Such plans are required under California’s 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), a landmark law that required local agencies to come up with their own long-term strategies to curb over-extraction and empowers the state to supervise and enforce them. Probation is a compulsory step to set lagging local agencies back on track to achieve sustainability goals that must be met by 2040.
The Tulare Lake subbasin is one of six the state has put up for possible probation due to inadequate plans, all in the San Joaquin valley, the powerhouse of California’s more than $50bn agricultural industry. The crackdown here has been met with a strong backlash.
The decision followed a nine-hour hearing on Tuesday where farmers protested the economic toll it would take on their industry. They cast the expected fees on their pumping as a devastating blow to the work they do and their ability to do it in the future.
“We all know there are several major farms that have filed bankruptcy in the last several months – it’s dire,” Doug Freitas, a third-generation farmer with 700 acres of land in the basin, said at Tuesday’s hearing. “I believe thousands of family farms and people who depend on groundwater will be displaced and homeless if we don’t take action on these excessive costs.”
Meanwhile, the decision was urged by clean water and environmental advocates who have called for more to be done to rein in dangerous overuse of groundwater.
“I see where the sensitivity is, but they have to remind themselves – they are farming on a lake that they pumped down,” Fred Briones, a representative of the Big Valley Pomo tribe said before the vote, referring to Tulare Lake,
a vast freshwater lake that was drained to make room for agriculture. He added that Indigenous people who once flourished on these lands no longer have water rights there. “As we watch the farmers fight amongst each other, the ground is collapsing underneath their feet.”
Tensions were on full display during the hearing as multigenerational farming families, dairy owners and representatives of local water agencies spoke at length, pushing the board to delay probation.
One local elected official, Doug Verboon, a Kings county supervisor, who urged the state to act, said he’d been threatened for his position. “It’s difficult to stand up here, because I have people behind me that wish I would just shut the hell up,” he said.
The board, meanwhile, framed its position as softly as possible throughout the hearing, reminding triggered attendees that probation is temporary. But, according to the law, if the groups across the San Joaquin valley don’t make adequate progress within a year, further pumping restrictions could be put in place.