MEETING NOTES: Well registration policy hammered out by Mid-Kings River groundwater agency advisory group

• Editor’s note: Monserrat Solis covers Kings County water issues for SJV Water through the California Local News Fellowship initiative. 

Feb. 10 agenda: CLICK HERE

The new Mid-Kings River Groundwater Sustainability Agency’s advisory group made recent headway on improving plans and policies, though the agency is still behind its counterparts in the subbasin.

“They’re catching up with everyone else,” Amer Hussain of Geosyntec Consultants, Inc. said of Mid-Kings. “They’re maybe five months behind.”

Hussain who consults with a number of the region’s five groundwater agencies.

During a Feb. 10 meeting, the advisory group focused on updating Mid-Kings’ well registration and metering policies. The proposed changes will go before the GSA board for approval in March.

When the former Mid-Kings imploded in summer 2024, the Kings County Board of Supervisors picked up the pieces and started anew creating the advisory group to represent growers. The advisory group has been doing a lot of heavy lifting going over core policies intended to help bring the area’s aquifers into balance, as mandated under the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA).

The advisory group has met for three consecutive weeks, hammering out the details of the agency’s groundwater sustainability plan (GSP).

Advisory group members are led by Hussain and General Manager Chuck Kinney, who also serves as the county’s Community Development Director.

Hussain noted the GSA’s former board and manager did approve five policies before the restructuring.

“They did a lot,” Amer Hussain said. “A lot of those policies we talked about came from them.”

The advisory members unanimously voted to make a recommendation to the GSA board to hire a company to develop a well registration system. That recommendation will go to the board at its next meeting on March 11.

By March, the advisory group hopes to have additional recommendations. 

The advisory group agreed that growers should begin registering wells starting Sept. 1 with a deadline of March 1, 2026.

To get well owners to register their wells, the advisory group discussed the possibility of incentives such as priority access to grant funding. They also discussed tiered penalties that could lead to a loss of groundwater allocation for growers who don’t register. 

“Nobody wants people to volunteer information on wells and nobody wants to be regulated,” advisory group member Karl te Velde said. “But unfortunately, we have to. We have to make rules and if we don’t follow, there’s penalties.”

Meters versus telemetry

The advisory group also discussed the advantages and disadvantages of flow meters and telemetry data and made tweaks to the existing policy. 

The advisory group decided that data from non-rural domestic wells could be logged quarterly instead of monthly to allow landowners time to submit their water usage.

There was also consensus that the GSA would not move towards metering 100% of wells, but offer flexibility to well owners. Because of that, the violations for noncompliance and the deadline were removed from the policy. 

GSA’s within the Tulare Lake subbasin, which covers most of Kings County, began to edit sustainability plans and policies after the region was placed on probation by the State Water Resources Control Board in April 2024. 

Probation sanctions, including well registration and mandatory extraction reporting, were paused due pending the outcome of a lawsuit. 

But that hasn’t stopped GSA’s from instituting similar requirements at the local level before a judge deals a decision.

“I’m not worried,” Kinney said when asked if he was concerned about the timeline. “I think we have time.”

How to attend:

The advisory group will next meet on Feb. 24 at 1 p.m. in the Ag Commissioners Multi-Purpose Room, 680 N. Campus Drive, to finalize the well registration and meter policies and review the recharge and mitigation policies.

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