Matt Hurley isn’t one to gloss over what he doesn’t know about California water.

The Fresno-area attorney has served as general manager, executive officer, consultant or a board member for at least a dozen agricultural water districts and local resource conservation agencies across the San Joaquin Valley.

What’s more, he was on an advisory committee that helped draft one of the most consequential pieces of water legislation in California history: The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act of 2014, commonly referred to as SGMA, that for the first time regulated a much-overdrawn resource critical to the state’s economy and the livelihoods of its residents.

But in 2019 when Hurley was charged with implementing SGMA in a critically overpumped area of Fresno County, he felt unarmed. Many farmers had asked him how likely it was that groundwater sustainability could be achieved.

“I have no idea,’ Hurley recalled saying. “I don’t know how many wells there are. I don’t know where they are. And I don’t know how much they’re pumping.’”

As the new general manager of the McMullin Area Groundwater Sustainability Agency, Hurley quipped, “that’s not a good place to start.’”

“I don’t know how many wells there. I don’t know where they are. And I don’t know how much they’re pumping.”
~Matt Hurley, recalling the uncertainty of many water managers as they began to draft groundwater sustainability plans.

Hurley was hardly alone in the dark. The dozens of locally governed Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSAs) forming across California following the enactment of SGMA on Sept. 16, 2014 had little data on their groundwater use, let alone the number and location of wells. They were starting from scratch.

Crafted during the severe 2012-2016 drought, SGMA was designed to bridge such gaps in knowledge and avoid “overdraft,” that is, pumping more groundwater than is replaced by rainfall, deep percolation of irrigation water and other means.

The law charged the GSAs with assessing the groundwater conditions in their districts and drafting plans to attain sustainability by 2042, or even earlier, by 2040, for critically overpumped areas.

The GSAs had to map out ways to curb declines in groundwater levels that can dry up domestic wells, draw seawater into coastal aquifers and cause land to sink – damaging canals, roads and levees.

Today, 10 years after then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed SGMA into law, most GSAs have had their plans approved by the California Department of Water Resources while a handful whose plans didn’t pass muster are facing potential intervention by state regulators.

Overall, water policy experts deem the early stages of SGMA implementation a success.

One of them, Richard Frank, an environmental law professor at the University of California, Davis, said he didn’t expect so many GSAs would have their sustainability plans completed and approved so soon.

“That’s one of the success stories over the last decade,” Frank said. “A lot of GSAs stepped up and took it seriously and did a substantive job.”

The Hard Part Begins

Wade Crowfoot, California’s natural resources secretary, said it is important to recognize both the progress that has been made and the greater challenges that lie ahead.

The GSAs must start putting their Groundwater Sustainability Plans into action, he said.

“This is where the rubber meets the road.”
~California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot on putting groundwater sustainability plans into action

“It involves finding ways to invest in and maximize groundwater recharge and identifying how annual groundwater use is going to be reduced,” Crowfoot said. “For me, this is where the rubber meets the road.”

Nowhere is California’s groundwater crisis more acute than in the San Joaquin Valley, one of the world’s most productive agricultural regions with more than 4 million irrigated acres.

To meet the requirements of SGMA, valley growers may have to switch to less water-intensive crops, install meters to measure their groundwater use or build systems that capture floodwater and store it underground.

These changes in groundwater management, along with increasing uncertainty in surface water deliveries to the valley, will inevitably force some growers to take some farmland out of production, said Cannon Michael, who is involved with several groundwater-dependent irrigation districts as chair of the San Luis & Delta Mendota Water Authority’s board of directors.

“You’re definitely going to see some land that has to have some other purpose, whether it be solar or some projects underway to return the land to productive native habitat,” Michael said.

The Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) estimates that at least 500,000 acres of irrigated cropland will need to come out of production by 2040 to end overdraft in the San Joaquin Valley, where agriculture employs 340,000 people and generates $24 billion in annual revenue

The amount of farmland retired will depend in part on the occurrence of droughts, which are expected to become more severe and prolonged with climate change.

