Page 6 - Yucaipa Valley Water District - Board Workshop

Water Deeply: And what’s the second reason?

Ekdahl: The second is that you don’t really need to. I think that’s the more important one.

There seems to be the mistaken belief among a lot of water-right users that if you just
made groundwater recharge a beneficial use then it would be really easy to get a
groundwater storage permit. Yet that’s not really the case. It doesn’t address the things
that really fundamentally drive the water-right permitting process – which are whether
or not they have done an environmental review and whether or not there is actually water
available, as well as the effects on downstream water users and the environment. We still
have to address all of those things. So simply making groundwater recharge a beneficial
use doesn’t avoid those issues that take a long time to address.

The other element of this is that when you really look at what people want to use
groundwater storage for, we already include those as beneficial uses. Typically, it’s
because they want to use it for their irrigation or municipal supply later on. That’s already
a beneficial use. You don’t need to create a new type of beneficial use to account for that.

Other issues include what we might call “in situ” beneficial uses, or nonextractive uses.
This could include recharging groundwater as a seawater barrier, protection from land
subsidence or protecting instream flows. Pollution control could be a beneficial use.
Those are all beneficial uses, as well. In fact we have permitted those types of things in
the past. The storage itself doesn’t fundamentally affect the aquifer. It’s what use comes
out of it after that’s fundamentally important.

Water Deeply: What about the goal of achieving sustainability in an aquifer,
as required by the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. Is that a
beneficial use?

Ekdahl: It could be. I would take a slightly more skeptical view of this idea that we need
to recharge an aquifer just to meet that definition in the SGMA. Why are you trying to
reach some water level in the aquifer? It’s almost certainly going to be for a number of
reasons: That’s the level at which most of your private domestic or municipal wells are at
[or] at which subsidence no longer occurs – or to repel salinity. There are all these other
issues that would actually drive the need to raise the aquifer level to some point. And
those would all be beneficial uses.

The other idea that I think merits a little bit of skepticism is this: If we’re going to raise
the level in an aquifer, how realistic is that for most of these SGMA basins? I think that’s
a pretty unrealistic goal for many basins. I think what we’re going to see in most SGMA
plans is some kind of slow ramp-down to a level that’s lower than what we see today. I
think it’s going to be really tough to raise groundwater levels in many of these aquifers
without massive, massive changes in pumping rates or water application, or through
recharge efforts. The mass balances just don’t work out otherwise.

Yucaipa Valley Water District - October 30, 2018 - Page 6 of 56