(Wines&Vines) - The days of “pump as much as you can get” are over in California, and it’s just a matter of time until that reality catches up with growers who rely on groundwater to irrigate in times of drought.
That’s according to Chris Scheuring, an attorney with the California Farm Bureau who is also a member of a family that grows nuts and other crops in Yolo County and for whom “water delivery is near and dear to my heart.”

Scheuring said using groundwater is what saved his family’s crop last year and reassured the audience March 17 at the third WiVi conference that groundwater rights will continue to be respected in the state of California, but “the long and short of it is management is coming.”

That’s because of the passage of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act last year that has applied a layer of state control to the use of groundwater throughout California. The use of groundwater has always been somewhat controlled by the provision of “safe yield” as part of common law that applied to the use of groundwater but Scheuring said the state has put the onus on local authorities to ensure proper management.

Water is a particularly sensitive issue in Paso Robles where the region’s groundwater basin proved to not be as large as previously thought. When residential wells began to go dry a few years ago, the area’s fast-growing wine industry received the blame for dropping water levels. One of the other bills passed into law last year that dealt with groundwater would allow rural residents as well as large growers to form a “hybrid” groundwater district to manage the Paso Robles groundwater basin.

Local management is vital
Scheuring said that district could be the vitally important local group that manages the area’s groundwater and ensures that the resource isn’t directly regulated from Sacramento, Calif. The first deadline of the new law is for a local body to be designated as a “groundwater sustainability agency” by June of 2017. If a region can’t agree on who will oversee its groundwater that gives the state the first opportunity to get involved.

The local agency then needs to draft a plan to sustainably manage groundwater and that plan will be subject to state approval although Scheuring said throughout the new law it repeatedly makes assurances that existing groundwater rights will be respected. Local agencies have about 20 years to get a plan approved by the state.

Scheuring said the groundwater law will be further defined by appellate decisions in courts throughout the state, but it’s the new reality and won’t be struck down. He said he knows some water right holders are seeking court adjudications on their rights “to get out in front” of the new state law but in his opinion working with a local entity on a management plan is the best course in most instances.