California recently celebrated 10 years since the enacting of the State Groundwater Management Act, the landmark legislation known by the acronym SGMA. The law mandated that overdrafted groundwater basins must come into balance over the next 20 years. That is when groundwater extraction must not exceed the amount aquifers are replenished. Most of the state’s overdrafted basins are in the San Joaquin Valley.
Local agencies are now working to craft groundwater management plans that state regulators will accept. As aquifers continue to decline in the southern San Joaquin Valley, farmers and town residents alike are struggling to come up with groundwater sustainability plans that the Department of Water Resources (DWR) will certify. Otherwise, the state will take over—a fate that nobody wants.
Tulare County is a case in point. The plan that the Kaweah Sub-Basin Groundwater Sustainability Agency came up with in 2022 failed to protect domestic wells and disadvantaged communities. Some 40% of domestic wells, more than 1,500 of them, could dry up under the plan. Fifty-three public supply wells would also go dry, and drinking water contamination could worsen.
The Community Water Center (CWC) was a major force in creating the SGMA. Now it has taken a leading role in bringing those issues to the table, to ensure that the groundwater plan will serve all residents.
Senior Policy Advocate Tien Tran has been applying her environmental studies degree from Yale and her experience in state government to help local residents participate in the planning process of Kaweah’s groundwater plan. She says it has been a struggle to find equity in decision-making.
“You’re at this point where a couple of plans have not been approved by the state, and they’ve been going through the probationary process. And you also have plans that are getting updated, but on the ground there’s still a lot of concerns around water quality, contamination wells going dry and the cost of that.
“So even though 10 years later we have SGMA in place, not all the local agencies have stepped up to the plate and really thought about how drinking water should be protected in this process of groundwater management.”
Another concern was how well groundwater sustainability agencies (GSAs) would engage the public. The state placed a high priority on bringing all impacted residents to the table. The CWC circulated a guidance document trying to make sure that the process was meaningful and inclusive. Tran says in practice the results were uneven.
“There are huge gaps in it, but we are at this point where, you know, DWR has been providing funding and technical assistance to agencies to provide community engagement. Some major concerns that we have are things like having translation at meetings, making sure that the materials are prepared in a way so that they are accessible to community members, [and] that they are not using a lot of jargon and technical language when explaining these things.”
Working residents, she adds, also have difficulty even attending agency meetings or following the latest developments. “I think the local agencies should work with community-based organizations like Community Water Center and Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability to make those connections happen in a more proactive manner, instead of just expecting people to show up at these agency meetings that are held during the day or don’t have a Spanish translation option.”
Tran acknowledges that the process has improved over time, with stakeholders listening to all concerns, and collaborating toward a common goal: “I would say my relationship with the Kaweah Sub-Basin has evolved a lot. It has become a lot more collaborative where we can work together and talk through issues and highlight really serious water quality concerns that have to be addressed.”
Valley residents have another formidable ally in Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability. A powerhouse of attorneys, experts and policy advocates, they are deeply involved in seeking environmental justice for underserved and disadvantaged communities.
Dr. Nataly Garcia has been studying and working on SGMA issues for nearly eight years. Her Ph.D. thesis focused on implementation of the landmark groundwater law. She has developed expertise on overdrafted Valley aquifers in the region, from Merced to Kern counties.
Garcia recounts that groundwater sustainability plans began to take shape in 2018 when water advocates began to provide feedback on what those plans should look like. “When these plans were really shaping up there had already been thousands who had been left without water. And we were finding that a lot of these plans were going to put thousands more at risk of having their systems dewatered.”
As local groundwater agencies crafted plans, Garcia noticed that some were not considering the overall environmental concerns of residents and small farmers, “Sadly, what we were finding was that a lot of agencies were unwilling to really take that responsibility which they had signed up for. I think a lot of them were mostly focused on making sure that the agricultural economy wasn’t impacted.” By 2023, state regulators cracked down and started putting some basins on probation.
Facing a state-mandated probation, the Kaweah Sub-Basin groundwater agency revised its original plan to meet the DWR standards. A January meeting with state officials was cancelled in light of those changes.
Tran says the groundwater sustainability plan has improved a lot: “I would say they made a lot of progress, and I’m hoping that other agencies can look to the Kaweah and take some of their best practices and incorporate [those] into their plan, so that they don’t have to go through this process of not getting approved, potentially going on probation and then having their local control removed.”
Disagreements within some of the groundwater basins, Garcia observes, have complicated planning and led to divisions. “The Kern groundwater authority is probably the prime example of massive splintering where you had a lot of different irrigation water agencies kind of decide they don’t want to be part of this bigger umbrella. Most of the time, the disagreement is about how you are going to handle the overdraft and who is going to pay the bill for that.”
There are disagreements in the Tule Sub-Basin as well. According to Garcia, the dispute is around land subsidence. “For most areas of the state, we have inelastic land subsidence, which means once the land collapses, it is essentially gone. Some of the worst land subsidence we have in the San Joaquin Valley is in the Tule Sub-Basin.
“You have seen some of the lawsuits around the Friant-Kern canal where land subsidence around canals is quite dangerous and potentially extremely expensive basically for everybody, including the taxpayer.”
Disputes around data are also complicating the planning process. Who has the most accurate accounting of the amount and nature of the aquifers. Garcia says that is where the DWR helped advance the planning process.
“I think that is a part of the state intervening, making sure that data is consistent across these plans so we have a holistic picture of what’s going on. You have some sub-basins that have multiple plans, and then these multiple plans are all depending on different data that can sometimes be inconsistent with one another. So even really basic things like data have been an issue with some of these sub-basins.”
