The California Department of Water Resources plans to issue new regulations requiring local groundwater sustainability agencies to take immediate actions to prevent more land from sinking due to overdrafting aquifers.
DWR is drafting a set of best management practices to guide local groundwater sustainability agencies, or GSAs, through the regulations and the complex and widely varying process.
State and federal administrations have invested billions of taxpayer dollars into fixing conveyance canals in the San Joaquin Valley over the last decade. Yet the land has continued to sink along critical water delivery systems as more farmers turn to pumping to account for reduced or delayed surface water allocations.
The Newsom and Biden administrations are sensitive to the growing problem after financing both the canal repairs and the infrastructure for shoring up drinking water wells in adjacent communities, according to Alex Biering, policy advocacy director at the California Farm Bureau.
“This is part of what's driving DWR to get very aggressive in how they look at how subsidence is managed by the GSAs,” said Biering, in a discussion at the farm bureau’s annual meeting on Monday.
Paul Gosselin, DWR’s deputy director for SGMA, stressed to Agri-Pulse in an interview that the upcoming regulations will maintain local control with implementing plans under the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. The new rules will require GSAs to shore up their monitoring, develop a better understanding of the hydrologic modeling, detail basin vulnerabilities, gather more information on the extraction wells and home in on the infrastructure impacted by subsidence, according to Gosselin. DWR will impose a certain set of actions and a timeframe for those GSAs.
The regulations are likely to result in additional costs for growers. The GSAs at issue will have to “either get some alternative water sources in there or start to eliminate the extraction of groundwater in these areas,” he said. Despite the top-down direction to GSAs, the state does not want “a cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all” standard for basins and expects to see locally driven solutions.
DWR plans to begin the process in the first quarter of 2025, with the release of a draft document featuring a set of best management practices and scientific findings to help GSAs comply with the regulations. Gosselin and his team will work closely with the agencies and interested parties to refine the document as needed. DWR plans to host three public workshops on the regulations, in addition to an approval process through the California Water Commission.
Paul Gosselin, DWRGosselin said the need for regulations arose as the department, in reviewing hundreds of groundwater sustainability plans, found many of the approaches did not conform to SGMA’s requirement to minimize or eliminate subsidence — even with the approved plans. Along with wells going dry, the high rates of subsidence led to the creation of SGMA in 2014.
“We've seen that repeatedly during dry years, where increasing rates of dry wells and increasing rates of subsidence continuously have occurred,” said Gosselin. “These are in many cases very disastrous and have costly impacts.”
DWR has taken a softer approach to addressing the problem by issuing guidance documents to assist agencies in developing and implementing plans. The topics have covered monitoring, managing water budgets and establishing criteria for rebalancing aquifers along SGMA’s 20-year horizon, according to Biering.
At the Water Education Foundation’s annual summit in October, DWR Director Karla Nemeth outlined a series of new studies the department is rolling out that will paint a more detailed portrait of the impacts of climate change and SGMA on the water system. One study will focus on infrastructure and the need to fix canals as part of climate-adaptive management, while another assesses the amount of surface water available for recharge in the valley.
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DWR has five watershed studies coming out that will analyze tributaries from the headwaters to floodplains. Nemeth said the insights into the looming climate impacts will enable the state to reoperate those systems to maximize the supply and benefit recharge. That gets the Army Corps of Engineers’ attention, since the Water Resources Development Act now has a provision on water supply being the corps’ responsibility, she explained. Last week House and Senate committees struck a final agreement on reauthorizing the act, with provisions on leveraging federal infrastructure to increase the water supply.
Nemeth expects to release the studies by next summer and hopes they will “show how all these pieces need to work together.”
At the same time, DWR is embarking on a five-year review of approved plans, starting with the most critically overdrafted basins. It has deemed six of those inadequate, often for failing to stem subsidence damage. The State Water Resources Control Board has put one subbasin on probation and canceled a hearing for another, after GSAs fixed issues in their plans. Yet the subsidence issue remains.
In its semiannual report on groundwater conditions in October, DWR noted active land subsidence in the Sacramento River, San Joaquin River and Tulare Lake regions. During the extreme drought of 2020-22, when State Water Project allocations dropped to 5% of the contracted amounts, subsidence accelerated in the Central Valley in the same way it did during the 2012-16 drought. After a pause in 2023 due to a wet winter and spring flooding, DWR expects the rates to increase again in the next dry period, unless long-term extraction is reduced.
Biering hopes the new subsidence document and regulations will be a more amendable alternative to the Legislature attempting to tackle the problem.
Earlier this year DWR took the unusual step of endorsing a measure to set aggressive limits on new wells. Assembly Bill 2079 proposed to prohibit groundwater agencies from approving large-diameter wells within a quarter mile of domestic systems and in areas of significant land subsidence. It considered high capacity to be wells greater than eight inches in diameter with pumps capable of drafting more than two acre-feet of water annually.
“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 Assemblymember Steve Bennett, D-Venture, when advocating for his measure in committee. “[The bill] actually incentivizes [water managers] to get groundwater subsidence under control, which is a win for everybody.”
Alex Biering, California Farm BureauTestifying in support of the bill, Gosselin 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.
After strong opposition from farm groups and water interests, a Senate committee voted down the measure.
Gosselin told Agri-Pulse that AB 2079 was just one aspect of the subsidence issue and was directed at local governments permitting new extraction wells, while the new regulations will focus on GSAs. He pointed out that farmers stand to benefit by mitigating subsidence, since damaged canals lose water, leaving less for irrigation.
The destruction also undermines the case for investing in more infrastructure repairs. In 2018 state and local partners paid about $11 million to raise the Corcoran levee in Kern County after it dropped seven feet. By 2023 it had already returned to that level, effectively erasing all progress from the repair project and propelling the state to commit another $17 million to once again raise the levee.
“It's nothing more than a cancer on the landscape,” said Gosselin. “It’s impacting roads, high-speed rail, gas infrastructure. It's costing billions of dollars.”
He warned that even if the state could immediately halt subsidence, the impacts will continue for decades.
He urged farmers to “start working with GSAs right now, well before we come out with any guidance document or [best management practices] or regulations,” and said the solutions are not complicated. He lauded the Westlands Water District for taking an aggressive approach to subsidence that has already led to significant success.
“These are topics that we're going to work through with the growers and groundwater sustainability agencies,” said Gosselin. “They're difficult ones, but we're going to work shoulder to shoulder to get through this.”
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