I see buyers get excited about deeded water rights and completely ignore the ditch company shares attached to them. Those are two different things, and conflating them cost me dearly on my second land purchase.
The prior appropriation decree looked solid. Good priority date, adequate cfs on paper. What I didn't dig into before making an offer was the ditch company's internal bylaws, their maintenance assessment history, and the voting structure among shareholders. I closed thinking I had functional irrigation water. What I actually had was a minority share in a cooperative where three large operators controlled board decisions, assessments had tripled in four years, and the delivery infrastructure on my lateral hadn't been touched in two decades.
The water right was real. The practical ability to get that water to my headgate on a reliable schedule was not.
Anybody can pull a decree from the state database. Almost nobody requests the ditch company's last five years of board minutes and financial statements before closing. That's where the actual story lives.
Has anyone else found that the ditch company governance was a bigger problem than the underlying water right itself?