WATER APPROPRIATION FROM KINGS RIVER. 319 



all supplied, the taking of measures to restrict waste wherever possible, and to make 

 the water ordinarily wasted do full duty, should be considered imperative. Education 

 in this direction should not be neglected. The good work already done by various 

 United States and State departments in this direction is to be highlj' commended and 

 the example should be followed in this State, which is one of the foremost in the 

 matter of extent of irrigation, but one of the last to give its irrigators much-needed 

 aid and protection. 



The study of methods of water measurements, delivery of water to irrigators, 

 and the application of water to the soil, becomes of great importance. Each State 

 must be prepared to meet these questions, and wherever irrigation is of considerable 

 extent this can be done only by a department with broad duties and permanently 

 established. Such investigation can not be terminated in a year or two, and should 

 continue indefinitelj', as there will be much to learn, even after the conditions in 

 irrigated sections have become fairly permanent. The State should not be slow in 

 aiding the agriculturist, even if the aid stops with good advice; neither should it be 

 lax in protecting his rights to the moisture which the soil needs any more than in 

 protecting him in the possession of the realty itself. 



But little control has been exercised in the past by the State of California over the 

 conditions imposed by canal owners upon the takers of water. The law provides 

 that lands once served with water from any canal from which water is sold have 

 equal rights with all other lands in their class and can not be deprived of their right 

 to receive water at the pleasure of the canal owner. Otherwise canal owners make 

 regulations to suit themselves. This is fairly well illustrated in the remarks made 

 upon canal management and water distribution in the foregoing pages, for each of 

 the more important irrigation works described. 



The rates charged by any canal owner for water are subject to regulation by the 

 board of supervisors of the county in which the water is for sale. There has been 

 but little demand for such regulation in Fresno, Tulare, and Kings counties, because 

 it seems questionable whether the water-right agreement is subject to such regula- 

 tion, and because where rates are charged the irrigators are, for the most part, stock- 

 holders in the canal company, and would have to contribute to canal expenses as 

 stockholders if the amount collected from ratepayers should prove insufficient to 

 meet expenses. There is, therefore, but little occasion for complaint. It seems 

 questionable whether the power to fix water rates, or, rather, whether the power to 

 appraise canal valuation as a basis for fixing water rates, should be intrusted to such 

 bodies as supervisors. The rates are to be fixed so as to yield a fair return on the 

 value of the works in actual use. This value should be appraised by some State 

 rather than by a local department, and the value determined should serve as a basis 

 for the rates in all of the several counties in which water is to be sold by any canal. 

 The canal appraisement presents particular difliculties when values of franchises are 

 involved. These have value according to their earning power, yet it rests at present 

 in the power of the rate-fixing body to destroy such value entirely by fixing the 

 entire valuation so low that the earnings are scant interest on only a nominal fran- 

 chise value. Difliculty often arises, too, when canals are located in two or more 

 counties. The oflicials of one are not bound by the acts of another, and there may 

 be as many maximum rate scales established for a canal as there are interested 



