Kings County farmers caught between millions in back fees and being ghosted, again, by state water regulators
A Kings County court is set to consider a request for a new injunction to stop the state from charging farmers $5.4 million in a variety of fees, including for groundwater they pumped two years ago.
The motion for the injunction, filed by the Kings County Farm Bureau in its ongoing lawsuit against the Water Resources Control Board, is scheduled to be heard April 21. A case management conference in the underlying lawsuit is set for Wednesday, April 15.
If the injunction is denied, farmers will likely have to pay the fees sometime after May 1 when they are required to begin reporting groundwater extractions. The fees are retroactive to 2024 after the region was put on probation for lacking a cohesive groundwater plan.
If the injunction is granted, however, that could create a whole other set of problems for water managers, according to an email from Water Board spokesman Edward Ortiz.
That’s because, according to Ortiz, this new injunction request is based on “similar legal and factual errors” as a previous preliminary injunction granted in 2024 by a Kings County judge that had blocked these same fees. That previous injunction was overturned in October 2025 by the Fifth District Court of Appeal.
While the previous injunction was in place, and for several months after it was overturned, Water Board staff did not speak to, or meet with, water managers in Kings County, citing the pending legal action.
That lack of communication came at a crucial time for water managers trying to rewrite groundwater plans to Water Board standards with no guidance from the Water Board. State staff just began meeting with managers in the last few months.
But this new injunction threatens to, again, put those meetings on ice, according to an email from the Water Board’s Ortiz.
“…if granted, it would yet again set back efforts among the groundwater sustainability agencies (GSAs) and the Board to resolve deficiencies and achieve sustainable groundwater management in a subbasin which urgently needs it,” Ortiz wrote in an email to SJV Water.
Though he wrote that the previous injunction was the “sole reason” Water Board staff went silent, local water managers have said that was unfair as it was the farm bureau, not the GSAs that filed the lawsuit and sought the previous injunction and now this new one.
In fact, Doug Verboon, chair of the Mid-Kings River GSA recently beseeched the Water Board at its April 7 meeting to give the region an extra year to work on groundwater plans specifically because staff had ghosted them.
“We feel we were kind of betrayed a little because we were promised that we’d have working staff for two years to work with us,” Verboon told the Water Resources Control Board.
The fees under scrutiny are not insubstantial. Under probation, farmers must register their wells at $300 a piece and pay $20 per acre foot pumped. Kings County farmers are estimated to owe $1.7 million in 2024 pumping fees alone, Ortiz wrote in an email.
Probation is an enforcement function of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which mandates that local agencies bring aquifers into balance by 2040.
If local entities can’t – or won’t – comply, then the Water Board has the authority to step in, which it did in Kings County when it placed the region on probation in April 2024.
