Leavenworth: But don’t you think a super majority changes the dynamics a little bit? You don’t need to get Republican votes for this, so you don’t necessarily have to add this or that project to try to get a vote from there.
Read about California Statewide Groundwater Elevation Monitoring from DWR.
Saracino: I do, but that’s not neces- sarily a good thing. And I’m a Demo- crat. It depends on how the super majority handles itself with respect to what it does with the bond. I think a bond that falls short in addressing the critical needs of the public, such as addressing groundwater cleanup, is probably not a good idea. I think if we’re going to do a bond, we should do one that gets at addressing a lot of the problems that we have that don’t go to the benefi ciary pays principal like conveyance infrastructure in the Delta. And there are a number of those things, habitat restoration being near the top. Groundwater is another area that needs a lot of assistance.
Read about the Ground water Ambient Monitoring & Assessment Program from the State Water Board.
Pitzer: It’s been my experience that change comes very slowly and very incrementally with groundwater. We have a program of voluntary reporting where the Department of Water Resources collects elevation data, but it’s far away from where some folks say we should be regarding groundwater. On the other hand there are the concerns that it’s a private property issue. How do we get past that?
Saracino: I don’t know. I’ve worked in groundwater for decades now and I wish I knew the answer to that other than to say that someone has to stand up and, maybe with the super majority, pass some laws that make sense given our scientifi c understanding of ground- water and surface water and the fact that they’re inextricably linked. Every other state in the nation seems to get that, although some are more success- ful than others at groundwater man- agement. We are still trying to manage our water supply in a way that refl ects ancient legal thinking on the nature of groundwater as being mysterious and occult; literally that’s what’s in the law. And until we get over that, until
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we have some way to get beyond the paranoia about losing property rights so that we can manage groundwater, all of our water resources in a sustainable way, we’re going to continue to be in the situation that I talked about in the very beginning where we are running a defi cit every year.
Urban areas may be okay because they can generally afford to import water, but groundwater overdraft is going to hurt agriculture in particular in the long run. Groundwater depen- dent ecosystems will also take a hit and there will be impacts to infrastructure through subsidence. So we really do need to get a handle on the ground- water situation. I think it’s, next to the Delta, our biggest issue in California water. Because it’s somewhat arcane and non-sexy, a lot of people don’t like to talk about groundwater or deal with it, but it really is a key issue.
Hanak: In our research, we’ve argued that even with existing authority, the State Water Resources Control Board could do some very useful nudging right now to basically help in this area. And it’s not everywhere, right? It’s mainly the rural areas that have not had so much pressure on their re- sources. It’s pretty much where there’s a lot of ag and where there hasn’t been so much urban development that they had to get their act together because it was just vital for the economy. In Kern County, the Salinas area, various parts of the Sacramento Valley that are facing pressures, they’ve made a lot of progress in terms of getting some local monitoring going. It’s all voluntary still. But there is arguably a foundation that’s much better than what we had 20 years ago in terms of having any idea what’s going on. People talk to each other and do more monitoring, and we’re ripe now in some of the places where the problems are most critical for the State Board to say, “Look, it’s not reasonable. Under Article 10, Section 2 of the Constitution, this is not a reasonable use of water to be over drafting and damaging these basins in this way.”