Local Control Remains Key to SGMA’s Success as Act Notches 10th Year

Signed into law during a severe drought, the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act turns 10 this year during a much wetter period. In a way, that perfectly illustrates why SGMA was necessary and what it will take to achieve its goals.

Since 2014, I've seen SGMA as a water agency General Manager and now as this association's Executive Director, leading a team of highly skilled advocates working on your behalf in Sacramento. SGMA and groundwater sustainability counts among our top priorities.

ACWA supported SGMA's creation contingent on making local control its central tenet. And we're continuing to emphasize the need to empower local agencies. We need to ensure they have the time and resources to implement effective and realistic plans that achieve sustainability, but not at the cost of wiping out local economies. That's easier said than done; however, seeing the incredible investments made by Groundwater Sustainability Agencies, GSAs, over the past few years offer cause for hope.

Our colleagues in state government, in the Department of Water Resources, have invested a tremendous amount of energy on both a financial and personal scale into building relationships with GSAs. Through collaboration, so much has been accomplished and continues to be accomplished, with innovative on-farm recharge projects, plans to store more water above-and- below ground, as well restore conveyance capacity. All of this depends heavily on momentum, a force dependent on mutual trust, shared interests and aligned perspectives.

Given the immensity of SGMA's task, problems along the way are a given. It took us more than 100 years to get to a point where dry wells, overdrafted basins and canal-cracking land subsidence demanded action.

In the meantime, ACWA's advocacy continues its focus on empowering agencies at the local level. It is why we submitted a comment letter late last year articulating why the State Water Resources Control Board must take a more logical approach to using probationary control of agencies as a backstop.

For example, the letter calls for developing a process by which a basin could submit a revised GSP that addresses deficiencies before a probationary hearing. Even more importantly, the letter called for a focus on implementing SGMA as written without expanding its scope to include other Board priorities. Most years also see a few bills introduced in the Legislature that seek to tinker with SGMA in various ways. In other words, give SGMA an opportunity to work as originally intended.

The growing wet and dry extremes of climate change serve as a warning that we must act now to empower our local water managers in implementing SGMA. We must move forward in aligning our investments and regulatory environment to realize projects that capture more water from high-flow events for the benefit of communities currently relying on overdrafted groundwater basins.

As SGMA closes out its first decade, ACWA is committed to helping empower our member agencies to act, and succeed, locally.

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