The Washington Post reports today that the Bush administration agreed to pay farmers in California for profits lost due to water restrictions placed upon them by the Federal government in 1992 and 1994 in an attempt to save endangered fish during a drought.

Property rights advocates hailed the settlement between the Justice Department and several thousand farmers from five San Joaquin Valley water districts, who lost as much as a third of their water deliveries in 1992 and 1994, when a long drought threatened the survival of the area’s chinook salmon and delta smelt populations. The agreement affirmed a federal judge’s 2001 decision that federal authorities’ decisions to conserve water for the fish violated farmers’ property rights.

The farmers’ lawyer, Roger Marzulla, who served in the Justice Department’s environmental division under President Ronald Reagan, said the government will no longer be able to deny citizens use of their land or water without compensation, even if a species is in trouble.

“The principle has been established that if the federal government does take water rights . . . then the federal government must pay for that water,” Marzulla said in a telephone interview. “It is now on the books.”