{"id":28826,"date":"2013-06-13T11:45:57","date_gmt":"2013-06-13T16:45:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/?p=28826"},"modified":"2013-06-13T11:46:00","modified_gmt":"2013-06-13T16:46:00","slug":"supreme-court-backs-oklahoma-over-texas-water-district","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/2013\/06\/13\/supreme-court-backs-oklahoma-over-texas-water-district\/","title":{"rendered":"Supreme Court Backs Oklahoma Over Texas Water District"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

<\/h4>\n
\"The<\/a>

Photo by REUTERS\/Mike Stone<\/p>

The dried south fork of Lake Arlington is seen near Bowman Springs Park, when the water level was nine feet below normal, in Arlington, Texas August 5, 2011.<\/p><\/div>\n

From the Texas Tribune:\u00a0<\/a><\/h4>\n

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday issued a\u00a0unanimous ruling for Oklahoma<\/a>\u00a0over a North Texas water district in a case over delivery of water from the Red River.<\/p>\n

The case, Tarrant Regional Water District v. Herrmann, Rudolf J. et al, pitted fast-growing North Texas against the state of Oklahoma. The Tarrant Regional Water District, which serves Fort Worth and other North Texas communities, wanted to buy water from Oklahoma reservoirs, but Oklahoma passed laws that effectively meant it wouldn’t sell.<\/p>\n

The Tarrant district sued six years ago and has spent\u00a0$6 million on the lawsuit, according to water district spokesman Chad Lorance. On Thursday, the Supreme Court upheld a ruling from the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.<\/p>\n

“The Compact does not pre-empt the Oklahoma water statutes,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the Supreme Court opinion. She was referring to the\u00a01980 Red River Compact, which stipulates that signatory states \u2014 which include Texas and Oklahoma \u2014\u00a0get an \u201cequitable\u201d share of water.<\/a>\u00a0The Tarrant district wants water flowing south out of Oklahoma, but they say that by the time the water reaches Texas it is essentially unusable, so they want to tap the reservoirs further upstream. Oklahoma state lawmakers have declined their request.<\/p>\n

The decision could have implications for other parts of the country. For example, legal experts have been interested in\u00a0whether Oklahoma\u2019s efforts to stop or discourage out-of-state water sales would be trumped by a multi-state compact<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Gabriel Eckstein, a law professor and water expert at the Texas Wesleyan School of Law who is also affiliated with the firm\u00a0Sullivan and Worcester, said the ruling was not a “complete disaster” for the Tarrant water district. “They can still get the water,” he said, but it will be much more expensive because the water will contain more particles, like salts, that must be cleaned and treated.<\/p>\n

Still, he said, the decision is “going to hurt Texas, it\u2019s going to hurt Tarrant County’s objective of getting that water.”<\/p>\n

The decision comes against a backdrop of continued severe drought across Texas<\/a>. Another North Texas water agency, the North Texas Municipal Water District, began limiting the use of lawn sprinklers<\/a> to once a week starting June 1.<\/p>\n

Texas also is battling for water from two other neighbors, New Mexico and Mexico.<\/p>\n

Texas Tribune donors or members may be quoted or mentioned in their stories, or may be the subject of them. For a complete list of contributors, click here<\/a>.<\/em><\/h5>\n<\/article>\n
This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune<\/a> at http:\/\/www.texastribune.org\/2013\/06\/13\/supreme-court-decides-texas-oklahoma-water-case\/<\/a>.<\/em><\/h5>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the Texas Tribune:\u00a0 The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday issued a\u00a0unanimous ruling for Oklahoma\u00a0over a North Texas water district in a case over delivery of water from the Red River. The case, Tarrant Regional Water District v. Herrmann, Rudolf J. et al, pitted fast-growing North Texas against the state of Oklahoma. The Tarrant Regional […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":143,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28826"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/143"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28826"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28826\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28831,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28826\/revisions\/28831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/texas\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}