WATER SECURITYA Simmering Revolt Against Groundwater Cutbacks in California
In 2014, California legislators, focused on groundwater’s accelerating decline during a prolonged drought, passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. New agencies find making sustainability plans is hard, but easier than persuading growers to accept them.
In 2014, California legislators, focused on groundwater’s accelerating decline during a prolonged drought, passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. Its imperatives: keeping groundwater levels sustainable by 2040 and keeping control of groundwater in local hands. Both goals are now in limbo.
As the state endures yet another prolonged drought and state water managers have balked at approving plans covering the basins at greatest risk – the vast majority in the San Joaquin Valley – more growers in a few of the new local groundwater agencies are in revolt at the new rules that will curtail access to the water they once took for granted.
The law requires these new agencies to develop a plan to keep their groundwater basin levels sustainable by 2040 and avoid negative outcomes like dry domestic wells. Now the DWR has called for improvements in the plans of 11 critically overdrafted San Joaquin Valley basins. Local agencies have sent revised plans back to the state and await DWR’s determination, due this winter.
Why were the plans rejected? In careful bureaucratic language, DWR made it clear that, whatever the plans’ merits, agencies failed to meet two key goals: First, when defining sustainable criteria and minimum groundwater thresholds, they didn’t consider enough the key public and private groundwater uses like public supply wells and domestic wells. Wells dried out in record numbers this summer. Second, there was little information about what continuing subsidence (the term for land above declining aquifers deforming downward) would do to important infrastructure like roads and canals if pumping exceeded historic lows.
The discussions between the state and local agencies over sustainability plans are complex, but the bottom lines are: what controls are imposed and by whom. Who takes responsibility for ensuring groundwater will be there for future generations? Who sets pumping limits to protect domestic wells and local streams? Whose decisions on enforcing the new limits will force growers to leave land fallow and maybe go out of business, crippling rural economies?
Will it be the new local groundwater management agencies, or the state’s Water Resources Control Board, or perhaps a judge?
