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Cal. WAT § 8609

This is the official text of Cal. WAT § 8609, part of California’s Water Code — governs water rights and water resource management.

Not legal advice. This page reproduces the official text of a government statute for reference only. Laws change, and how a statute applies depends on your specific facts. For advice about your situation, consult a licensed attorney in your state.

Official statutory text

(a) The board may designate floodways throughout the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers drainage to control encroachments in, and to preserve the flow regimens of, floodways for the purpose of protecting public improvements, lives, land use values, and improvements created in reliance upon historical flooding patterns.

(b) As used in this part, “Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers drainage,” or equivalent language, means all lands currently and historically drained by the Sacramento River and the San Joaquin River and their tributaries and distributaries.

(c) This section is declaratory of existing law.

Status: in_force · Read it on the official government site

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About this page: Statute text is reproduced from official government publishers via the Open US Law dataset (Vaquill AI, snapshot v2026.08, CC BY 4.0). Primary legislative text like this is public domain under the government-edicts doctrine (Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, 2020). We link every section back to its official source so you can verify it independently.