“To some extent, it’s going to depend on what the skies bring us,” said Ellen Hanak, a water policy expert with the PPIC. Dry years exacerbate groundwater overdraft, she said, while wet years allow for capturing more water and replenishing aquifers.

Last in the West

The road to sustainability would not have been so long had California followed other states in the arid West in regulating groundwater years ago.

Groundwater is a vital source of irrigation and drinking water for urban and rural communities across much of California, and a critical component of the state’s struggling freshwater ecosystems.

“We were really laggards.”
~UC Davis’ Richard Frank on California regulating groundwater

During an average year, California’s 515 groundwater basins and subbasins provide about 40 percent of the state’s water supply. During dry years, groundwater contributes up to 60 percent or more of the statewide annual supply and serves as a critical buffer against drought and climate change. 

About 83 percent of Californians depend on groundwater for some or all of their water supply.

California is typically at the forefront of managing natural resources, but it was the last state in the West to regulate groundwater.

“We were really laggards,” UC Davis’ Frank said.

Until SGMA became law in 2014, California was still the Wild West on groundwater use with landowners and water districts pumping whatever amount they needed to irrigate crops and serve communities.

The 2012-2016 drought was a turning point. The vast fallowing of cropland and the results of overpumping groundwater – drying of domestic wells and aquatic habitat and damage to canals from sinking land – prompted the state to rethink its water supply strategy.

“It quickly became apparent in the run-up to 2014 that we had a lot of overdrafted groundwater basins,” Frank said.

The McMullin Area GSA that Hurley runs covers part of the Kings subbasin, which has one of the largest overdrafts in California. The 981,000-acre agricultural area spanning parts of Fresno, Kings and Tulare counties is on the state’s “high priority” list of 46 basins with the most economic and environmental resources at risk from overpumping.

Growers in the McMullin area specialize mostly in grapes, almonds and pistachios. The region is almost entirely dependent on groundwater, even in wet years. There are no rivers to tap or access to the state or federal water projects that transport snowmelt and rainfall to other Central Valley farms. 

SGMA put the McMullin Area GSA and the subbasin’s six other groundwater agencies on the hook for 120,000 acre-feet of overdraft. Those other agencies blamed McMullin-area growers for most of the overpumping, Hurley said, and assigned his agency responsibility for eliminating 75 percent of the overdraft – 90,000 acre-feet.

Hurley balked at the cutback, knowing it would devastate farming in his district. But no one had data to contest the apportionment; no one measured their groundwater use.

Hurley also knew farmers generally don’t take well to any suggestion of water metering.

When he first mentioned registering the wells to find out where they all were, he said, “All that got me was, ‘Talk to my hand. No registration, no meters.’ So, I said, ‘Talk to my hand. They’re all going out of business.’”

The McMullin Area GSA conducted an outreach campaign on the merits of metering under SGMA, telling farmers that measuring their groundwater use would assure them they wouldn’t have to retire any cropland because of the groundwater law.

“We said, ‘Look, folks, if you want to make a stand in this SGMA world, you have to know right down to the ounce how much water you’re producing.’ That’s just a simple given.”

Gradually, Hurley said, after a debate spanning more than two years, growers realized the statistics could work in their favor.

The Merits of Metering

The McMullin Area GSA’s board of directors adopted a groundwater metering and monitoring policy in 2021 and more than 90 percent of the landowners registered their wells within four months, Hurley said.

The agency won a $2.8 million U.S. Bureau of Reclamation grant to cover about half the cost of metering, telemetry and the first year of monitoring.

Hurley estimates that more than 1,000 wells will be metered by the end of this year.

Next year, as the data on groundwater use starts rolling in, Hurley and other groundwater managers in the Kings subbasin will have a firmer basis for apportioning each GSA’s responsibility in remediating the region’s overdraft.

“That will be the first data point,” Hurley said. “It won’t be some algorithm that engineers put together.”  

McMullin is among more than 70 GSAs across California that have the state’s blessing to execute their sustainability plans.

Most GSAs see recharge as the primary strategy for achieving sustainability and list plans for boosting stormwater capture for storage underground.

