State Water Board to Hold First Ever Probation Meeting on Tulare Lake

For the first time ever the State Water Resources Control Board will hold a probationary determination meeting under the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. On Tuesday, April 16^th at its Sacramento headquarters and online, the five member State Board will weigh staff recommendations to place the Tulare Lake Subbasin on probation for producing an inadequate Groundwater Sustainability Plan. 

What does this mean? I don’t think anyone knows for sure, beyond if placed on probation the Tulare Lake Subbasin could be immediately fined more than $20 million. How did we get to a place where an unelected board overseeing a bureaucracy can determine a mostly rural community owes it $20 million for submitting a plan it determined wasn’t up to snuff? A plan that, by the way, has never before been required. I’m not sure I have a satisfactory answer but let’s start with a look at the law and its implementation. Buckle up, there’s a trash can full of initials, abbreviations and jargon to wade through. 

Impact

If the State Board determines Tulare Lake Subbasin should go into probation there are going to be some changes. The Tulare Lake Subbasin is located in Kings and Tulare Counties and covers 536,000 acres. As of the 2010 census the population is 136,000 the majority dependent on the ag economy. 

It’s estimated there are 2,300 non-domestic wells in the subbasin. (Domestic wells drawing less than two acre feet per year are exempt from Sustainable Groundwater Management Act [SGMA]) Under SGMA probation each nonexempt well is subject to a $300 fee. That’s $690,000. Meters will be required and the average cost for a meter is $4,000. That’s $9,200,000. In 2022 the State Board estimated 549,716 acre feet were pumped. In November 2023 there was a hearing held in Hanford, California. At that time the fee per acre foot was $40. That means a pumping fee of more than $20 million. When it was all totaled the immediate cost to place the Subbasin in probation would be $31.3 million. 

Evidently the cost was too much to bear during an election year and the $40 per acre foot was reduced to $20 per acre foot. That’s a savings of $10.9 million for a new total of $20.8 million or $153 per every man, woman and child in the subbasin. This is money for the State Board staff to use to take over groundwater management in the subbasin. 

Why SGMA?

Without surface water there is no groundwater. The San Joaquin Valley is a conjunctive use area. Meaning farmland is irrigated with the surface water provided by snowmelt from the Sierra Nevadas. Flood irrigation, where the water is applied directly to the ground soaks in, provides water to the root zone of plants and percolates into the aquifer. This practice kept the aquifer recharged and the groundwater could be pumped during dry times. California has lots of dry times. 

Two thirds of California’s precipitation falls north of Sacramento and two thirds of the usage is south of Sacramento. Two water delivery systems were built to move water from where it was to where it was needed. The federal Central Valley Project (CVP), administered by the US Bureau of Reclamation (USBR or Bureau) and the State Water Project (SWP), administered by the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) are the two main conveyance facilities. 

Both the CVP and the SWP have to move water through the Delta to pumps near Tracy California and then south by way of canals. The CVP moves water down the San Luis and Delta Mendota Canals to provide irrigation for the San Joaquin Valley’s westside. Some water from the San Joaquin River is diverted at Friant California into the CVP’s Friant Kern Canal that supplies irrigation for the San Joaquin Valley’s eastside.

The SWP’s California Aqueduct ends south of Bakersfield and pumps the water over the Tehachapi Range into the Los Angeles Basin. Much of the western part of Kern County receives irrigation supplies from the Aqueduct. This infrastructure was publicly funded but the cost has been reimbursed by the users. The idea farmers get free water paid for by the taxpayers is a myth. A series of water agencies up and down the canals; i.e. Water Districts and Irrigation Districts are the nexus between the government control of the water in the CVP and SWP and the private ag sector. These entities collect assessments and fees from growers living in their boundaries for providing surface water. This money has been used to pay back the capital costs of building the infrastructure and for operations and maintenance of the facilities. California’s water infrastructure is often called a marvel of modern engineering. It was completed when the state’s population was 16 million. It is now 40 million although the population is in decline, in a large part due to an unfriendly government. 

Since the mid-1970s the amount of surface water delivered to growers in the CVP and SWP has been incrementally decreased to the point they now receive about half of the amount originally contracted for. This lack of surface water has greatly changed the ag landscape.

Growers planted more high value permanent crops such as nuts and fruit trees. They also resorted to micro-irrigation instead of flood irrigation. This raised the efficiency of the water used to more than 90-percent on average by placing the water directly on the root zone. However, micro-irrigation doesn’t provide recharge. And the combination of less surface water for recharge and the need to keep trees alive year round has forced more pumping of groundwater. This increased pumping and decreased surface water supplies has resulted in overdraft of the aquifer. Something had to be done to prevent widespread and permanent damage to the aquifer.

