Page 5 - Yucaipa Valley Water District - Board Workshop

Officials at the State Water Resources Control Board, which oversees water rights, say the
reality is not so clear-cut. In fact, existing rules allow most groundwater recharge projects
to obtain a water right. It’s just that they may not be awarded that right for the act of
recharge by itself. The applicant would have to specifically target some ancillary benefit
of recharge, such as salinity control in an aquifer or reversing land subsidence caused by
overpumping groundwater.

The U.C. researchers, among other things, recommended that the water board develop
new regulations to clarify that those kinds of nonextractive uses of groundwater are, in
fact, a beneficial use. But the water board has no plans to do so, asserting that existing
rules are adequate.

To explain all this further, Water Deeply recently
spoke with Erik Ekdahl, a deputy director in the
division of water rights at the state board.
Photo courtesy California Water Resources Control
Board

Water Deeply: Why isn’t the water board
changing the rules to make groundwater
recharge a beneficial use?

Erik Ekdahl: Two main reasons. The first is that it
leads to trouble and potential “cold storage,” for
lack of a better term, related to junior water-right
holders and senior water-right holders.

If you start making groundwater recharge a
beneficial use, what that does is it allows senior
water-right holders to start placing vast amounts of
water into aquifer storage that downstream junior
water-right holders essentially no longer have
access to. It really messes up the order of things,
including how much people pay for water.

Let’s say you have a very senior water-right holder and they have a license for maybe 1,000
acre-feet a year. Yet they’re only able to actually use 300 a year, because that’s how much
they need for their crops. So they have a right to 700 additional acre-feet, but no place to
use it.

Upon making groundwater recharge a beneficial use, what you basically allow that senior
water-right holder to do is put that extra 700 acre-feet into storage. They can lock that
up and keep it underground, and they don’t have to do anything with it. Then all the
downstream users don’t have access to it. So something a junior water-right holder might
have been getting very cheaply, they suddenly might have to pay a couple hundred dollars
an acre-foot or more to get. It reduces the amount of water that might be available, and
it changes the cost structure.

Yucaipa Valley Water District - October 30, 2018 - Page 5 of 56