Land Buying1 min read

Water Rights Priority Date Is the Only Number That Matters

Colt Waverly

3 weeks, 1 day ago

👁 211 views💬 2 replies

I used to think senior versus junior water rights was mostly a technicality — something lawyers worried about, not buyers. I was dead wrong, and it almost cost me access to the one creek that made a property worth owning.

I was looking at 80 acres in the Bitterroot drainage. Great riparian corridor, healthy willows, decent trout habitat. The listing showed water rights. What nobody volunteered — and what I didn't press hard enough on — was that the priority date on those rights was 1987. Every upstream neighbor with a pre-1960 date could legally dry that creek to nothing in a low water year, and in recent summers, they have.

I walked away, but barely. The next buyer didn't.

In the arid West, a water right without a strong priority date isn't really a water right. It's a maybe. Brokers treat all decreed rights like they're equivalent, and they are not.

Anybody else bought into a basin where junior status made your rights essentially worthless in practice?

#water rights #priority date #riparian land #western land buying #stream access

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2 Replies

Jonah Pressley

3 weeks ago

Hard agree, and I'd add that even knowing the priority date isn't enough — you need to know what the right is actually *for*. My neighbor here in the Ozarks holds a water right that looks great on paper until you realize it's designated for livestock use only, not irrigation. Completely different legal bucket. I've been wondering how often buyers conflate 'there's a water right attached' with 'I can use this water however I need to.' Those are very different things.

Harlan Oeffner

3 weeks ago

Same lesson hits different on the High Plains, but it hits just as hard. Out here in southwest Kansas, surface water rights are mostly theoretical anyway — it's the groundwater allocation dates tied to your GMD permit that determine whether your well produces in July or sucks air. I've watched neighbors with 1990s-era permits get curtailed while a 1962 neighbor irrigated through drought. Creek or aquifer, the principle is identical: that date isn't a technicality, it's the deed within the deed.