Views vary on aquifer management

Disagreements occasionally flared, primarily over the underrepresentation of domestic well owners and small farmers within Tuscan Water District, during a groundwater forum on a recent Saturday afternoon.

Concerns about legal implications of groundwater recharge for water ownership also surfaced during the meeting hosted by the League of Women Voters of Butte County.

The panel, consisting of county officials, Tuscan Water District (TWD) leadership, a geology professor, and an environmentalist, discussed potential solutions to improve groundwater sustainability and the challenges of maintaining a balanced aquifer. Around 150 people, including city councilmembers Katie Hawley and Addison Winslow, attended the two and a half hour session. 

Christina Buck, assistant director of the Butte County Department of Water and Resource Conservation, said groundwater levels have remained relatively stable over the past 10 years due to several wet years, but over the longer term—since 2000—the trend still shows a decline.

The underrepresented: small farmers and domestic well owners

One of the controversies around the TWD, some critics reiterated during the meeting, is that it doesn’t adequately represent small farmers and domestic well owners because of its weighted voting system based on land acreage. 

“What about the domestic water users, and how much say do they have in voting and deciding on projects that the Tuscan Water District will implement?” one attendee asked Tovey Giezentanner, TWD general manager. 

“Domestic well-users use about a tenth of a percent of the water, so the answer really is not much,” Giezentanner said, “but they’re going to pay very little compared to the landowners who own the acreage, who are going to pay for the projects.”

An argument between a few domestic well owners and Giezentanner broke out later.

Anne Dawson, a domestic well owner who lives in an area governed by the Vina Groundwater Sustainability Agency (Vina GSA) and the Tuscan Water District, said most domestic well users are effectively excluded from voting rights within TWD.

“You have all this lip service to beneficial users and usage. And yet, on your board, you have a domestic well user, supposedly, but he’s actually a farmer,” Dawson said. “And then you have this voting structure that is [one vote] per acre.”

Giezentanner responded.

“That’s how that works — they have less skin in the game, which means they pay less when projects come down,” he said. “Now you could say, that’s not true, because if my domestic well goes bad because you’re doing all that, well, there’s going to be a domestic well mitigation plan.”

“…the small farmers get left behind” — Cheetah Tchudi

“That’s not true,” a woman wearing a black mask yelled in the audience. “How long is it going to take for somebody to get the mitigation while they have no water? Look at what happened in Orland.”

“That’s Glenn County. That’s not here. And we move pretty quickly,” Giezentanner said. 

“Domestic well owners are vulnerable,” the woman continued. 

Cheetah Tchudi, groundwater engagement organizer of Community Alliance with Family Farmers, expressed his concern for underserved small family farmers in an interview with ChicoSol after the meeting.

“Small farmers’ wells are usually old and not very deep,” Tchudi explained. “They were drilled in the 1960s when the water table was very high. When large farmers can drill bigger, deeper wells, and when they draw down the water supply, the small farmers get left behind, and they’ve got dry wells, and they cannot afford to repair it or drill a new and deeper well.”

Now, all the small family farmers within TWD have to pay the fee to support the district’s operation, yet the benefit for them remains unseen, he said, adding that the small farmers he talked to have no interest in being part of TWD, but have no choice “unless they pay about $1,000 to apply to opt out.” 

“Small farmers are working so hard just to stay afloat just to provide food for our community that they don’t have the time to break away and waste three hours in a water policy meeting,” Tchudi said. “But their voices need to be heard.”

Recharge: “Privatization is not inevitable” 

During the panelists’ presentations, recharge — a practice of directing surface water, such as river flows or stormwater into the ground so it can refill underground aquifers — was discussed as a solution to tackle groundwater sustainability. 

However, Jim Brobeck, a water policy analyst of AquAlliance, an organization dedicated to protecting North State ground water, cited a 1975 court case and raised concerns about what recharge implies for water ownership legally.

“It [the court case] dissolved the right of overlying landowners to pump groundwater and gives that privilege to the agency that recharged the groundwater,” he added. 

“In 2020, the attorney for the Vina Groundwater Sustainability Agency issued a comprehensive white paper outlining the legal consequences of engaging in experimental recharge programs. The water in the aquifer would no longer be owned by the public, while the recharger may exercise full control over that water.”

During the Q&A session, some audience members also brought up the matter of water ownership. 

Buck acknowledged those concerns but said aquifer privatization is not inevitable.  

“There can be ownership of water if you have surface water,” Buck said. “And you do the work to put that surface water into the ground, and that is still your surface water stored underground.

“[But] in the Vina Subbasin, these projects are being pursued for the benefit of sustainability of the subbasin. It’s a conjunctive use approach. The Vina GSA can provide landowners with surface water that offsets their groundwater pumping. It can be set up so the landowner does not receive the right associated with that [conjunctive use]. … it changes the operations at the landowner level, and recharge occurs.

“So privatization, in my understanding, and talking to legal counsel and thinking about these projects, is not inevitable,” Buck said. “That’s an important one that is still kind of in the works.”

Buck later told ChicoSol in an email that the Vina GSA is exploring “the acquisition of surface water supplies to promote conjunctive use and/or recharge of the local aquifer.” 

Brobeck, however, also noted that some recharge projects require lowering groundwater levels first to create storage space in the aquifer—a process that might further harm ecosystems and the environment, causing subsidence, streams going dry, shallow aquifers disappearing.

Future water exports?

Giezentanner also addressed the audience about the regulatory guardrails facing TWD, including a condition set by the Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO) that prohibits the district from exporting groundwater outside the Vina or Butte subbasins.

Michael Nalin, an audience member, asked for more detail.

Nalin said LAFCO had advised changing the language to ban the export of any water from Butte County — not just groundwater — a recommendation that was ultimately rejected.

“I think that’s what makes people worried about the possibility of permits in the future that allow us to export surface water,” Nalin said. 

“So what is the reason that that language was not included?” Nalin asked.

“That’s a good question. I don’t know,” Giezentanner said. “Several years ago, our attorney said, ‘Look, do it this way.’ So that’s the way we did it.”

“Against LAFCO’s advice?” Nalin pushed.

“It’s a political process where you go through, and you have staff involved, you have interests involved. Just because the staff says something doesn’t mean you do it, right?” Giezentanner answered. 

“There’s always negotiation on these things, but that was the recommendation from our attorney,” Giezentanner added. “It’s still a pretty sweeping provision.”

Yucheng Tang is a California Local News Fellow reporting for ChicoSol.