A federal appeals court Monday spurned California farmers who sued 14 years ago in search of compensation for the government’s failure to provide irrigation drainage.
Revisiting a remarkably complex and long-lived dispute, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit rejected the farmers’ contention that the government’s acknowledged irrigation drainage failure amounted to a taking of land in the sprawling Westlands Water District.
Under the Fifth Amendment, the government owes compensation for the taking of property. If it ever came due, the total bill for land despoiled by the lack of adequate irrigation drainage could be immense. But in a unanimous decision, the three-judge appellate panel concluded essentially that farmers waited too long before filing a U.S. Court of Federal Claims lawsuit in 2011.
“Appellants here irrigated their land for over 40 years knowing the United States had not provided any drainage,” Chief Judge Kimberly Moore noted.
