2014 marks the 20th anniversary of the State Water Resources Control Board's (SWRCB) landmark Decision 1631 to amend the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power's water rights to protect Mono Lake and its tributary creeks. The decision was the first in the state's history to integrate the Water Code, Fish and Game Code, and the common law of public trust, to achieve such a result.
UC Berkeley’s Wheeler Institute for Water Law and Policy, joined by stakeholders in the Mono Lake Cases, are convening this symposium on November 17, 2014 to address several fundamental questions on this twentieth anniversary of D-1631. What are the actual results of implementation of D-1631? What does the decision mean for other water rights, as the State Water Board seeks to determine how best to protect public trust uses of the Delta and Central Valley rivers consistent with maintaining reliable water supplies?
We will seek to move from problem definition towards solutions statements, building on previous events at UC Davis in 1980 and 2011. The symposium will do so by bringing together panelists from multiple perspectives to distill lessons learned from twenty years of concerted effort to implement the Mono Lake decisions, and from efforts elsewhere to implement environmental flows by regulators who are confronting public trust issues. The speakers will ground their discussion in the context of institutional, fiscal, and biophysical realities.