. Some environmental laws regulate the quantity and nature of impacts of human activities; for example, setting allowable levels of pollution. Other environmental laws are preventive in nature and seek to assess the possible impacts before the human activities can occur.
Environmental law has also been used in numerous growth versus no-growth disputes to affect the decisions of municipal, county, state and/or federal authorities in connection with development approvals and planning.
Water law is the field of law dealing with the ownership, control and use of water as a resource. It is most closely related to property law, but has also become influenced by environmental law. Because water is vital to living things and to a variety of economic activities, laws attempting to govern it have far-reaching effects.
Water has unique features that make it difficult to regulate using laws designed mainly for land. Water is mobile, its supply varies by year and season as well as location, and it can be used simultaneously by many users. As with real property (land) law, water rights can be described as a “bundle of sticks” containing multiple separable activities that can have varying levels of regulation. For instance, some uses of water divert it from its natural course but return most or all of it (for example, hydroelectric plants), while others consume much of what they take (especially agriculture), and still others use water without diverting it at all (for example, boating). Each type of activity has its own needs and can in theory be regulated separately.
There are several types of conflict likely to arise: absolute shortages; shortages in a particular time or place; diversions of water that reduce the flow available to others, pollutants or other changes (such as temperature or turbidity) that render water unfit for others’ use and the need to maintain “in-stream flows” of water to protect the natural ecosystem.