The California Department of Water Resources is sponsoring legislation to fill in the gaps where Gov. Gavin Newsom’s executive order failed to protect drinking water wells during the most recent drought. The agency has teamed up with one of the Capitol’s most aggressive lawmakers for reforming state water laws.
Under fierce opposition from agricultural groups and local water districts, Assemblymember Steve Bennett of Ventura has unsuccessfully pushed for two years to set limits on approving new groundwater wells. Bennett is again on the offense with his latest bill and is blasting “powerful interests” for blocking attempts to reign in subsidence.
“People have used the complication of groundwater to block—over and over again—appropriate legislation by the state of California and just confuse people,” said Bennett, when advocating for Assembly Bill 2079 in its first committee hearing recently. “[The bill] actually incentivizes [water managers] to get groundwater subsidence under control, which is a win for everybody.”
Ahead of the irrigation season in 2022 and at the height of the extreme drought, Newsom issued an executive order aimed at stemming the tide of community wells running dry. The additional requirements for permitting new wells led to months of delays. Counties issued moratoriums while they sought to interpret the order, provoking frustrations among farm groups.
A DWR assessment of the order issued in March found that it provided critical direction to local agencies but did not fully address the complexities of well permitting or align with the goals of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), and it did not ensure compliance.
According to the department, the continued subsidence and well permitting in vulnerable areas “indicate that in many respects, the EO failed to achieve its goal.” Survey respondents claimed that groundwater sustainability agencies (GSAs) were unwilling to comply with the order, adversely impacting small, economically disadvantaged farmers.
The report noted that nearly 2,000 wells went dry over the two years following the order, while the land sank by as much as a foot in parts of the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys.
The department recommended improving public transparency with pending permit applications and setting limits on well spacing and depth. It also called for exempting public wells and low-priority basins from the standards.
DWR has worked with Bennett to plug those recommendations into AB 2079. The measure would prohibit a local agency from approving large-diameter wells within a quarter mile of domestic systems and in areas of significant land subsidence. It considers high capacity to be wells greater than eight inches in diameter with pumps capable of drafting more than two acre-feet of water annually.
Asm. Steve Bennett, D-Ventura“Imagine trying to regulate and ration 10 straws dropping into your soda, while more big straws are dropping in randomly, with no guidelines on their impact,” said Bennett. “Literally, private equity firms from outside the United States were racing in during our worst drought in a thousand years and getting dozens of large-capacity wells permitted with no review of their impact on neighboring wells or land subsidence.”
The Newsom administration typically collaborates with legislators through private meetings or inserts policy proposals into budget trailer bills to ensure passage. In a rare move, however, a state official testified in support of Bennett’s bill.
Paul Gosselin, DWR’s deputy director of SGMA, has been the point person in the state’s oversight of groundwater sustainability plans and is widely respected for collaborating closely with local agencies, farm groups and other stakeholders.
“When you have large ag wells near shallow or vulnerable wells, they do interfere and cause them to go dry,” said Gosselin, who acknowledged the governor’s order fell short by “trying to be a little bit too specific on a very complex issue.”
He detailed one instance when the state spent millions of dollars on a community well only to see the county issue a new drilling permit for property across the street, leading to immediate impacts on the domestic well.
While there has been significant progress over the last decade in establishing groundwater agencies and setting SGMA plans in action, less has been done to prevent subsidence, Gosselin said. He warned that prohibiting new wells in those areas is the “minimal first step” in the state’s overall strategy and that “there's going to be other harder decisions and actions needed,” since it is leading to billions of dollars in infrastructure damage.
“It just makes common sense that if you're digging a hole and that's causing problems, the first thing you should do is stop digging,” added Bennett.
The Southern California legislator stressed that the moratorium on new wells would only apply to areas with subsidence and that the bill would exempt small and urban water retailers as well as groundwater banking projects.
But several trade groups are pushing for more amendments to further soften the provisions. Bennett objected to such amendments imposed on his 2022 bill, which would have added further regulatory review for new wells and was also based on Newsom’s executive order. Frustrated, he pulled the measure ahead of its final vote in the Assembly and filed the same legislation months later at the start of the next session—without the committee amendments. That bill later stalled in a Senate committee, though Bennett could revive it later this year.
Agriculture and irrigation districts are raising many of the same red flags over AB 2079 as they had with the previous legislation, charging that SGMA must remain local.
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“SGMA’s intention is to address negative impacts of groundwater overdraft, including permanent subsidence, and to do so on a holistic and local level,” said Brenda Bass, a policy advocate at the California Chamber of Commerce, who shared the concerns of dozens of groups in opposition. “This bill's singular focus on new well permitting goes against this holistic view.”
Bass called it a mistake to assume that adding more wells would alone cause subsidence, without accounting for water use or other factors. She worried about unintended consequences, such as stranding investments in groundwater banking projects if landowners cannot install the wells needed to retrieve their stored water.
Bass shot down Bennett’s assertion that his bill would only go after large pumpers. She pointed to the State Water Resources Control Board and its decision last month to place a GSA plan on probation for the first time, emphasizing that the agency focused on wells that could yield 500 acre-feet per year.
The bill’s two acre-feet provision "doesn't seem to be targeting these kinds of nefarious actors we're hearing about,” said Bass. “It seems to be targeting anyone who's trying to use their land for production.”
Like Bass, the Community Alliance with Family Farmers, which often sides with progressive water reforms, was reluctant to support the bill over fears that the spacing rule wouldn't be feasible for small growers.
Kristin Sicke, who manages the Yolo County Flood Control and Water Conservation District as well as the county’s GSA, has a more detailed list of complaints with the bill. She argued the blanket provisions in AB 2079 would ignore the varying hydrologic conditions among basins throughout the state and any good-faith efforts to comply with the governor’s order.
Sicke said her GSA has worked with stakeholders for the past two years to develop a robust procedure for reviewing well permits, investing more than $125,000 in the process. She worried the bill would undermine that effort as well as the credibility and trust developed over the last eight years under the rollout of SGMA.
“We’ve participated in hundreds of community meetings, doing our best to educate and empower stakeholders to get involved and to assist us in defining local sustainability,” she said. “This bill derails progress on important planning and implementation efforts.”
In response, Gosselin asserted that “this is not a SGMA bill” and reasoned that it would have been just as applicable 15 years ago. He said the bill aims to buy time for GSAs to deal with subsidence in their plans.
“As they go through that, it seems counterintuitive to have another county agency allow more groundwater extraction in the areas that need to be dealt with,” he said.
He shared that DWR plans to guide GSAs through that process by issuing a set of best management practices later this year.
The arguments swayed committee members, who were confident Bennett would work with the opposition to strike a compromise, and the measure passed along party lines. The bill now resides in the Assembly Appropriations Committee, one of two fiscal gatekeepers that next week will cast critical votes on potentially costly measures—killing or weakening perhaps hundreds of bills to help the state balance a massive deficit.
Correction: This article previously stated the Community Alliance with Family Farmers opposed the measure, but their position was "support if amended."
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