Description
Design and implement strategies to secure, allocate, and manage water rights, ensuring legal compliance and reliable supply. Evaluate availability and priority, negotiate acquisitions and transfers, prepare permits and change applications, and coordinate with regulators and stakeholders under state, federal, and compact requirements.
- • Negotiate acquisition, leases, exchanges, and transfers of water rights to meet supply needs.
- • Review diversion, well, and storage designs for consistency with water-rights permits and decrees.
- • Model water availability, priority calls, curtailment, and yield to support rights decisions.
- • Map points of diversion, places of use, and service areas using GIS and GPS.
- • Compile and maintain chain-of-title, permits, decrees, and adjudication records.
- • Prepare and file appropriation, change, and transfer applications and supporting reports.
- • Recommend policies and procedures to ensure lawful allocation, beneficial use, and compliance.
- • Advise utilities, agencies, and water users on permitting pathways and rights strategies.
- • Present rights proposals, analyses, and findings to boards, courts, and community groups.
- • Develop strategies for reuse, exchanges, augmentation, and mitigation that satisfy legal requirements.
- • Monitor diversion volumes and usage to verify compliance with authorized amounts, seasons, and purposes.
- • Identify unauthorized diversions, impairments, or expansions of use affecting senior rights.
- • Develop allocation and drought contingency plans consistent with priority systems and compacts.
- • Develop standardized metering, reporting, and audit methods for rights compliance.
- • Conduct due diligence on water-rights validity, reliability, historical consumptive use, and yield.
- • Investigate permit violations, impairment complaints, and compliance with decree conditions.
- • Evaluate economic and legal tradeoffs of rights acquisition, leasing, banking, and mitigation.
- • Analyze conveyance losses, return flows, and delivery obligations affecting consumptive use.
- • Coordinate with state engineers, watermasters, tribes, and federal agencies on rights administration.
- • Support adjudications, settlements, and litigation with technical analyses, exhibits, and expert testimony.
- • Oversee field verification of points of diversion, beneficial use, meters, and place-of-use boundaries.
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Last reviewed: Jan 2026
