CHARTING A NEW COURSE
Published in the Nov. 22, 2025 issue.
I can hear the frustration in the voices passionately advocating for Los Angeles to hand over some of its land and water to the Paiute tribes in the Owens Valley.
At two recent water-related public meetings, tribal members and their allies confronted Los Angeles staff and elected officials about their inability to provide additional water to the reservations and allow them to expand onto adjoining lands owned by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP).
The arguments and demands are reasonable and hard to dispute. And LA and LADWP officials don’t dispute them.
The problem I see is that those LA officials also do nothing to educate tribal advocates about the tangle of knotty problems that must be overcome before any additional water or land can be provided to the tribes.
Instead, they offer a weak bow to political correctness in the form of silence and “acknowledging” those concerns. What should replace that silence is calmly outlining the real-life legal and logistical obstacles that must be overcome to achieve those goals.
The first lesson is a simple reading of the LA City Charter, adopted in 1925. Section 73 (b) Water and Water Rights states: “Other Water and Water Rights. Except as provided in this Article, no other water or water rights owned or controlled by the City shall ever be sold, leased or disposed of, in whole or in part, without the assent of two-thirds of the registered voters of the City voting on the proposition, and no water shall ever be sold, supplied or distributed to any person or corporation other than to municipalities for resale, rental or disposal to consumers for their own use.”
That City Charter section meant no water rights were included in the 1939 land exchange between LADWP and the federal government that provided about 3,000 acres for reservations in Bishop, Big Pine and Lone Pine (The Fort Independence Indian Community reservation was established in 1915). Those three reservations were given a “contractual water right” for about 5,500-acre feet of water a year, but no actual water rights. The Federal Reserved Indian Water Rights that were supposed to come with the land were to be addressed at a future date. That date hasn’t arrived, 76 years later. (See the Owens Valley Indian Water Commission webpage, www.ovwic.org, for an overview of these land and water issues.)
So instead of head-nodding silence, LA officials need to lay out the legal straightjacket the city is in regarding selling or giving up any water rights. That should be the foundation of the water debate. Then a real effort can begin to find solutions. That effort must also reflect the needs and priorities of each individual tribal government.
Same for land. The City Charter, again, has an extensive section about selling city land. And it’s always selling. Usually at auction for market price. And only land that is declared vacant or abandoned or unneeded.
Toss in the federal government and Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) for more complications and complexity. The federal government owns the reservation land and holds it “in trust” for the tribes.
Any land deal will have to comply with the City Charter, meet the different needs of separate tribes, and either comply with or outwit the restrictions imposed by the federal government and BIA.
I would bet my simplistic analysis just scratches the surface and additional roadblocks and challenges lurking in dark, bureaucratic and legal cubby holes.
But the first step to realistically confronting the land and water issue is to bring those issues out of the dark and discuss them in the daylight of public meetings.
Then the passion and problem-solving savvy of the tribes and their allies can be focused on addressing those complex issues and finding solutions and compromises that will achieve the goal of ensuring local tribes have the land and water they need and deserve to maintain and enhance their communities.
Jon Klusmire of Bishop reluctantly recommends bringing in the lawyers.
