Not to come in and tell them exactly what to do about it, but to say: “You’ve got, three years, fi ve years, to fi gure out how you’re going to fi x this and come back to us with a plan.” I agree a lot with the folks on the ground, and I think our Southern California and Silicon Valley examples really dem- onstrate well that local management can really work well. We’ve got some of the worst groundwater management experiences in California, but we also have some of the best.
Saracino: I totally agree with you, and Joe Sax pointed to the fact that the State Board has this jurisdiction if they would only use it. (Editor’s note: In 2002, University of California, Berkeley law professor Joseph Sax prepared a report for the State Water Resources Control Board that said the Board possesses and should exercise authority over ground water, either under the public trust doctrine or under the waste and unreasonable use doctrine, when the extraction of that groundwater might have an adverse impact on instream values.) But the State Board, quite frankly, hasn’t had the cojones or political desire perhaps to exert their existing authority in the minds of a number of people. And I don’t know what it’s going to take to get them to do that. So I think we need to explore other options while putting pressure on the State Board to address the groundwater issue.
Davis: We’ve got the same recommen- dation in the Delta Plan in terms of looking at groundwater management in terms of improving management information. Then there’s a recom- mendation that looks at which regions of the state are dependent on the Delta and the overlap with regions that have a groundwater overdraft problem and, given the vulnerability of those communities if there’s a disaster in the Delta, what they should be doing to plan ahead.. We want to encourage better water planning in that context. Then the last level recommendation addresses the unsustainable ground-
January/February 2013
water water management and the need for Board action.
Using constitutional provisions,
the Water Board has the ability to step in to address unsustainable manage- ment. I think part of the problem for them is simply funding. I mean bottom line, what resources they have, how they’re dedicated. If you really are going to move the ball forward, there’s going to have to be some allocation of resources to the State Water Resources Control Board to be able to initiate the kind of adjudicatory process that Anthony is talking about, which is intended to be supportive of commu- nities getting their act together. But recognize that it’s hard, particularly when it comes to groundwater and fi guring out who has what water rights, to move forward.
Saracino: I think funding is part of it, but quite honestly, when they received the Joe Sax report way back a decade or so they just put it on the shelf and didn’t even attempt to implement any of the recommendations that were in there. I do think there needs to be some political wherewithal for them to be able to take action. And I think if they had that, there might be some means to acquire the funding that they need to do what they need to do. One last point on this, just to take it back to the Delta: I think the reason a conveyance solution to the Delta is so important is that it provides for fl exibility in operations. And that gets back to groundwater. In order to take advantage of all the groundwater space that we have, especially in the San Joaquin Valley, we can’t just rely on fl oods, because fl oodwater doesn’t percolate into groundwater that quickly. You need to manage the water for percolation into the groundwater basins and if we add additional surface storage and fl exibility in operations associated with a larger conveyance facility we would be in a much better place to take advantage of ground- water banking and conjunctive use in the San Joaquin Valley. So all these things are interconnected as I think
“How much are we accounting for the anticipated impacts of climate change on our water supply? It’s constantly talked about but are we doing enough to actually plan for and have contingencies in place?”