Often-criticized SGMA is state’s response to ag’s overpumping of ground water | Opinion

It’s the ten-year birthday of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, known as SGMA.

While the law doesn’t take full effect with balanced groundwater management until 2040, there is already much to like. Its very enactment in 2014 meant California was finally getting serious about the problem of groundwater over-drafting and all the problems that go along with it, such as dry wells and subsidence.

With Gov. Brown’s signature, California joined all the other western states in having some kind of groundwater law. Finally.

Why, then, does SGMA (pronounced sigma) strike fear in parts of the state it is intended to help?

That California has a severe groundwater problem is not news; it has been a problem for over a century. One reason Californians begged the federal government to build the massive Central Valley Project (CVP) in the 1940s was because Valley agriculture was exhausting its aquifers to irrigate fields. In the 1960s, growers in the western San Joaquin Valley, who had not hooked into the original CVP convinced lawmakers to build San Luis Reservoir to get irrigation water to their side of the Valley because their water tables were falling to dangerously low levels.

Yet the groundwater over-pumping crises continued, often because bringing in more surface water meant more land overall could be brought into production. Yet the more growers’ powerful wells pumped out the water, the more shallow domestic wells for poor communities up and down the Valley went dry. Drained aquifers compacted like sponges, subsidence causing towns like Corcoran to sink several feet and damaging the main artery for eastern Valley irrigation, the Friant-Kern Canal.

To get financial support to repair and expand surface water facilities, agricultural leaders and other water users agreed to SGMA. And a new age began.

The first ten years have actually gone fairly well. The law required groundwater subbasins (regions within geographic basins) to form groundwater sustainability agencies (GSAs) – small governments akin to irrigation districts – to design and submit management plans detailing how they would keep their aquifers in balance, no more taken out than put in. Most subbasins have had their plans approved by the state. So why is there so much angst, especially among Valley farmers, over SGMA?

It is more than just farmers not wanting more regulation of essential water supplies or resenting restrictions on using water, traditionally considered a private property right.

By requiring the formation of GSAs, SGMA creates a new layer of government, one growers must pay for whether they want them or not. Management plans are expensive to develop, and agencies expensive to staff and run. And once they run, they may start implementing rules restricting water use at a time when water supplies generally are in decline.

This gets to the deeper reason there is resentment. Since the 1990s, farmers have seen their irrigation supplies reduced to keep more water in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to preserve its ecosystem and save fish such as the Delta smelt. Restrictions from the Endangered Species Act and similar laws have left many farmers with too little water in many years for farming, or very often no water at all.

Now there are similar restrictions on groundwater. For many farmers, groundwater is the reserve supply when there is too little surface water for irrigation, and now it too is restricted. What next? Will courts impose further restrictions, as happened with surface water? How much will farmers have to pay to use groundwater (now being metered) and will those prices keep rising? Will small farmers be able to survive?

Finally, creating groundwater management plans for subbasins often requires competing growers to work together. This is especially difficult if farmers in one part of the subbasin believe that growers in another part are the ones primarily responsible for over-drafting the aquifer in the first place.

While it can be a good thing to push competitors to resolve difference and develop more holistic management, it can also make it very difficult to craft a management plan that regulates everyone’s use equally. Indeed, true equity in water management might require some growers to be more restricted than others.

Failure to work together well has led to weak management plans that do not meet state approval and ends up with subbasins put on parole, and which in turn has led to lawsuits against the state’s “overreach.” We are seeing this now with the Tulare Lake Subbasin and the Eastern Tule GSA. Farmers there are angry, and their recent successes in court suggest they may have a point.

Full compliance is not required until 2040, so there is time to settle differences and re-work plans. While the state may have the authority to place fines on subbasins without approved plans (we shall see what the courts ultimately say), levying them may not be a good idea. SGMA is supposed to be “bottom-up regulation” with local GSAs leading the way.

The state needs to help them lead by providing engineering and hydrological support to over-stressed GSAs. And since surface water is an excellent source of water for recharging aquifers, a few less restrictions on CVP water deliveries might generate some badly needed goodwill.