With a short window to tackle a high-stakes problem – water – things are getting serious, fast.
Members of the Salinas Valley Basin Groundwater Sustainability Agency’s (SVBGSA) advisory committee met on Thursday, April 16 to talk about potential solutions, and the consequences if deadlines are missed.
The goal, under California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, is to develop projects and management actions to bring basins to sustainability by 2040 or 2042. If local groundwater sustainability agencies cannot come up with effective solutions, control could shift to the State Water Resources Control Board, which has the authority to impose pumping restrictions. That could result in fallowing farmland, impacting the county’s top economic driver.
“We are asking you to develop a recommendation to the board,” SVBGSA Executive Director Piret Harmon told committee members. She said potential projects would need to be finalized by early fall. “We need a suite, a portfolio of projects. Not any single one, because it doesn’t get us there. It really comes together to be the most optimal.”
The timeline came as a surprise. “That was a yikes,” Committee Chair Curtis Weeks said.
The 180/400-foot aquifer, underlying areas from Castroville to Gonzales, was deemed critically overdrafted by the state in 2014 due to decades of overpumping, and is at risk of being contaminated by seawater intrusion.
In 2022, the state Department of Water Resources determined that the plans submitted by SVBGSA for this critically overdrafted basin were incomplete, requiring stronger evidence to show how sustainability would be achieved. In December, the state asked for more refinement to the plan for this basin; local agencies have until April 30 to respond, showing how their groundwater plans relating to seawater intrusion in the 180/400 subbasin will actually work.
For the whole region, several projects are on the table, and will continue to be discussed at the next advisory committee meeting on Wednesday, April 29. The largest is a brackish groundwater restoration project, which would extract salty groundwater before it spreads inland, then treat it before delivering that treated water back to farms or back into the aquifer. That project – the highest-cost option – is estimated to cost around $1 billion.
One feasibility study discussed at the April 16 meeting was for aquifer storage and recovery, which would involve capturing excess surface water from the Salinas River and diverting that water to be stored in the aquifer for later use. The estimated capital cost would be $278 million-$383 million.
Another concept includes upgrading the existing Castroville Seawater Intrusion Project to reduce groundwater pumping. That project would cost an estimated $60 million.
Weeks stressed the need to come together to find a solution and maintain local control.
“There’s no way today to know who is going to face these cuts,” he said. “ And there’s no way to say that [the state] won’t go into certain areas. We don’t want to have the fight, so let’s figure it out.”