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Show 694 GROUND WATER RIGHTS IN SELECTED STATES can be identified by competent evidence, are treated as one source of supply for all users who have access to it. The similar riparian and correlative doctrines of rights to use water that vest in the owners of riparian and overlying lands, respectively, as developed by the California decisions, form the basis of titles to use waters. Superimposed upon this basis is the doctrine of prior appropriation, which ordinarily applies to any surplus above the reasonable requirements of the riparian or overlying landowners whose rights usually are paramount;162 the statutory procedure for the acquisition of appropriative rights, however, is confined to waters in definite surface and subterranean streams.163 And governing the exercise of all water rights, of whatever character, is the 1928 constitutional amendment creating a policy of reasonable beneficial use.164 An exceptional situation: Pueblo rights.- An exceptional situation was presented in Los Angeles v. Hunter because of the pueblo right of the City of Los Angeles.165 The city was asserting its paramount pueblo right to the use of the waters of the Los Angeles river as against owners of lands overlying tributary ground waters in San Fernando Valley. These ground waters were held by the court not to be percolating waters in the common law sense of the term, but only in the sense that they formed a vast mass of water percolating toward the outlet of the river from the valley. In any event, they constituted the source of supply of the river, and their interruption would impair the flow of the river as certainly as would an interference with a flowing tributary on the surface. The paramount pueblo right of the city therefore extended to these tributary ground waters, so that the owners of the overlying lands had no correlative rights with the city when the city demanded the entire subterranean flow. Ground Water Supply Fed by Percolation From Watercourse Ground waters that have so far escaped from a watercourse as to be no longer a part of that or of any other definite stream may become percolating waters.166 But their derivation from the watercourse makes them part of a common water supply of which the watercourse is also a part. The principle of coordination of rights in common water supplies, developed in the cases involving stream waters and tributary percolating waters that are discussed above, was carried still further in Miller v. Bay Gties Water '"Certain possible exceptions are explained in chapter 6 at notes 230-233. 163 Also modifying the basis are the rules governing the acquisition of prescriptive titles to use waters. 164Cal. Const, art. XIV, § 3. See "Effect of Constitutional Amendment of 1928," supra. 165Los Angeles v. Hunter, 156 Cal. 603, 607-609, 105 Pac. 755 (1909). Regarding pueblo water rights, see chapter 11. 166 Vineland Irr. Dist. v. Azusa Irrigating Co., 126 Cal. 486, 494, 58 Pac. 1057 (1899). See Montecito Valley Water Co. v. Santa Barbara, 144 Cal. 578, 588, 77 Pac. 113 (1904). |