Imperial County farmer Michael Abatti looks to take fight with IID to U.S. Supreme Court

Having been turned away by the California Supreme Court last week, farmer Michael Abatti looked to have lost his years-long fight with the Imperial Irrigation District over who owns valuable water rights on the Colorado River. But Abatti apparently isn't ready to throw in the towel just yet.

In paperwork filed in a state appellate court Monday, Abatti's legal team indicated that they wanted to petition the U.S. Supreme Court to take up the matter.

Monday's filing dealt with a procedural matter at the state court level, asking the appellate judges to hold off on closing the case until Abatti's lawyers had time to petition the country's top court for certiorari, the process of requesting a hearing.

"The Abattis will suffer irreparable injury if they are prevented from exercising their right to seek review by the United States Supreme Court and are deprived of that opportunity for further review," one of Abatti's attorneys, Cheryl Orr, wrote in the filing.

Abatti won at the trial level in 2017 when a judge in Imperial County with personal ties to him ruled that farmers in the valley own the local water rights — a major power shift in the water district that is the single largest water user on the river. The rest of the state court system, however, rejected that claim.

The decision was overturned in an appellate court, which then also denied an appeal for a rehearing. The California Supreme Court next turned him away, rejecting a petition that the court hear the matter and letting the appellate court's decision stand.

Abatti did succeed in getting IID's 2013 Equitable Distribution Plan — a document it wrote to lay out how to apportion water in times of shortages — struck down, and IID has since stopped fighting that decision.

If the state court agrees that it is Abatti's right to ask for recourse at the U.S. Supreme Court, then his lawyers will have until Jan. 28 to submit that petition, according to Monday's filing. At that point, they will begin making their arguments for why the matter should be handled at the federal level, what precedent-setting questions will be posed and why they have a chance to win under the relevant federal laws.

The Colorado River Basin touches seven states and Mexico, and the waterway itself is managed by an intricate set of federal laws, court decisions, contracts and other compacts known collectively as the Law of the River. Still, the ranking of priority water users is already defined by state law in the California Water Code, with irrigation falling second to domestic purposes.

In a typical year, the Supreme Court only grants cert — meaning that it agrees to hear — to between 100 and 150 of the 7,000 cases sent its way, or roughly 2%.

Mark Olalde covers the environment for The Desert Sun. Get in touch at molalde@gannett.com, and follow him on Twitter at @MarkOlalde.