The creation of a water district to manage groundwater in the Cuyama Valley moved forward on Sept. 1 following a 6-1 vote by the Santa Barbara County Local Agency Formation Committee (LAFCO) to approve an application to form the Cuyama Water Basin District (CWBD).
Santa Barbara County 3rd District Supervisor and LAFCO commissioner Doreen Farr was the only dissenting vote.
With an effort led by Bakersfield attorney Ernest Conant, a petition signed by 71 percent of the valley’s growers called for the formation of the CWBD that would allow them to, among other functions, construct and operate projects to manage and stabilize groundwater resources at a local level.
The district’s formation comes as a response to the Sustainable Groundwater Resources Act (SGMA)—a law intended to protect California’s groundwater resources—that was signed by Gov. Jerry Brown in September 2014.
Encompassing Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Ventura, and Kern counties, the CWBD is the “largest ever” district LAFCO Director Paul Hood has seen in his 30 years of working with the agency.
The new district will be funded by its members and include some the valley’s largest growers in terms of acreage and yearly sales, such as Caliente Ranch, Grimmway Farms, and Bolthouse Farms—a subsidiary of Campbell Soup Company.
Santa Barbara County leads as the primary county in the district because most of the irrigated land falls within its boundaries.
Coupled with the drought that’s now in its fifth year, the CWBD is drawing controversy among some residents of New Cuyama who fear that depleting water resources will fall under the control of corporate interests.
Also, some opposed how the district would be formed—which would be by one vote per acre, rather than one vote per person—calling it undemocratic.
“No individual owns water on a lifeboat,” said John Coats, manager of the Cuyama Community Services District (CCSD). “One acre, one vote would be a disaster.”
The CCSD provides water to the approximately 1,100 residents of unincorporated New Cuyama, whose only source of water comes from the groundwater below. Although the CCSD is excluded from the newly formed CWBD, it falls directly in the middle of the area.
The area in question has had its share of problems. Decades of overpumping water has left the Cuyama Valley Groundwater Basin sinking in some parts, according to U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) hydrologist Randy Hanson. He added that the water in the basin is being discharged twice as fast it can be recharged.
The basin was declared to be in a state of “critical overdraft” by the California Department of Water Resources.
In addition to discharge rates there is also the question of whether the CWBD and the CCSD share the same groundwater.
A 2014 USGS report indicated that the basin is composed of several sub-regions that each have different water availability, although it’s not entirely clear how interconnected they are.
Residents who depend on the land are already feeling the result of the basin’s problems. Growers in some parts told the Sun their wells are running dry. Jim Wegis, owner of Triangle E. Farms and a proponent of the district, said one of his wells has already gone dry.
“We realize that it’s going to be a different cropping pattern so we use less water,” Wegis said at the Aug. 5 LAFCO meeting when he argued for the district’s formation. “Time is of the essence.”
Formation of the CWBD was needed by the Sept. 1 LAFCO meeting, some argue, in order to meet critical deadlines imposed by SGMA, or else the basin would fall under state control—which is what the growers and ranchers feared.
While some residents feared a lack of representation, Conant, the attorney who led the effort to secure the district formation, disagreed that that would be an issue. A county official would represent the town’s residents within a larger groundwater sustainability agency that also includes the CWBD as a member, he said.
“The issue we have is that this basin is in four counties and there’s no one who represents the people who are going to be most affected—the landowners and growers,” Conant told the Sun. “Obviously counties need to be a part of the process”
Not all are convinced, however.
“My point of view, obviously is that the best approach or possible means of complying with the state’s expectations and the integrity of the basin would have been to minimize the major landowners’ discretionary power—that which they successfully continued through a variety of strategies (behind the scenes) for the last couple of years,” New Cuyama resident John Mackenzie wrote in an emailed statement to the Sun.
This article appears in Sep 8-15, 2016.