Farmland photo by Melissa Sweeney

California water officials today recommended putting several San Joaquin Valley groundwater agencies on probation for failing to develop an adequate plan to stop over pumping their severely overdrafted aquifers.

The Tulare Lake groundwater basin — which provides well water to residents and hundreds of square miles of dairies and farms, including land owned by agricultural giant J.G. Boswell Company — is designated as critically overdrafted, which dries up wells and causes land to subside.

The State Water Resources Control Board staff’s recommendation is the first time that state officials have moved to crack down on inadequate local plans for groundwater pumping in California. Thousands of wells in the Central Valley have already gone dry. The 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, prompted by well outages during a long drought, requires each basin to develop plans to curb overdrafting of the basins. 

The staff recommendation isn’t the final word for this largely agricultural region in Kings County, which is home to 146,000 people and the cities of Corcoran, Hanford and Lemoore. The State Water Resources Control Board will collect public comment and hold workshops leading up to a hearing and vote next April on the recommendation, released in the draft staff report today. 

The five local groundwater agencies — controlled largely by landowners and agricultural interests — were required to submit their plan in 2020, and the state Department of Water Resources warned them in late 2021 that it was not sufficient to protect the basin.

Paul Stiglich, general manager of the South Fork Kings groundwater sustainability agency, said he hopes that it will have worked out issues identified in their groundwater plan before the public hearing and that the state board will give them the breathing room to comply. 

“Allow us to succeed, and don’t hamper us. That’s what probation would do — probation would throw a cold bucket of water on the whole issue,” said Stiglich, who noted he was speaking on behalf of his own agency, and not the entire basin. 

The other agencies — the El Rico, Tri-County Water Authority, Mid-Kings River, and Southwest Kings groundwater sustainability agencies — did not immediately respond to requests for comment. 

“We need these basins back on track by 2040, not to be at the starting line four or five years late,” said Natalie Stork, the water board’s program manager for the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. 

The current plan “will allow substantial impacts to people who rely on domestic wells for drinking, bathing, food preparation, and cleaning, as well as impacts to critical infrastructure such as canals, levees, and the aquifer itself within the subbasin,” the staff wrote.

Last winter, floodwaters that filled the once-dry Tulare Lake bed submerged homes, chicken farms and crops. But they are unlikely to make a dent in the vastly depleted groundwater stores.