By Lois Henry, SJV Water
A pair of bills that arose out of the ongoing fight over groundwater in eastern Kern County’s desert have come to very different conclusions – one awaiting the Governor’s signature and the other tabled indefinitely.
Both bills address a process known as groundwater adjudication, in which a judge decides how much water is available in a basin and then assigns pumping rights to various users.
These cases can go on for up to 10 years as courts sift through rights going back more than 100 years and try to find and engage with every pumper in the disputed region.
Assembly Bill 1466, placed on Gov. Newsom’s desk Sept. 23, attempts to alleviate some of that leg work by having groundwater sustainability agencies (GSAs) provide a report of all pumpers to the court.
A companion bill, Assembly Bill 1413 was “ordered to the inactive file” on Sept. 9. That bill would have required judges to use groundwater amounts – known as “sustainable yield” – established by GSAs rather than litigate that issue independently.
Sustainable yield refers to how much groundwater can be pumped each year without causing negative consequences such as drying wells, or subsidence.
A basin’s sustainable yield is the foundational figure used in groundwater plans under the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), which requires locals to bring aquifers into balance by 2040.
“As far as I’m concerned, the state is saying SGMA is dead,” said Kern County Supervisor Phillip Peters who also chairs the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority.
Without AB 1413, judges can decree an entirely different sustainable yield from what’s in a basin’s groundwater plan, Peters said. That basically voids all the work that went into writing the plan.
He understands that groundwater agencies can’t assign water rights “…but if the state is going to make us spend all this money and time to come up with a groundwater plan based on sustainable yield, that should at least be considered by the courts, otherwise what’s the point?”
By leaving sustainable yield up to the courts, large pumpers know they can wait out the SGMA process for another 15 years, then go to court and tack on another decade, or more, before they have to reduce pumping, Peters said.
In the eastern Kern desert, the Indian Wells Valley Water District sued for adjudication after the state approved the groundwater authority’s plan, which includes stringent pumping allotments and a $2,130-per-acre-foot pumped beyond those allotments.
The water district, which mostly serves the town of Ridgecrest, disagrees with the groundwater authority’s sustainable yield figure.
Groundwater authority studies set sustainable yield at 7,600 acre feet per year while a water district study shows up to 14,000 acre feet a year can be safely pumped out.
That number isn’t set in stone, said David Saint-Amand, president of the water district board.
Once a judge determines what the region’s sustainable yield is, they will continue monitoring groundwater levels and adjust up or down as they learn more, he said.
What’s not in dispute is the region’s demand of about 20,000 acre feet.
The groundwater authority wants to bridge the gap between sustainable yield and demand by building a 50-mile pipeline to bring water from the California Aqueduct in the Antelope Valley. The line will cost $200 million, according to the groundwater authority, though the water district says the cost will be much higher.
The groundwater authority instituted the $2,130-per-acre-foot fee to raise $50 million to buy water on the open market to ship in the pipeline.
Progress on funding for the pipeline is now uncertain with the demise of AB 1413, Peters said.
The groundwater authority received notice it would get some federal funding for the pipeline through the Water Resources Development Act, but must come up with matching funds, which it hoped to gather through grants or a bond.
“It’s hard to bond for that kind of money with this (adjudication) creating so much uncertainty,” Peters said. “It puts us in a place where we can’t comply with SGMA.”
The groundwater authority took another blow earlier this summer when the judge hearing the adjudication ruled against how authority had divided up the region’s groundwater.
The authority had allotted about 7,000 acre feet a year of the region’s sustainable yield to the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake. About 2,000 acre feet was used on base with the remaining 5,000 acre feet used by the water district for the Navy’s off-base population, which lives mostly in Ridgecrest.
The court ruled in July that the Navy couldn’t claim water not used on its property, so cut its right to 2,008 acre feet per year. The other 5,000 acre feet is, as yet, unclaimed.
The groundwater authority said the ruling opens the door for private interests including Meadowbrook Dairy and Searles Valley Minerals to lay claim to that water, potentially to the water district’s detriment.
“If the water goes to Meadowbrook or Searles, then the water district will have to buy water from them because it will have to come up with supplies to serve all those people,” Peters said.
Saint-Amand said the district is content to hear from the courts.
“We’d like our rights identified and not rely on allotments from the groundwater authority that we don’t think make much sense,” he said.
