A decade after lawmakers pitched the initial groundwater legislation, the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act is turning into reality. The local agencies are in place, the plans drafted and the first steps of implementation are happening—the start of a tough road ahead for agriculture.
“The review of the plans and developing the plans was the easy part,” said Paul Gosselin, deputy director of SGMA at the Department of Water Resources (DWR). “Now it's going to get hard.”
In a panel discussion at the annual summit of the Water Education Foundation last week, Gosselin stressed that SGMA will continue to be an iterative process going forward and no approved plan will look the same in the end.
He shared that DWR will soon release guidance documents to assist local groundwater sustainability agencies (GSAs) with filing annual reports and undergoing periodic evaluations at least every five years. DWR will use those touch points to assess whether the agencies are still on track to balancing the critically overdrafted aquifers by 2040 and the others by 2042. The department can drop basins to an incomplete status if they veer off track at any time, even if the initial plans were already vetted and approved.
Gosselin is noticing that subsidence will be a stubborn issue to resolve in the years ahead.
“Frankly, right now there is not enough action in all the basins to deal with the huge sinking that's going on,” he said. “Particularly with just the residual subsidence, action needs to happen now.”
Matt Hurley, McMullin Area GSAIn some basins, groundwater levels correlate closely to water bodies on the surface. This issue along the Scott River watershed has come to a head at the State Water Resources Control Board, which is considering regulations to protect native fish populations. DWR plans to issue guidance for GSAs managing that interconnection.
The depletion in surface waters is “going to cause basins to do a rethink and probably result in either the need for more demand reduction or recharge,” according to Gosselin.
He also anticipates that broader inter-basin issues will come to play in the next three years, once GSAs have set their initial sustainable management criteria. The SGMA laws allow for one basin to preclude another from reaching its goals, which tees up some difficult discussions ahead that evolve into negotiations and eventual actions, he explained.
Another looming issue with SGMA is that the Public Policy Institute of California projects that as many as a million acres of farmland in the San Joaquin Valley must go out of production to meet sustainability.
Such a prospect has put more attention on one promising tool for balancing the supply and demand: water markets. The California Water Commission issued a report to DWR with a set of policy recommendations to ensure equity and fairness in trading groundwater credits. The state budget has etched out some funding for DWR to examine those concepts, and Gosselin is planning to roll out state guidance later this year. He warned that “an unregulated market, especially in this environment, can cause a lot of mischief and be counterproductive.”
“There's starting to be more energy and action around that as a management tool,” noted Ann Hayden, vice president of climate-resilient water systems at the Environmental Defense Fund. “EDF has long believed that trading can play an important role in providing increased flexibility when there’s scarce water supplies. And we have to have the sideboards in place to protect sensitive ecosystems and communities.”
Matt Hurley added that establishing rules on trading “is not as simple as it sounds.” As general manager of the McMullin Area GSA, Hurley began talks last week on initiating a rulemaking process for trading within the basin boundaries. The GSA had tapped into Bureau of Reclamation grants to analyze the potential and found that it could help farmers “get to the finish line” in an economically satisfactory way when they come up short on their water supply.
Yet even trading within one water district presents problems, since water conditions often vary from end to the other, he explained. To manage such markets, data is critical, which means installing meters on wells. Hurley had to convince his farmers to register their wells, submitting key information, such as locations and points of contact, on more than 1,100 wells in just four months to meet a SGMA deadline.
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“Now how is that possible?” said Hurley. “Well they're lining up to do it so they can prove that we're not using near the water that the models say we are.”
From the start of the planning process, Hurley framed the SGMA discussions with growers as a joint effort in the decision making.
“You have to treat them like your partner,” he said. “You wouldn't lie to your partner. You wouldn't keep stuff from your partner, if you wanted to be a successful business or in marriage.”
The McMullin Area GSA is the only agency out of six in the Kings Subbasin without any surface water. The area had always pumped without any restrictions, which led the other GSAs to assign it 75% of the pumping cutbacks after it was discover that the subbasin had an overdraft problem of 120,000-acre-feet. Yet Hurley is a firm believer that his GSA, along with the whole subbasin, will reach the SGMA goals.
To cover the cost for water use efficiencies and for improving the water supply, the GSA raised the price of water in 2018 to $19 an acre-foot. It was a high price then, but some landowners still called for $30, seeing how much work would be needed to shore up the supply. Hurley noted that prices today have shot up to as much as $250 in some places and the conversation has considerably improved as the public awareness of SGMA has grown. Two GSA board members had voted against the 2018 increase but none voted against raising it to $90 this year.
He stressed that the costs will prevent any landowners from involuntarily retiring their land, though many will make the business decision on their own to repurpose the “crappy” land for solar projects, habitat restoration or groundwater recharge efforts.
“But we're not about for one minute to give up on this process,” he said. “We're going to be successful.”
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