WATER MANAGEMENT


call “subsidence,” eventually caused a loss of capacity in three major water transpor- tation facilities. The Fresno to Bakersfield Friant-Kern Canal on the east side of the San Joaquin Valley lost 40% of its ability to move water. The California Aqueduct on the west side of the Valley lost 20%, and a flood bypass channel of the San Joaquin River going north lost 30%.


The impacts created an ongoing inabil- ity to timely deliver water to agriculture and cities, including Southern California, and a threat of flooding of thousands of acres of land. The evidence heavily points the finger at the San Joaquin Valley as ground zero for drought-related impacts on groundwater, and it is the largest contiguous area of critically over-drafted groundwater. But other areas and issues influenced the scope of the new law including coastal seawater intrusion and many groundwater basins with water qual- ity issues.


BREAKING DOWN SGMA


So how does SGMA work? The new law has the following elements:


• Governance is “bottom-up to top- down.”


The law gives responsibility of ground- water management to new local agencies (bottom-up) called ground- water sustainability agencies. Eligibility


California has had numerous groundwater policy and law changes over time. The result is that groundwater management in California has been a journey, not an event.


requires having previous authority in governing water supply, water manage- ment or land use. The new agency has to meet SGMA requirements by certain dates or the state will take over adminis- tration (top-down). The agency can be formed by a single eligible entity or mul- tiple entities, but groundwater basins with multiple agencies must develop a coordination agreement to meet the overall needs of the basin. SGMA gives agencies the ability to register wells, purchase land and services, establish fees (including extraction fees), and assign extraction allocations to stabilize groundwater levels or take other spec- ified actions needed to meet the goals of the law.


• The goal of the law is to avoid “undesirable results.”


Undesirable results include avoiding six things: unsustainable lowering of groundwater levels, unsustainable loss of groundwater in storage, seawater intrusion, degraded water quality, land subsidence and surface water depletion.


• The tool to meet the goals is a prescriptive groundwater sustain- ability plan.


California subsidence map from 2010-2015 22 Irrigation TODAY | Winter 2021


The Department of Water Resources was given the role of devel- oping the prescription for most of the ground- water sustainability plans, as well as con- ducting the technical review of the adequacy of the plans. However, the California State Water Resources Control Board regulates water quality, so they have


responsibility for oversight of the water quality part of the plans. The board is also the agency responsible for enforcing water rights in California. As a result, they are the agency that can ultimately enforce SGMA if the local agencies fail to meet the timelines or their own groundwater sustainability plan. The plan has to have specific goals and proposed remedies to avoid the undesirable results. A key part of the groundwater sustainability plan performance evaluation is the monitor- ing network, which also has a top-down state approval process to assure data consistency. The other key evaluation tool required is benchmarks. Specifically, water elevation thresholds are the benchmarks used to prove that the remedies applied are meeting approved goals.


SGMA has a timetable as to who had to comply when, and the highest pri- ority basins that were declared critically overdrafted by the Department of Water Resources were first. Twenty-one basins were given that distinction, but three were in the middle of court adjudications where the users in the basin sued each other so 18 moved forward. Today we have 260 new local groundwater sustain- ability agencies, and the critically over- drafted areas have complete coverage.


All the critically overdrafted areas submit- ted their groundwater sustainability plans on time in January 2020 and the Depart- ment of Water Resources is still reviewing those comprehensive documents. Many plans exceed 2,000 pages of information when appendices are included. The plans include projects that increase recharge or reduce pumping.


Based on analyses by outside experts, the findings in the area with the most exten- sive area of overdraft, the San Joaquin Valley, are that there is not enough water


irrigationtoday.org


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40