Supreme Court plugs up Oklahoma river as water source for Texas

WASHINGTON -- Oklahoma beat Texas at the Supreme Court on Thursday in a cross-border contest over water for the Fort Worth area.

In a unanimous decision, the court rejected efforts by the Tarrant Regional Water District to tap into a Red River tributary that flows through Oklahoma. Though Oklahoma and Texas are part of a hard-fought Red River Compact that divides up the water, the court?s nine justices reasoned that the deal goes only so far.

?Cross-border rights were never intended to be part of the states? agreement,? Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for the court. ?There is no indication that Tarrant or any other Texas agency, or the state of Texas itself, previously made any mention of cross-border rights within the compact.?

Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana took some 25 years to negotiate the Red River Compact, signed in 1978, as a way to share access to the 1,300-mile river, which moves from the Texas Panhandle southeast through the three other states. The compact allocates most of the water it apportions to the states in which that water is located. In certain cases, though, the compact divvies up water equally to the four states.

This case concerns water in an area that encompasses territory in Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas. Tarrant argues that the compact means Texas has a right to 25 percent of the sub-basin?s water above a certain level.

Tarrant, which serves some 2 million customers in the Fort Worth area, applied for water from an Oklahoma tributary to the Red River. Oklahoma, though, has in place what Texas officials call ?a panoply of expressly discriminatory state laws? that, practically speaking, block the Texas water claims. The Constitution?s Commerce Clause doesn?t permit states to discriminate against one another.

In its 26-page decision, which included two color maps, the Supreme Court rejected the constitutional argument as well.

Source: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/06/13/3449304/supreme-court-plugs-up-oklahoma.html

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