Summary of Expert Services

The principals of JRP Historical Consulting, LLC have worked as historical consultants on expert witness service contracts, historical land and water use investigations, historic preservation studies, and other historical research projects since 1977. The principal partners, Rand Herbert and Stephen Wee, each have twenty-six years of experience as consulting historians. The firm's third partner, Meta Bunse, has fourteen years of experience as a historical consultant, all of them with JRP. The partners have extensive experience designing, researching, and writing a broad spectrum of historical studies under contract to law firms, environmental and engineering consultants, state and federal agencies, as well as various water users associations, municipalities, public utilities, irrigation districts, local water agencies, and private business entities.


JRP's past projects related to water rights investigations have included expert witness services and reports based on extensive historic research for litigation and administrative adjudications of water issues and other land or natural resource related questions. These studies have embraced pre-1914 water rights claims in California and pre-1908 water rights claims in Oregon; Native American and Federal reserved water rights; examination of land patents and acquisition/disposition patterns to assess potential riparian water claims; historical studies of the hydroelectric power industry; water-use priority and due diligence studies in California, Arizona, Oregon, and New Mexico; legislative histories of provisions of the California water code; historical navigation on inland waterways and lakes in California; public easement issues on roads in California, Nevada, and Utah; water resources management histories; and regional settlement, reclamation, and flood histories.


While water resource investigations are a primary focus of many JRP studies, the firm has also undertaken several urban and rural land use histories and corporate lineage studies as a part of preliminary site assessments for real estate transactions and for CERCLA investigations. In the area of historic preservation, JRP is a recognized industry leader in evaluation and nomination of buildings, sites, and engineering works for the National Register of Historic Places and the California Register of Historical Resources; maintenance-management guides for historic buildings and districts; and CEQA/NEPA Section 106 compliance documents.


JRP's research expertise on water issues has been developed over more than two decades of experience in the use of local property records, records of water claims and appropriative water right filings with administrative boards and commissions; federal agency records in the custody of the National Archives and other regional federal archives; private and public record centers and archival depositories located around the nation; federal departmental libraries; map and project files of federal and state regulatory agencies; state archives, state court, and state water agency records; university libraries, special manuscript and map collections; local/private historical society libraries throughout the western United States; and municipal, county, special district and other local agency files and public records in California and other western states.


For a number of our large-scale cultural resources inventories and litigation support services, JRP has constructed, organized and prepared interactive databases to archive, track, and provide ready access to large (> 30,000 documents) collections developed as a part of its, and the project team's, research efforts. These collections are key-coded for document content, historical themes or legal issues, source, author-recipient, date, accession number, and other valuable data. On past projects we have found this archival-computer system an invaluable resource, as have our clients and other members of interdisciplinary project teams.

Organized in 1981, JRP Historical Consulting, LLC has the experience, knowledgeable personnel, and all the necessary transportation, computer, photographic and graphics capabilities and equipment to provide prompt and efficient services for our clients. In addition to the three partners, JRP has a staff of eighteen professional, technical and administrative employees and maintains its office in University Research Park, in Davis, California. JRP has ready access to the University of California's extensive library and information systems, as well as state and federal records depositories and libraries in Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Contact us at:

530.757.2521
Email: webmaster@jrphistorical.com