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Crestview Mutual Water Company’s shareholders, along with thousands of other individual property owners of the water companies listed therein, recently received formal notice regarding Santa Barbara Superior Court Case No. VENCI00509700 – Las Posas Valley Water Rights Coalition, et al. v. Fox Canyon Groundwater Management Agency, et al.  As a Crestview shareholder, you do not need to respond individually, as Crestview’s legal counsel will represent the Company on behalf of all shareholders.

 

The original filing for this case occurred in 2018, and will take many years to settle.  The allegations involve a claim for a comprehensive groundwater adjudication of the Las Posas Valley Groundwater Basin.  Court proceedings recently started, and it is expected that the final judicial decision regarding allocations for all parties involved will be years into the future.  Crestview is named because our wells draw water from the Las Posas Valley Groundwater Basin.  In summary, water allocations are in dispute, in spite of negotiations by the Las Posas Basin User’s Group/Fox Canyon GMA over the last five-plus years.  Crestview’s corporate counsel will represent Crestview in this matter at all mandated court appearances. This expense has been budgeted in our financial plans. 

 

In the meantime, Crestview continues to have an allocation to extract water from the basin. Our expectation is that once the litigation comes to a conclusion, Crestview’s allocation will be set at a specific number of acre-feet per year, as it is each year.  As is our usual practice, any shortfall in our groundwater allocation will require additional imported water supplies to meet shareholder demands.

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