Friday, December 6, 2024
Water
California Reflects on SGMA 10 Years Later
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California water officials, local water agencies and farmers have spent the past decade preparing for the 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, or SGMA, a historic regulatory framework developed to bring overdrafted aquifers into balance by 2040.
Under SGMA, local groundwater sustainability agencies must submit plans that show how the basins will achieve long-term sustainability by limiting overdraft, land subsidence and impacts to drinking water.
Last March, the California Department of Water Resources rejected groundwater sustainability plans for the following subbasins: Chowchilla, Delta-Mendota, Kaweah, Kern County, Tulare Lake and Tule. The action by the state triggered the state intervention process, allowing the state water board to step in to manage the basin if necessary. Basins are in different stages of the process, but in recent weeks, a meeting to consider whether to place the Kaweah subbasin under probation was canceled, while the Kern subbasin is set to appear before the board Feb. 20.
As SGMA implementation takes shape, state and local water officials, lawmakers, farmers and association leaders commemorated the 10th anniversary of SGMA last week at the California Natural Resources Agency in Sacramento. The daylong event featured panel discussions on the past, present and future of the regulation. The keynote address was delivered by former Gov. Jerry Brown, who in 2014 signed three pieces of legislation known collectively as SGMA after the state experienced a multiyear drought that caused some drinking wells to go dry.
In reflecting on when SGMA was passed, Paul Gosselin, DWR deputy director for sustainable groundwater management, said, “There was a sense at that moment that something really, really big was happening.
“The way SGMA is constructed, and the leadership that we’re seeing at the regional and local levels, is a paradigm shift in California,” Gosselin said. “It’s a recognition that the answers to a lot of our resource challenges are not found in Sacramento or Washington, D.C., but across California, where people actually understand the conditions best.”
Brian Lockwood, general manager of the Pajaro Valley Water Management Agency, said his agency’s approach includes use of demand management, an agricultural conservation program, optimizing existing water supply facilities and working to build new facilities. Other goals, he said, include tackling seawater intrusion and doing more groundwater recharge.
Fresno County farmer Don Cameron, president of the California State Board of Food and Agriculture and member of the state’s Environmental Farming Act Science Advisory Panel, said it is important that the state be positioned to take advantage of rainfall during wet years for use in dry years.
“We need to be prepared to capture as much (water) as we can and move it onto land and store it for periods when we go through drought,” said Cameron, known as a pioneer in on-farm recharge, or flooding agricultural lands with water to help restore the groundwater basin. “In the last 10 years, we had three years of flooding and seven years of drought, and we’re seeing more of these extremes as we move forward, so we need to be prepared.”
He suggested improvements to the process to increase adoption of using flood flows to recharge groundwater.
“We need to have better monitoring on the rivers and streams that feed these watersheds, and we need to establish parameters that, when we do hit certain levels, we know that we can go ahead and take water,” he said.
To improve the permitting process for groundwater recharge, Cameron suggested updates to make it more responsive and simple, and to lower costs.
Many agencies try to increase basin capacity by working on groundwater recharge projects, but Gosselin suggested they also start developing demand management programs to reduce groundwater pumping.
“Every agency should, if they haven’t now, start scoping out what a demand management program would look like, even if they don’t need to have one immediately in place,” he said. “You are going to have land-use changes, changes in water supply, surface-water supply, reliability and other factors, including climate change.”
California Department of Food and Agriculture Secretary Karen Ross said few realize that 60% of farms in the state are fewer than 100 acres, and the vast majority are fewer than 50 acres. She called California farms “vital to local resilient food systems.”
“They all contribute to this really healthy, nutrient-dense food that we grow in California that cannot be grown in other states and few other regions in the world,” Ross said.
Researchers studying impacts of SGMA say they anticipate the landmark law will result in the fallowing of 500,000 to 1 million acres of farmland.
Geoff Vanden Heuvel, director of regulatory and economic affairs for the Milk Producers Council, expressed concern about a “tremendous reduction” in market value for farmland. He added, “Most farmers have debt, and they rely on that equity in their land to get operating loans to be able to function.
“When you cut those land values by half or more, which is what’s happening, suddenly even a farmer that was relatively in good shape with his loan to value rates is upside down,” he said. “That puts an enormous amount of pressure on that farmer to probably liquidate.”
Source: Morning Ag Clips
