A group of commercial fishermen won a potentially significant court ruling in the seemingly endless battle over California’s water supply and the volumes of water pumped south through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

A federal appeals court last week ruled that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which delivers water from the Delta via the federal Central Valley Project, violated federal environmental law by renewing a series of two-year delivery contracts for south-of-Delta agricultural customers. The court said the bureau should have given “full and meaningful consideration” to the idea of reducing the amount of water available for delivery in the contracts.