Legal Framework for the Urban Water Environment

Abstract

The complexity of the legal framework for the urban water environment approaches the complexity of the scientific and technical aspects of urban water management addressed in other chapters, although for different reasons and with different possible solutions. Urban water resources are addressed, to varying and sometimes overlapping degrees, by private, local, state, regional, federal, and sometimes even international law. Some aspects of urban water resources management are governed by common law (legal principles derived from a series of decisions reached by judges in individual cases), while other requirements are dictated by statutes passed by federal, state, or local legislative bodies, or regulations issued by administrative agencies. Separate (although sometimes linked) legal regimes address aspects of water supply, water treatment and distribution, and the environmental and human health and safety aspects of wastewater, storm water, and drainage or flood control. This chapter will outline the major legal doctrines and sources of law that govern or affect urban water management most directly. (Other legal principles, such as those governing contracts, affect urban water use and management more tangentially and largely in the same way as they affect other public and private activities.) Even this brief summary, however, covers a wide range of statutory, regulatory, common law and other legal aspects of the urban water environment. The chapter concludes with a critique of the manner in which the fragmentation of that law and policy impedes efforts to promote more sustainable and efficient uses of water in urban areas.