By Monserrat Solis, SJV Water
As groundwater agencies limit pumping, sometimes in different amounts and ways, farmers with land across boundaries are trying to figure how to operate.
Lakeside Irrigation District Board member and farmer Ralph Alcala brought up a hypothetical at the district’s Oct. 1 meeting: How will groundwater agencies stop farmers from transferring water between parcels, potentially out of one groundwater region and into another?
“So I’ve got a ranch that is in Mid-Kings (River GSA) and I’ve got another ranch that’s in Greater Kaweah (GSA),” Alcala said during the meeting, referring to two groundwater sustainability agencies (GSAs).
Between those ranches, is an underground pipeline that moves water between his parcels.
However, since the passage of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), which created an entirely new layer of government to oversee pumping, those two ranches now sit in different GSAs, as well as different subbasins.
“This is infrastructure that I put in years ago, so now I have to block it off because I can’t use it?” Alcala questioned.
The Lakeside Irrigation District sits within the Mid-Kings GSA borders, which is adjacent to the Kaweah subbasin.
Alcala took a break from harvesting cotton Oct. 6 to explain that he asks these kinds of questions to understand ever-changing groundwater policies.
“It’s overwhelming and it’s frustrating,” Alcala told SJV Water. “I’m just on the board with Lakeside ID and these GSA policies come and they go. I’m just trying to understand these policies myself.”
Currently, Greater Kaweah GSA, which is in the Kaweah subbasin covering the northern half of the flatlands of Tulare County, allows the transfer of groundwater only within that subbasin.
Mid-Kings, which is in the Tulare Lake subbasin that covers most of Kings County, is still ironing out the kinks in its groundwater allocation policy, which dictates how much farmers can pump.
As the allocation policy draft stands now, Mid-Kings farmers would be able to transfer their allocation within Mid-Kings and bordering GSAs. All transfers must be approved by the involved GSAs, be transferred among contiguous parcels and only be delivered to active ag land.
“I would think it would be in partnership with the neighboring GSAs to coordinate, but that is currently being developed,” Mid-Kings Secretary Chuck Kinney told SJV Water.
Kinney also serves as the Kings County’s community development director.
Mid-Kings’ policy is not approved yet. The GSA board must first agree to publicize the draft for public comment before approving and implementing the final policy, Kinney said. The board will meet Oct. 14 at 1 p.m.
Complicating matters further for farmers, the Tulare Lake subbasin, including Mid-Kings, was placed on “probation” by the state Water Resources Control Board last year for failing to come up with a groundwater plan that was protective enough of drinking water wells and would stem subsidence, among other issues.
Probation comes with severe sanctions including requiring farmers to meter and register their wells at $300 per well, report extractions and pay $20 per acre foot pumped. Those sanctions have been held at bay pending the outcome of a lawsuit.
Meanwhile, GSAs in the Kaweah subbasin avoided probation after their plan was deemed adequate, putting them under oversight of the Department of Water Resources.
How those different regulatory agencies might affect individual farmers is anyone’s guess.
When concerns similar to Alcala’s arose among other Lakeside board members at the Oct. 1 meeting, Lakeside Manager Shawn Corely reminded them to call Kinney and to have patience.
“There’s a lot of flexibility built into the Mid-Kings River GSA,” Corely said. “I believe they’re doing their best to play with the hurdles that are given to them from the state.”
“Farmers think of a really common sense approach to all this stuff, but that doesn’t work in all of this stuff. SGMA doesn’t believe in common sense,” Alcala said at the meeting.
