City Council Agenda and Packet 1985 02 05

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To put the matter in further perspective, the current market value of the 29 plus shares of Goodhue is approximately $15,000. The City has had many 'arm's length ' transactions in the past year or so on those water rights and the yield of those water rights is approximately half--an-acre foot per share. So we have 14 or 15 acre feet of water per year which is available. That quantity of water would be inadequate, in my opinion, to irrigate the Coal Creek Memorial Cemetery at its ultimate development. Similarly, it would be inadequate in and of itself to irrigate the City 's municipal cemetery as it would be expanded under the plans that are applicable to it. So what we have here is a situation to whom will the water be available in the short term for a phased kind of application. Mr. Brock ' s professionals may disagree with me categorically, but in my view, the water rights that are an issue here are only adequate to irrigate probably the first phase of their planned cemetery even if the City makes them completely available to that group and does not compete with them for beneficial use of the water. - The original annexation on this property was completed in December 1976. The water rights were required to be dedicated to the City as a condition of the annexation agreement. The stock certificate was surrendered to the ditch company, was cancelled, and a new certificate was issued to the City in January 1917. The City has owned these water rights continuously since January 1977 and has paid all the assessments levied by the Ditch company on those shares since that time. We have not yet received one drop of wet water benefit from these shares because we have not yet completed the appropriate water court transfer proceedings. Those are the proceedings that we filed a little bit more than a year ago. So the situation is somewhat of an anomalous one in my view - in that the City had title clearly. And the City has paid all the assessments on the shares for approximately $ years. But the position of the cemetery developers as I understand it is that there was some arrangement made or to be made when the City agreed to buy the open space land, in which those shares would not be available to us, but to them instead. And as I said that is the question to be answered. I don't find that clearly set forth in the documents, but it is a matter to be argued. So from my point of view, we are proceeding routinely with a transfer and 6