California Groundwater Management: Are Adjudicated Basins the Answer?

Hard to think about water shortages here in western Oregon today - here is a current picture of my yard as the snow is coming down - perhaps as much as 6 inches (15 centimeters) in the mid-Willamette Valley. For us, that amount will shut the place down and make Atlanta seem like Boston when it comes to managing snow. Oregon State University is closed today. I have an inquiry from a reporter to discuss the California drought. I called her back but no return yet; I guess she found someone else. So it's time to move on to the title of this post.

I've gone on (and on...and on...) about the lack of regulation and statewide oversight of California's groundwater (my two most recent posts are 24 November 2013 and 10 September 2013). I focus on the Central Valley because of its subsidence and sustainability issues.

But there is some management of California groundwater by local agencies/ordinances or adjudication by court decree. Why, there is even a section on groundwater management on the DWR WWW site! What has prompted this post is my curiosity about California's adjudicated groundwater basins. There are 22 (or 23) of them.

Here is a DWR pub Adjudicated Groundwater Basins that is a few years old:

Download Water_fact_3_7.11 

A map of the basins:

 

Two recently-adjudicated basins are not shown on the map: the Santa Maria Valley Basin and the San Jacinto Basin. Both of these are in Southern California, where virtually all these basins are except the Scott River basin.

Interesting fact from the publication alluded to above:

The basin boundaries are defined by the court. Some boundaries do not include the entire basin as defined in Department of Water Resources Bulletin 118, California's Groundwater.

Huh? That's what happens when judges and lawyers decide boundaries. Not good, folks, not good at all.

Another interesting fact: no adjudicated basins are in the Central Valley, where irrigators are now turning on the groundwater pumps to supplant meager surface water supplies because of the drought. This is the region where land subsidence has reared its ugly head again, where it has been known for about 75 years.

What this means is that subsidence and unsustainbable pumping will be exacerbated by the drought because irrigators, unregulated and unmanaged by the state, will pump more groundwater. Why? Because they can.

Adjudicated basins? They might not help the Central Valley. What is needed there is valley-wide groundwater management and oversight, with groundwater basin boundaries discerned by hydrogeology, not political or legal considerations. 

 Dream on...

"Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment." - Unknown

Comments

[Elaine Hanford]

The following website says 22(but the listing has 23)adjudicated "basin" in California and the year adjudicated by the courts (only one by a federal court). Also lists the agencies who manage ground water with juristictions that overlie them.

http://www.water.ca.gov/groundwater/gwmanagement/court_adjudications.cfm

Garret Harding was right....overpopulation and greed dictate what happens rather than how critical resources should be used.

[Deirdre Des Jardins]

When I looked at the 100,000 plus acres of land in Westlands Water District that had been retired from irrigated production, almost all of it had groundwater that was either so severely depleted or contaminated with salt and boron as to be almost unusable.

Since the groundwater is the dry year supply, it makes the land subject to fallowing any time there is a reduced allocation. There are similar problems in the western Tulare Lake basin, where another 100,000 acres has been converted to grazing land.

State land maps show that a total of 350,000 acres has been retired from irrigated production in the San Joaquin Valley in the past 25 years.

[PAUL MILLER]

…California Groundwater Management: Are Adjudicated Basins the Answer? …. Adjudicated $mell$ an awful like he who has the gold rule$ … $ounds like a perfect set up for the legal profession to choose up sides and let it play out in court for years … decades … in the meantime water supply is depleting … the “people” go into this fight likely paying all the legal costs of both sides … the playing field is grossly unfair and unlevel…