CANYON LAKE -- The lake should be open to all of the state's residents and not just those who live in the gated Canyon Lake community, a Los Angeles man contends in a lawsuit filed earlier this month that alleges he was barred from fishing on the lake.

The Canyon Lake Property Owners Association, its management company, the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District, the State Water Resources Control Board and Riverside County are named as the defendants in the lawsuit, which was filed Sept. 15 in Los Angeles Superior Court on behalf of Los Angeles resident Mark Bolanos.

The property owners association leases the surface rights to the 500-acre, 15-mile-shoreline lake from the water district for about $900,000 a year.

Bolanos' attorney said Thursday that the county is named in the suit because the Riverside County Sheriff's Department threatened to arrest Bolanos in August if he did not abandon his attempt to fish on the lake from a small boat he was on. The state water board is named, the attorney said, because it has jurisdiction over matters involving water in the state and has failed to enforce the law in this case.

The main contention in the lawsuit is that the lake, according to the state constitution and several statutes in the state code, is a public resource that should be open to all California residents.

Bolanos is asking the court to dissolve the lease between the water district and the property association and to open the lake to everyone. He also seeks undisclosed financial and punitive damages.

Water district attorney John Brown could not be reached for comment Thursday.

But a lawyer for the property owners association said that Bolanos makes a "novel contention" in the suit. However, he added, at the end of the day, it doesn't hold much water.

"The association's position is that there is no merit to any of the allegations made in that lawsuit," attorney Pete Racobs said.

The association has legally owned the rights to the surface of the lake since 1968 per an agreement with the water district and its predecessor, Racobs said. For the property owners association to be stripped of those rights so that the lake can be opened to anybody, he added, a public agency would have to go through the proper legal process to do so.

"What the California Constitution guarantees is that no one loses their private property for public use without due process of law and … being paid just compensation," he said.

But Mark Simpkins, Bolanos' attorney, contends that the district doesn't have the authority to lease those rights to the association.

He points to the state Constitution, which states in Article 10, Section 4, that access to the public of any "navigable water" cannot be denied. The section also states that "the Legislature shall enact such laws as will give the most liberal construction to this provision, so that access to the navigable waters of this State shall be always attainable for the people thereof."

One of the laws Simpkins says applies is Health and Safety Code Section 118530, which states that "All water supply reservoirs of a public agency … shall be open for recreational use by the people of this state."

In 1927, the San Jacinto River was dammed in Railroad Canyon, forming what is Canyon Lake.

Simpkins said that because of these provisions, the rights to recreational use of the lake belong to the people of the state. The State Water Resources Control Board did not pass those on to the water district when it issued it a license.

Simpkins also cited a 1968 opinion by then-Attorney General Thomas Lynch that the surface rights to Dwinnell Reservoir in Northern California could not be sold to a private real estate developer by the local water conservation district.

"(The district) is under a statutory obligation to keep Dwinnell Reservoir open for public recreational uses," Lynch wrote back then. "The district owns no exclusive surface rights or fishing rights since these rights are permanently vested in the people of this state."

Simpkins says that members of the Canyon Lake Property Owners Association are being inappropriately charged for use of the lake through the $900,000 a year in lease payments. And state residents, he also said, are providing taxpayer dollars for millions of dollars in projects meant to improve conditions on a lake they cannot use.

The district and the property owners association are breaching the public trust, he said.

"They want their cake and they want to eat it, too," Simpkins said.

Contact staff writer Jose Carvajal at (951) 676-4315, Ext. 2624, or jcarvajal@californian.com.