Page 7 - Yucaipa Valley Water District - Board Workshop

Water Deeply: So if the water board has no plans to change the regulations
on beneficial use, what is it doing to encourage more groundwater recharge?

Ekdahl: We are working internally to find ways to give better direction to stakeholders
and do better outreach. We’ve added information to our website that clarifies examples
of in situ uses, and also clarifies that you can use groundwater recharge to mitigate
subsidence, support groundwater-dependent ecosystems, protect or enhance
groundwater levels. We directly say this on our website now.

We’re going to look in the next couple of months to further clarify nonextractive beneficial
uses, and how an applicant might go about applying for a permit. The messaging and
communication on that is maybe still a little bit unclear on our end. We do want to work
on providing more information to applicants. Maybe it’s more FAQs on our website;
maybe it’s more outreach events. But we are working toward it.

We think we can permit and accommodate almost any kind of reasonable application that
comes to us. We do encourage people to give us a call in advance and talk through why
they are trying to recharge groundwater. We’ll tell them about all the different kinds of
beneficial uses we can permit, and would be interested in working with the applicant to
do so.

But I don’t want to make it sound like it’s going to be like buying a ticket at the fair and
getting your water right. It’s still going to be a complex process. You still need to complete
the California Environmental Quality Act process, go through a public notification
process – and you’re likely to get protests, because most water-right applications do. We
want these environmental protections in place to make sure we’re preserving instream
flows for the environment or to protect senior water-right holders downstream.

Source: https://www.newsdeeply.com/water/community/2018/10/18/why-california-
law-requires-a-clear-benefit-for-groundwater-recharge

Additional Links:

Water Deeply website - https://www.newsdeeply.com/water

Register for a Water Deeply - https://www.newsdeeply.com/register/sign-up

Yucaipa Valley Water District - October 30, 2018 - Page 7 of 56