SGMA

The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act was actually two bills passed in 2014. Written by two urban legislators; Assemblyman Roger Dickinson of Sacramento Assembly Bill 1739 and state Senator Fran Pavley of Agoura Hills, Senate Bill 1168. Dickinson went on to become the Policy Director for Civic Well, a Non-Governmental-Organization. More about NGOs later. Pavley, a former teacher went back to academia. 

Like a volcano rising from the sea to create a new island, the passage of SGMA set into motion the formation of an entirely new layer of government in California. This new government is comprised of Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSA) tasked with writing and implementing Groundwater Sustainability Plans (GSP). 

California is divided into hydrological basins and further divided into subbasins. These divisions generally follow geological features such as watersheds. Of the state’s 515 subbasins,18 are in the San Joaquin Valley. Each of these subbasins were required to form GSAs by 2017. SGMA was sold as a law that provided for self-control, where the people in the impacted area could decide how to set GSA boundaries and write their own GSP as each area has unique situations. 

All the Groundwater Sustainability Agencies were formed by the 2017 deadline and the Groundwater Sustainability Plans were written and submitted by the 2020 deadline. The subbasin’s conditions are reported annually and the GSP is reviewed every five-years. A subbasin has until 2040 to become completely sustainable, meaning no more water is pumped than is recharged on average.

There are areas within the subbasins that are not covered by a water or irrigation district and have no surface water delivery contracts or infrastructure. These areas are known as “White Areas” because on colored maps of districted lands they show up as blank on white paper. The only thing worse than decreased surface water deliveries is no surface water deliveries. 

The agricultural economy is cyclical. Money is borrowed to finance the inputs needed for the crop such as seeds, fertilizers, pest prevention, fuel for the equipment, tractors and such. At harvest after the crop has been sold the bank loan is paid off and hopefully there is a profit left over. Without an additional source of water beyond pumping, the lending is tightening up considerably. 

As an example an acre of mature almond trees requires two and half to three acre feet of water to yield a crop. This amount of water isn’t carved in stone but only an estimate. Soil conditions, tree spacing in the orchard and location can reduce this amount. So, for illustration an acre of almonds needs three acre feet per year. If a grower is in a irrigation district can get one acre foot of surface deliveries another two acre feet is needed. If a GSP limits pumping in that area to one acre foot, the trees still need an additional acre foot to produce a viable crop. If the grower is in a White Area that only allows one acre foot of pumping the grower is now two acre feet in deficit. This water deficit severally limits a farmer’s ability to farm. 

Since the reduction in surface supplies in the 1970s and now a reduction in groundwater usage under SGMA, it’s estimated a much as one million acres of the highest producing farmland on earth will have to be fallowed. 

Groundwater Sustainability Plans

The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act required the Dept. Water Resources to prioritize subbasins into very low, low, medium or high based on groundwater conditions. All of the San Joaquin Valley is in a medium or high priority subbasin and much of it is listed as critically overdrafted. SGMA requires each subbasin to submit a GSP detailing how by 2040 the six undesirable results will be avoided: 

• declining groundwater levels, 
• reduction of groundwater storage, 
• water quality degradation, 
• land subsidence, 
• seawater intrusion, 
• surface water depletions. 

In 2020 all but one subbasin had submitted its Groundwater Sustainability Plans to Dept. Water Resources on time. DWR reviewed the plans and sent them back for revisions as needed. If after revisions DWR still felt the plans didn’t adequately address solutions to avoid the six undesirable results they were kicked over to the State Board to determine if the subbasin should be placed on probation. 

State Board, Staff & NGOs

If the State Board determines a subbasin’s GSP is inadequate it can put it in probationary status. State Board staff has called for placing the Tulare Lake Subbasin in probation. So have the NGOs Civic Well and the Community Water Center. 

It’s informative to note the Community Water Center has an amended Technical Assistant Agreement with the State Board to extend the completion date by four years and increase funding by $4,767,836 for Project #33449. This project was originally funded in 2020 to, “. . . provide technical assistance to develop, fund, and implement capital improvement projects and community engagement in communities.” 

The communities are located in Tulare County. Community Water Center was founded by State Board member Laural Firestone in Tulare County. It has been emphasized again and again staff will not determine the Tulare Lake Subbasin’s probationary status. Only the board will reach that conclusion. 

The five members of the State Board are appointed by the Governor. It is by and large a thankless task. The amount of eye glazing, minutia to the point of stupor this board has to wade through justifies the close to $200,000 per year they pull down. Some of the NGOs in the state have filed racial grievances against the State Board when they didn’t receive the results they wanted. You can’t win for losing. 

But it isn’t about the Board members’ comforts or the desires of staff and NGOs. It’s about the unintended consequences of a law doing more harm than good. The community in the San Joaquin Valley that depends on agriculture for its livelihood is at least 80-percent Hispanic. The very community much of SGMA was designed to assist and not harm.