Agriculture in the region uses 91% of the groundwater with urban use at 7%. Regional groundwater levels are rated by the state as much below normal or at an all-time low. Those levels have dropped considerably during the 20-year mega-drought the state has experienced.
Tran describes what happens to water quality in depleted aquifers when the Valley has a run of dry years. “We always try to make the connection between drought and overpumping. As the water table drops, it can have a higher concentration of contaminants. It can lead to people drinking even more contaminated water.
“Another scenario is that overpumping can also move around different contaminant plumes toward more shallow domestic wells depending on what the pumping practices and groundwater flows look like.”
Finding the sweet spot of equitable water use is the critical element and challenge of the SGMA, according to Garcia, “We’re not in the business of trying to make agriculture go away. I think for us, we just want to figure out where the balance is here. I don’t know why we don’t shift the way we’ve done agriculture in the past to be able to reach some kind of sustainable use of groundwater.”
Recharging aquifers has become a key element in groundwater sustainability plans. But the relentless warming of the planet and especially California makes it difficult to bring the system into balance.
Garcia considers recharging an inadequate solution. “We don’t have that water. Even in really heavy rain years we can only capture so much. It is also not realistic that I can recharge my way out of this problem. It implies you are leaving something behind if you’re just capturing the water to then use it later that year. You are just banking it.”
Water quality and access is also a concern on California’s central coast. Even though the Pacific Ocean is next door, it does not mean there is an ocean of water underground. Fresh water is in relatively short supply all along the state’s coastline. Ironically, the rising sea, induced by global warming, is causing contaminated groundwater to move closer to the surface.
Tran explains that the Salinas and Pajaro valleys are dominated by industrial farming. “The Central Coast is known as the salad bowl of California. That’s where you get all your greens. That’s also where you get all your berries.
“The soil is very overused. For example, even within one year you might get four crop rotations of berries or four crop rotations of lettuce and spinach. And what that means is a lot of fertilizer use. There’s a lot of nitrates and different pesticides going into the groundwater.”
Another major issue near the coast is called groundwater rise. Rising sea levels can potentially make groundwater move upward and have contaminated water layers come closer to the shallower domestic wells. People living near industrial areas are especially vulnerable.
“We work in Salinas Valley and Pajaro Valley and have a couple of different technical assistance projects where we’re trying to think about how we can consolidate them to nearby systems as part of their long-term solution, so that they don’t have to just manage the well on their own,” says Tran.
California’s water managers need to adopt a holistic perspective on the nature of that resource. According to hydrologists, it is one very large, very complex system from mountain snowpack, through flowing watercourses, into reservoirs and canals, and ultimately sinking underground. It has not been handled that way but rather in silos as separate entities. Garcia believes this is a drawback for achieving a balanced approach to water use.
“This is one entire system. We’ve just chosen to regulate it separately. And honestly, I think that has been a disadvantage to the system, that we have decided that surface water and groundwater are somehow separate.
“Even when boundaries for these GSAs are created, they do not follow hydrology. They follow political lines. I just don’t think that’s a great way of getting us to a healthier system if we continue to act as if we can impose these hypothetical boundaries onto a system that just doesn’t work that way.”
Climate change impacts such as global warming and more tempestuous weather events featuring atmospheric rivers and drought are the new normal. How well groundwater management works in the future must take those factors into account. That is not a simple calculation when drafting groundwater plans, as Garcia indicates.
“A lot of these water budgets are based on average scenarios, like an average year. But because of climate change that’s just not real for California. We don’t have average years, it’s just not our normal.
“If the law required you to actually take into consideration our extremes, you would have people moving toward management a lot sooner. I’m really curious how the state is going to reconcile this difference between surface and groundwater rights and management.”
In some ways, the SGMA process has been a work in progress. Garcia notes that sometimes state guidance is a one-size-fits-all approach. “The state could have done a much better job of providing especially local oversight as to how these agencies were engaging all different users of groundwater. It is one of those things that the law did not totally think through when it was passed.”
Water marketing is another element in the groundwater equation that is being discussed in the state, but Garcia is skeptical. “I think we will start to see more and more water markets pop up in the next five years. Generally, we do not support groundwater markets because we know how markets work, and there is far too much room for inequity.
“If you are going to do a market, it has to be hyper localized. And even then, you might still not be able to avoid impacts. I always think it’s a slippery slope when you commodify a natural resource.”
Garcia concludes that for groundwater management to be successful, there should be changes to the state’s surface water rights. “As somebody who has been studying water for quite a long time, I think folks in the groundwater sector could do everything right, but if we don’t fix things on the surface water rights it is just going to be even harder for them to get it right on the groundwater side.
“Realistically, I think you will have some sub-basins that are going to be pretty successful. And I’m willing to bet that the more successful ones are going to be those basins that have higher surface water rights than others.”
It is estimated that a million acres of San Joaquin Valley cropland could be fallowed to bring aquifers into balance two decades from now. Kaweah’s groundwater plan has been revised, and the state is moving toward acceptance. If they craft a plan that works for all stakeholders, Tran says it could be a model for other groundwater agencies in the Valley to follow toward a sustainable future.
Tran emphasizes that safe, affordable and accessible water benefits Valley farmers and communities alike. For groundwater sustainability plans to meet the state’s requirements, hard decisions will have to be made about agricultural land use. The CWC is calling for widespread groundwater monitoring to make sure aquifers are not being depleted.
“[The] Community Water Center has been really emphasizing actual demand management,” says Tran, “making sure that these local agencies set out allocations and have a better understanding of what their water use is. And then also, making sure that they have pumping restrictions especially on the larger industrial agricultural pumpers.
“Because this pattern of overpumping can’t keep happening if we want communities to thrive and still live in the San Joaquin Valley.”