But over time, the agencies will need to focus on reducing groundwater demand and finding ways to shrink irrigated acreage without sacrificing productivity, the PPIC’s Hanak said.

The state has a $90 million Multibenefit Land Repurposing Program to help landowners switch to crops that use less water or convert some irrigated cropland to solar energy development, groundwater recharge basins or wildlife corridors. The program has provided grants to multiple GSAs to incentivize such transitions.

“This is intended to give landowners options that wouldn’t exist otherwise,” said Ann Hayden, an expert in climate-resilient water systems at the Environmental Defense Fund, which coordinates the program’s community outreach and technical support along with the nonprofit Self-Help Enterprises.

Demand for the land repurposing grants far exceeds supply, she said. The program will receive another $200 million if California approves Proposition 4, the climate bond, on the November election ballot.

Banking on the Future

Don Cameron, who manages the 6,000-acre Terranova Ranch in the McMullin Area GSA, saw the need to replenish overworked aquifers well before SGMA became law.

In 2010, he and engineering consultant Philip Bachand began installing a system to capture winter floodwater overflowing the nearby Kings River. An innovation grant from the Natural Resources Conservation Service helped pay for the recharge project.

They started by flooding a few hundred acres of wine-grape vineyards and open land. They eventually found they could also inundate almond and pistachio orchards without losing crop yield.

“We were really kind of cutting edge,” Cameron recalled. “Everyone was concerned about killing a crop by putting that kind of water on it.”

Cameron and Bachand then partnered with the Kings River Conservation District to expand the floodwater capture system. It took another grant and about a decade to complete that work, Cameron said, and by last year, they were able to draw more than 18,000 acre-feet of floodwater to replenish aquifers on the farm and use in place of groundwater to irrigate crops.  

Cameron’s capture-and-store system now has 350 acres of recharge basins.

“We saw that our water table increased by 15 to 20 feet below these fields,” Cameron said.

Over time, he hopes to expand his system to 20,000 acres.

But there’s a catch.

Redirecting floodwater to recharge basins requires agencies to navigate a state permitting system that isn’t nimble enough to adapt to sudden changes in weather.

The McMullin Area GSA and other parties have filed for a permanent right to take floodwater off the Kings River, but the State Water Resources Control Board has not decided whether floodwater is available. The issue in the long-running dispute is whether all the water in the river has already been appropriated to other users or whether seasonal floodwater is a different category and available for distribution.

Cameron previously had a deal with the Kings River Water Association to take floodwater, but that agreement was canceled due to the legal dispute.

As a result, Cameron could not take advantage of the parade of torrential Pacific storms that drenched California in January and February 2023.

The situation changed the following month when Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order allowing the use of floodwater for recharge and storage. Cameron said that made it easier to continue his work even with the rights to the water uncertain.

“It allowed a lot of water that wouldn’t have otherwise been captured to get back into the aquifer while helping to protect downstream communities from flood risk,” he said.

One potential solution to the McMullin district’s groundwater crisis may come from a simple twist of geology.

“We knew it was like a giant bank vault.”
~Matt Hurley describing a vast empty aquifer for potential groundwater storage

Before agricultural development, much of the area was swampland. Groundwater naturally rose above the aquifer and overflowed onto the land.

In the early 1900s, the swamps were drained for agricultural use and the once-flush aquifers became a huge, empty underground vault. 

“We knew that it was like a giant bank vault,” Hurley said. The question was simple. “What if we replace the 70 years’ worth of water taken from down below and did a water bank?”

Hurley figures his agency has about 800,000 acre-feet of storage he can sell to water suppliers looking to store winter water for use in dry periods.

The district has drawn plans to build a $600 million system with canals, recovery wells and lift stations to transport the water to and from the “vault.”

Hurley said the revenue generated from selling the storage space will cover the construction cost and, more importantly, allow the agency to buy water to store and later irrigate McMullin farmland, keeping it in production.

“We will buy water from our neighbors or from sources wherever and whenever, Hurley said, “and we’ll use the banking facilities to convey water into McMullin and put it in the ground for the long-term benefit of my landowners and to achieve sustainability for the subbasin under SGMA.”