At least one Tulare County groundwater region is doing things right when it comes to protecting residential drinking water wells, according to two advocacy organizations.
The Kaweah subbasin, which covers the northern half of Tulare County’s flatlands, earned important endorsements this month from the Community Water Center and Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability.
Both organizations confirmed to SJV Water that Kaweah’s domestic well mitigation program is “the standard” for other subbasins to follow and will recommend to the state Water Resources Control Board that Kaweah not be placed on probation at its January 7 hearing in Sacramento.
“If they follow through on their commitments, I don’t think they have to go to probation,” said Tien Tran, senior policy advisor at Community Water Center. “They have a really robust drinking water mitigation program that is the standard right now.”
The program, announced in June, is the first of its kind in the state. The $5.8 million annual deal will fund a two-pronged approach with the help of valley nonprofit Self-Help Enterprises. If a residential well in the Kaweah subbasin goes dry, the program will pay for immediate replacement water and then find a long-term fix for that home.
Self-Help has a long history of boots-on-the-ground work with communities facing dry wells, especially during recent droughts when hundreds of homes lost water.
Coordinated, ambitious efforts to curtail groundwater pumping, land fallowing and recharge projects have also set the subbasin apart from its peers, said Nataly Escobedo Garcia, policy coordinator at Leadership Counsel.
“In the last two years, there was a shift in how Kaweah engaged with the public and their approach to addressing deficiencies,” outlined by the Department of Water Resources and the state Water Board, Escobedo said. “Every step of the way, the Kaweah subbasin, through either their technical advisory committees, their stakeholder committees, and additional meetings with drinking water advocates, showed there was mutual understanding of concerns.
“While in some subbasins we see more and more fragmentation, in the Kaweah subbasin we really see a group that is trying their best to find balance between all uses and users of groundwater in the most productive way possible.”
That is high praise from two organizations that have, so far, been on the side of probation for other subbasins.
Probation is the first step toward a possible state takeover of groundwater pumping. Failure to curb overdraft leads to a host of issues, including depleted groundwater levels, poor drinking water quality, and land sinking known as subsidence. Two other subbasins, Tulare Lake and Tule, were unanimously placed on probation by the Water Board for not addressing these issues at their hearings earlier this year.
The Kaweah’s domestic well program was codified in its groundwater sustainability plan, which is already in its second revision and available for public comment until Oct. 31.
At more than 4,000 pages, the groundwater plan is a work in progress that outlines goals toward sustainability, said Mark Larsen, general manager of the Greater Kaweah Groundwater Sustainability Agency. There are three groundwater agencies that cover the Kaweah subbasin, including the Greater, Mid- and East Kaweah agencies.
“What I’m most proud of is that we’ve learned you can talk about and write the best ideas and plans, but until it’s underway, they’re just words,” Larsen said. “We are working with domestic well owners and mitigating dry wells. There is a lot of work to be done, but there is funding money set aside, emergency drinking water being delivered, temporary water storage tanks being installed, and drilling rigs in the ground replacing wells in the Kaweah subbasin.”
Self-Help is working with residents to repair or replace 83 wells in the Kaweah subbasin, with 49 in the Greater Kaweah agency. One new well has been drilled and two more are being reviewed to determine the best long-term fix, Larsen said.
Meanwhile, residents served by all those wells are receiving replacement water, said Tami McVay, program director at Self-Help Enterprises. The organization is also helping residents complete applications for the best long-term fix, such as well repair, replacement or connection to a public water system.
“Most of the mitigation projects involve drilling a new well,” McVay said. “Once we approve a complete application and issue the project to the driller, it generally takes 1-3 months for the driller to complete.”
Other groundwater agencies are also working with Self-Help, which now has contracts with:
- Delano-Earlimart ID GSA
- Kern-Tulare Water District GSA
- Lower Tule River ID GSA
- Pixley ID GSA
- Tri-County Water Authority GSA
Additionally, Self-Help is working on a pilot project with the Eastern Tule groundwater agency to replace one domestic well and is working on a domestic well inventory for the Kern-Tulare groundwater agency.
McVay said Self-Help also has a letter of intent with the Kern subbasin for domestic well mitigation.
“We are working on developing the program and hope to have a contract in place within the next few months to begin work,” she said.
McVay said Self-Help continues to receive requests for well mitigation programs from groundwater agencies, even though earlier this year staff reported they were inundated.
“Self-Help is excited to work with both GSAs and the state Water Board,” McVay said. “Everyone is taking the future of our groundwater sustainability seriously and it shows in their actions.”
