Governor Signs Groundwater Management Laws

Governor Jerry Brown has signed a package of bills to regulate California’s stressed groundwater supplies and tighten oversight of water at a time when groundwater levels are shrinking in the third year of a crippling drought.

“This is a problem that’s been around, it’s a real problem and with climate change it’s going to get to be a bigger problem”, Brown said after the signing ceremony Tuesday morning in Sacramento, “we have to learn to manage wisely water and energy and land and our investment. So that’s why this is important, and just signing the bill today is only the beginning.”

“I think our yields are down a little bit but its going to be a great vintage”, says Santa Barbara County wine grape grower Kevin Merrill about this year’s harvest.

Merrill relies on water from the San Antonio groundwater basin that covers most of the nearby Los Alamos area.

Its one of several basins in Santa Barbara County in serious trouble due to the drought.

“I think we all understand that we need to work together to work on our water supply”, Merrill says, “I think its a hugely complex issue and we need to focus on sustainability and that means utilizing the storage facilities that we have, using that water wisely.”

Merrill says the groundwater basin management legislation signed by the Governor is excessive, over-reaching regulation.

“The problem with it is it was hurriedly put together in the Legislature that ended the session, we’re very concerned about what that means”, Merrill says, “does it create new regulatory agencies that are going to watch and see what we do with water, does it broaden the powers of the ones that are already there , who’s going to pay for the whole thing, is it going to be put on the backs of farmers?”

The package of bills, which take effect January 1, 2015, target areas where groundwater basins are being depleted faster than they are being replenished.

It gives local land planners two years to create a groundwater sustainability agency which then has up to five years to develop a plan for managing wells and pumping.

All groundwater plans must achieve sustainability within 20 years of adoption, and local agencies managing them must report to the State Department of Water Resources every five years.

The State Water Resources Control Board can step in and develop plans for communities that fail to comply with the new rules.

“This process that is set in motion by the law is going to take many, many years”, Governor Brown said Tuesday, “I just want to caution people, it isn’t all about laws and bills. It’s about actually implementing the laws we have on the books, and finding out how they work and how they don’t work.”

“There’s a lot of human decisions, arguments, working together and sometimes not together all up and down the state”, Brown said, “but today we do set in law a framework that has been resisted for a long, long time, since before my father was even Governor, so there it is, we’re making progress.”

“One of our huge concerns is the over-reaching of the bills”, grape grower Kevin Merrill says, “what does that mean for private property owners, what does it mean for those agencies to come in and shut your wells down for some time? Its very scary to not know what’s out there.”

Merrill says future groundwater basin management needs broader, more comprehensive solutions.

“The problem is if we focus all of our efforts on controlling how much water we use and do very little about encouraging new water storage”, Merrill says, “to figure out how we can be sustainable, how can we utilize recycled water, desal, how do all those things fit into the picture?”

“There’s over 515 groundwater basins in California, all very complex, and you try to put a one-size-fits-all approach on governing how to use those is going to be very, very difficult”, Merrill says, “we need our urban folks to understand that we can use desalination, we can use recycled water for some things, as our population grows and our weather patterns change, we need to all work together to come up with solutions and not put farmers out of business.”