The Water Lawyer Who Never Left the Room

How California water is supposed to work, and the paper trail showing how it actually works

Here is a simple rule most of us learn as kids. If two people are in a fight over something, you do not let the same referee call the game for both sides. You definitely do not let the referee also be friends with one team's coach, get invited to their parties, and then hand that coach a bonus check a few days later.

That is the rule. Now let me show you what the paper trail says actually happens with California water.

How it is supposed to work

Water districts are public agencies. That means a few things have to be true.

First, the people who run them are supposed to be elected or appointed to represent you, the person paying the water bill. Second, big decisions are supposed to happen in public meetings, with the vote on the record, not behind closed doors. Third, when a public agency needs a lawyer, that lawyer works for the agency and the people it serves. Not for the agency on the other side of the table. Not for the company trying to buy the water. One lawyer, one side.

Fourth, records of what public agencies do belong to you. That is the whole point of public records law. You are allowed to ask "show me the paperwork" and they have to show you, unless there is a real legal reason not to.

That is the rule book. Simple enough that a seventh grader gets it in one read.

How it actually works

In 2018, a reporter named Ry Rivard, working for a nonprofit newsroom called Voice of San Diego, dug up a pile of court records, sworn declarations, and old emails about a water lawyer named Scott Slater and his firm, Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck (it used to be called Hatch and Parent before a merger). Those documents are public record now, filed in a real court case, and they tell a story worth knowing if you live anywhere near a California water district.

Here is what they show.

From 1997 through at least 2018, the San Diego County Water Authority paid Brownstein and its earlier version more than twenty five million dollars for legal and consulting work. That is about one point two million dollars a year, for over twenty years, to one law firm.

During roughly that same stretch, the documents show that same firm's water lawyer, Scott Slater, was pitching a company called Cadiz Inc. to other water agencies too, including Otay Water District, as a place to buy or bank water. In a sworn declaration, the Otay Water District's own general manager, Mark Watton, said flat out that he knew Slater and his firm had a relationship with Cadiz, and that if his agency ever actually negotiated with Cadiz, he would have hired separate lawyers to protect his agency's side.

Read that again. Otay's own top manager felt the need to say, on the record, under penalty of perjury, that he knew he would need a different lawyer if a deal ever got real. That is not a compliment to the system. That is a red flag being handed to you in writing.

The San Diego County Water Authority's own general counsel, Mark Hattam, gave a similar declaration. He said Brownstein never told his agency it wanted to represent Cadiz, Poseidon, or Chino Basin in dealings with his agency. Maybe that is all true. But notice what these declarations are actually doing. They exist because someone, somewhere, was worried enough about the appearance of a conflict that lawyers had to put a formal denial on paper. You do not need a sworn declaration to deny something nobody suspected.

There is also a 2013 deposition in the file, where Slater is questioned under oath about a massive twenty billion dollar water transfer deal and a rate fight between San Diego and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, generally called MWD or Met. In it, Slater describes negotiating what he calls a "peace treaty" with Met, the same agency his own client had been suing. Water law in California is a small world, and the same names keep showing up on both sides of the table, decade after decade.

Even the water industry has a folk tale about this

Buried in the same file is a strange little document from 1996 called "But Who Will Pay? A Faerie Tale," written by a water lawyer named Gregory Quist. It tells the story of a rich "Kingdom" with big concrete rivers full of water, and a poor little "Village" next door that has to buy water from the Kingdom and eventually gets tired of being pushed around and charged more without getting a real seat at the table.

Water insiders wrote their own bedtime story about the big guy and the little guy fighting over water, back in 1996. That tells you the power imbalance is not some new discovery. It has been an open joke inside the industry for almost thirty years, while the people actually living in the "Village" mostly never got to hear the story at all.

Why this matters if you live in the Coachella Valley

If any of this pattern sounds familiar, it should. Coachella Valley Water District's own outside counsel, Best Best and Krieger, represents a long list of public agencies across the region at the same time, including cities, water districts, and joint powers authorities that sometimes end up negotiating with each other. That is a documented fact sitting in public agenda packets and public contracts, not a rumor.

The Voice of San Diego files show this is not a one town problem. It is a pattern baked into how water law has worked in California for decades. Different lawyers, different rivers, same basic setup. One firm, sitting in the room, on more sides of the table than the public realizes.

