LOS ANGELES (AP) — The office of California Attorney General Kamala Harris has asked the state’s Supreme Court to strictly limit a lower court’s ruling that local water rates designed to encourage conservation are unconstitutional.
In a letter to the Supreme Court, Harris’s office said the April decision by the 4th District Court of Appeal contains “unnecessary and overbroad language” that could hurt the state’s efforts to combat the drought. The language echoes earlier comments from Gov. Jerry Brown that the ruling would put a “straitjacket” on local governments in their drought fight.
The seven-page letter was sent to the court last week by Harris’s office on behalf of the State Water Resources Control Board and was detailed in a story Thursday by the Los Angeles Times.
The ruling found that the city of San Juan Capistrano’s practice of penalizing bigger water users with higher rates was unconstitutional. The city has already settled with the plaintiff, the Capistrano Taxpayers Association and the case is out of the courts.
Harris is not appealing the decision but asking the court to “depublish” it, which wouldn’t change the outcome of the case but would mean it couldn’t be cited as precedent in other trial or appellate courts, said Kelly Salt, a legal expert who wrote in support of San Juan Capistrano in the case.
