В Тихама-каунти провалили управление подземными водами из-за коррупции и ошибок в расчетах

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Would you like to know how far behind we really are in implementing the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act in Tehama County? Super duper far behind, would be the gentle answer. These past few weeks, I’ve been busy with harvest and number crunching so I’ve produced some pretty basic content for my Friday column contributions. Today, despite an air compressor in the background and a few other farm related distractions, I’m going to do my best to explain why we’re so far behind for a county whose main economy – outside government – is agriculture. First, our county government structure is built to politicize water, not to manage it properly or responsibly. We allowed an out of town consulting firm to run away with more than $11 million of a $15 million grant given, ironically, to create sustainable groundwater, because our flood control board never questioned the tasks or payments associated with the ‘free’ money. The grant was broken down into parts, called tasks, and the Flood Control board never held its director accountable for the money coming in or going out. Now, the deadline has passed and the county is begging the state to consider returning some of the money. Shake my head. That fancy colored grant brochure created by the state was a great tool for flood directors and county managers to use to keep track of what was spent and how much was remaining in each category to create groundwater sustainability by 2042. Sadly, I personally re-sent this graphic to several directors, who had either misplaced the fee structure or had never seen it in the first place. Shake my head. Instead of creating a system of recharge and secondary water sources to actually build a water accounting system, supervisors (simultaneously wearing flood control director hats) like Matt Hansen were too busy preaching the ‘recharge doesn’t work’ mantra, creating well moratorium language and changing the Groundwater Commission bylaws, in effect, rendering the commission useless. Case in point, when Rob Burroughs was elected supervisor, he replaced his District 1 appointed commissioner, Bart Flaharty, who was an actual attorney dabbling in water law, with Liz Merry, a community activist and comedian who is downright funny but is far from a groundwater ‘expert.’ With no disrespect to Merry, she doesn’t even reside in District 1, something her team used to characterize as ‘pro farmer’ when other appointees lived outside district boundaries. Shake my head. Now, the directors and county consultants have botched the entire funding mechanism so badly, public trust will be impossible to restore unless we throw out the baby with the bathwater. How can there be a 400 percent mathematical miscalculation after public hearing notices were sent out to 20,000-plus landowners? Why would this county even try to charge us by calculating assumed volumetric use when there is no system in place to measure groundwater? Shake my head. Even worse, we thought we were smarter than all our neighbors so we ignored how they managed their groundwater sub-basins, and instead focused on punishing agriculture instead of helping them manage this precious natural resource. Case in point, I opened my Colusa Groundwater Authority and Glenn Groundwater Authority letter this week, which provided an accounting system overview for two parcels of land we have in the Colusa subbasin. Our neighbors have not only been funding their Groundwater Sustainability Agencies, but they’ve been building a system to show how much water each parcel of land in their subbasin is using, and if it shows a positive, near zero, or negative net groundwater impact (NGWI). Our 2025 Water Year account summary for a duck club we manage near Maxwell states our two parcels have a -21.8 AF or Negative Net Groundwater Impact in the Colusa sub-basin. It actually calculates total rainfall, ET or the consumptive use of water through evaporation from the soil surface and transpiration from plants, derived from satellite imagery. Then it takes the applied surface water delivered from conveyance systems to come up with a fairly decent formula. Basically, it takes water inflow and subtracts it from water outflow, calculates runoff from precipitation and creates a fancy formula to determine positive, negative or near zero Ground Water Impact – GWI. Shake my head (but in a good way, this time). Our sub-basin neighbors are light years ahead of Tehama County, and so far, charge less than $8 per acre. They’re not trying to charge a faulty volumetric fee 15 times higher, like Tehama County attempted. These folks are making real groundwater sustainability progress that farmers and urban water users can actually measure and critique to make sustainability a benchmark. The real winners in the groundwater sustainability game are those who put politics aside, roll up their sleeves, and get to work, creating a system of trust and transparency. Why is it so hard for us?