The bigger picture, from someone who studies this for a living

Dr. Jessica Bremner studies water access and urban geography, and in 2022 she completed a doctoral dissertation on this exact region called "Thirsty by Design: Regulating Water Access in the Coachella Valley." Her research lays out a pattern with a name worth learning: a center and periphery split. In her own words, when Coachella Valley Water District was formed in 1918, it set up a system where farm water sat at the center of the valley's economy and got protected, while domestic water for regular people got pushed out to the edges and treated as an afterthought. She traces this pattern all the way back to the late 1800s, when U.S. settler policy took land and water away from the Indigenous communities who were there first.

That is not a legal term. It is a way of naming what keeps happening. The big central water supply gets lawyers, lobbyists, and decades of careful protection. The small domestic system serving a few thousand people out past the edge of town gets a phone call telling them their water district might get handed off to someone else, sometimes without so much as a heads up.

A real court case that proves the point

You do not have to take anyone's word for the core-versus-periphery pattern. There is a federal court case that spelled it out.

In 2013, the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians sued Coachella Valley Water District and Desert Water Agency. The tribe had been raising concerns for almost twenty years about how the water districts were managing the Coachella Valley aquifer, including replenishing it with lower quality imported Colorado River water. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the tribe held a federal reserved right to the groundwater underneath its reservation, a right the water districts had never accounted for.

That should have settled things. It did not. When the case moved to the next phase, where a court was supposed to decide exactly how much of that groundwater belonged to the tribe, a federal district court dismissed it, ruling the tribe did not have standing to even ask the question. Legal scholars have been writing about that outcome ever since, mostly asking the same thing a seventh grader would ask: what good is a right if nobody will tell you how big it is?

This is the whole pattern in one case. A public water supply gets managed for decades by a district built to grow agriculture. The people with the oldest and strongest legal claim to that water get told, after winning in court, that they cannot even get an answer on how much is theirs.

What you can actually do with this

You do not need a law degree to start paying attention. Here is where to start.

Find out who your local water agency's outside lawyer is. It is public information, usually sitting right in a board meeting agenda packet.

Check whether that same law firm also represents other agencies your water district negotiates with, buys from, or sells to.

Show up to your water board meetings, or watch them online. Big decisions are supposed to happen with a public vote you can see.

File a public records request if something does not add up. In California, public agencies have to respond, and you do not need a special reason to ask.

The system is supposed to work with the lawyer on your side, the vote on the record, and the paperwork in your hands whenever you ask for it. The documents above show what happens when that system slides. It rarely announces itself. It just quietly becomes normal, one contract, one closed door meeting, one favor at a time, until somebody finally goes looking for the paper trail.

#LeaveID8Alone

Look into Cadiz, Mojave Groundwater Bank, and your local water district.

References

Bass, D. A. (2018). Agua Caliente: A case study and toolkit for securing tribal rights to clean groundwater.Ecology Law Quarterly, 45(2), 227-252.https://doi.org/10.15779/Z38BN9X33H

Block, L. (2026). A right without a remedy: The court's failure to quantify the Agua Caliente's federal reserved water rights.Washington Law Review, 101(1), 265-295.

Bremner, J. (2022).Thirsty by design: Regulating water access in the Coachella Valley[Doctoral dissertation, University of California]. eScholarship.https://escholarship.org/uc/item/75g166fw

Coachella Valley Water District. (2023, February 28).Official minutes of the regular meeting of the Board of Directors. cvwd.org.

Hattam, M. (2018, July 12).Declaration of Mark Hattam[Sworn court declaration]. San Diego County Water Authority.

Quist, G. M. (1996, March 13).But who will pay? A faerie tale[Unpublished manuscript].

Rivard, R. (2018). [Investigative reporting on Cadiz Inc., Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, and California water agency legal representation]. Voice of San Diego. Via Document Cloud

Tyra, A. D. (2020). When the well runs dry: Groundwater policy and sustainability post-Agua Caliente.UCLA Journal of Environmental Law & Policy, 38(2), 309-338.https://doi.org/10.5070/l5382050114

Watton, M. (2018, July 13).Declaration of Mark Watton[Sworn court declaration]. Otay Water District.