Mike Eaton: To save Delta: Ditch the groundwater myth
Mike Eaton
Sacramento Bee
07/26/2009
The remaining wet spots in the Cosumnes River channel in southern Sacramento County faded away earlier this month. Most of the river corridor from the foothills to the Delta will be bone-dry until the rains return.
It wasn't always so. Historically, the river helped replenish groundwater during the wet season, and in the summer, enough groundwater seeped into the river to sustain a rich corridor of life from the Delta to the Sierra.
The extensive pumping of groundwater, first by nearby farmers and then, increasingly, by Sacramento County and its growing cities, upset this natural cycle. Throughout the region, pumping of groundwater now exceeds direct diversions of surface water from rivers significantly.
Enabling this shift to excessive use of groundwater was a legal delusion: a premise that surface water is unconnected to groundwater. Under state law, groundwater, unlike surface water, can be pumped virtually at will, unless limited by local governments or the courts.
This legal delusion dates to California's early days, when water resources seemed inexhaustible, and salmon were abundant in our rivers and streams. It remains in effect today despite what science and common sense tell us: Water moves constantly from the surface of the land, pulled by gravity out of our rivers and streams to fill the dry space created below ground when water is pumped out.
Regulatory and legal structures may be rooted in the past and slow to change, but California is not. Our population has mushroomed from fewer than a million in 1879, when our current state constitution was adopted, to nearly 40 million today. And we've deployed energy and technology to store, move and use water in ways that early settlers could never have imagined, just as they could not have imagined the demise of California's once-large salmon populations.
The consequences of this disconnect – backward-looking law, forward-moving state – have become increasingly problematic in an era of growing competition for water and rising concern about the environmental costs of water diversions and groundwater pumping.
No setting illustrates these conflicts better than Sacramento County. Today, Sacramento's local governments, along with farms and rural residents, pull an average of more than a half-million acre-feet of water a year from the underground aquifer. This groundwater use is in effect a diversion from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, because the major sources of "recharge" for Sacramento's groundwater are the rivers, wetlands and sloughs in or flowing to the Delta. The more groundwater Sacramento entities pump, the greater the yearly diversion from – or interruption of water flow to – the Delta.
As a de facto user of Delta water, Sacramento ranks high. Its take of groundwater every year is equivalent to about one-third of the volume of the State Water Project's expected shipments this year from the Delta to the rest of the state.
Because the law pretends that groundwater pumping has no impact on surface flows, however, and because state regulators have yet to use existing authority to address the problem, local agencies have a free ride, acting as if they are not complicit in the ecological problems of the Delta and hold no responsibility for an important resource like the Cosumnes River.
Other Delta-dependent water users, recognizing the fragility of the resource and their vulnerability to cut-backs, have invested heavily in water efficiency and water reclamation, and come to the table as stakeholders to address the Delta's ecological and water conveyance challenges. Sacramento County and its cities lag far behind in water conservation and reclamation, are the largest contributors of some important pollutants to the Delta, and seem to resist recommendations for reform of Delta policy and governance.
Moreover, Sacramento County seems to see the Bay Delta Conservation Plan as a threat to its interests. Rather than resist the Delta conservation plan, Sacramento should seek ways to connect the plan with its own long-delayed habitat conservation plan for the lower Cosumnes area, because the fate of the Cosumnes is of far more than symbolic importance. The Cosumnes is a key Delta resource and has received significant public and philanthropic investment for precisely that reason. Both plans should embrace the goal of mitigating groundwater pumping impacts that have devastated the river's salmon fishery and put at serious risk many of its wetlands, oak forests and riparian habitats.
Without the pressure of a reality-based state water law, Sacramento will continue to lag on issues ranging from water-use efficiency to habitat protection and restoration. It's time for state regulators, policy makers and the courts to recognize the pull of gravity and articulate a modern legal framework to integrate the management of groundwater with surface water.
