Mono Basin Protection

The fight over Mono Basin's water is one of California's longest-running environmental battles, stretching back to 1941, when the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power was first granted rights to divert water from Rush Creek, Parker Creek, Walker Creek, and Lee Vining Creek — the four streams that sustain Mono Lake and its surrounding ecosystem. Decades of diversions drew the lake down dramatically and starved its tributary creeks of the flows their fisheries depended on, setting off a legal fight that reached the California Supreme Court in 1983, produced the State Water Board's Decision 1631 in 1994, and finally arrived at a negotiated settlement in 2013 after CalTrout, drawing on California's public trust doctrine and Fish and Game Code Section 5937, helped bring LADWP to the table. It took until October 2021 for the State Water Board to give final approval to the settlement's implementation, folding it into the first consolidated water rights document in California history.

Now the real work is underway: LADWP is modernizing its water storage infrastructure, including upgrades to Grant Dam, delivering environmental flows down the four tributaries, and helping fund restoration across an estimated twenty miles of fisheries and wildlife habitat, all while building in protections meant to help the ecosystem withstand a changing climate. CalTrout continues to work alongside the Mono Lake Committee and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to monitor how the fishery responds, with the program's first comprehensive monitoring report completed in August 2023. For the communities and visitors who depend on the Eastern Sierra's water and its world-famous trout waters alike, the settlement represents a rare case where an 80-year fight over who gets the water ended with a plan for both people and the ecosystem to have enough.