Farm barons defy calls to cut groundwater pumping

Last year, as floodwaters rushed toward the San Joaquin Valley city of Corcoran — home to roughly 20,000 people and a sprawling maximum-security state prison — emergency workers and desperate local officials begged the state for help raising their levee. Corcoran had been sinking, steadily, for years because of persistent overpumping of groundwater by major landowners in the Tulare Lake Basin that has sent the valley floor into a slow-motion collapse. And the levee raises made in 2017 — a multimillion-dollar effort funded by local property tax hikes and the prison system — were no longer up to the job. Ultimately, the state agreed to pour $17 million into another round of levee engineering in an effort to save the town.

Farmers, meanwhile, were frantic as the basin’s phantom lake reemerged for the first time in 25 years and floodwaters surged onto croplands that had not flooded in modern times. The same overpumping that was sinking Corcoran had caused geologic transformations across the basin. What was once high ground suddenly wasn’t; infrastructure critical to drainage had in some cases shifted; water flowed in unexpected ways.

Lost in the chaotic scramble was the fact that just months before the water began rising in the ancient Tulare lakebed, the local agencies responsible for managing groundwater pumping had insisted that subsidence — and the subsequent flooding and destruction it might cause — was not an immediate problem. It was an assessment they’d doubled down on in reports to state regulators, despite evidence that the ground had been sinking in some places at a rate of more than one foot a year, fracturing roads and irrigation channels and depleting drinking water stores. Since 2015, Corcoran has experienced nearly 5 feet of subsidence, while areas just outside the town have sunk as much as 6 feet. Before the 2017 emergency work, the 14-mile earthen levee that protects the town had been repaired twice by the US Army Corps of Engineers, in 1969 and 1983.

Now, the state is finally trying to enforce the requirements of a nearly 10-year-old law limiting groundwater pumping that major landowners in a half-dozen regions — including the Tulare Lake Basin — have blatantly resisted. In October, state water regulators announced they’re taking the first step toward putting the Tulare Lake region on “probation” for its lack of progress. The move sets the stage for a confrontation, at long last, between state regulators and the powerful land barons who have long controlled water use in the heavily farmed Tulare Lake Basin. If the State Water Resources Control Board deems an area “probationary,” it has the power to require the big landowners to install meters on the wells they draw from for irrigation, start reporting how much they are pumping and begin paying fees based on the water they draw.

The state’s crackdown — or at least threat of a crackdown — follows years of foot-dragging by the legacy farming families and agribusiness conglomerates that run massive operations in the Tulare Lake Basin to fall in line with state regulations that call for major reductions in groundwater pumping. Under a 2014 state law, the five water agencies that make up the Tulare Lake subbasin were supposed to be working as a team to craft a plan for reducing pumping to levels that would stabilize groundwater levels and ease the subsidence as of 2040.

But those water agencies — some of which are run by representatives of the biggest landowners — have made virtually no progress toward that goal. Infighting among agencies was fierce; board members resigned in frustration and water officials wrote accusatory letters to state officials about each other’s failings. The group’s first plan, submitted in 2020, was deemed “incomplete.” Two years later, the group submitted a revised proposal — which was then rejected as inadequate. It was the second proposal, called the amended Tulare Lake Groundwater Sustainability Plan, that sparked the state’s pending disciplinary action. Rather than providing a blueprint for sustainability, the plan allows groundwater levels to drop even further — by as much as 319 feet below historical lows in some areas — and fails to address what that might mean for subsidence in the region. The State Water Board staff’s critique of the Tulare Lake plan spans 176 pages and lists multiple “deficiencies.” A Times analysis of the proposal, the staff critique and various other responses found:

* The proposal fails to provide details on how much water landowners in the basin extract. It notes that some landowners preferred to keep their data private.

* It fails to provide details about the risks that further subsidence would pose to critical infrastructure in the southern San Joaquin Valley such as roads, railroad tracks, bridges and levees.

*It calls for a level of groundwater pumping that, according to state estimates, could result in nearly 700 domestic drinking wells in the region going dry between now and 2040.

* It appears to cherry-pick water quality data in a way that allows the local water districts to eschew responsibility for drinking water contamination associated with lowered groundwater tables.

Regulating groundwater in the West has never been easy, especially in a region where decisions about water and land use have, for decades, predominantly been decided by a small group of farming clans and farming companies hostile and unaccustomed to government interference. And some of the basin’s biggest landowners have sent seething responses to a state effort they see as unnecessary regulatory overreach. J.G. Boswell Co., the area’s largest landowner, grows tomatoes, cotton and other crops on vast acreage in the Tulare lakebed. Wall Street analysts have valued the company not just for what it grows, but for its access to that most precious resource of the American West: water. The company objected to the state’s actions in a letter to the State Water Board, saying the regulators’ draft report contains false assumptions and “many deficiencies.”

Nathan Metcalf, a lawyer representing Boswell, wrote in the letter that the company believes the area’s groundwater plan “can be revised to avoid probationary status.” He made clear the company — like other big landowners — prefers that water remain under local control. Metcalf objected to the state’s proposed pumping fees of $300 per well and $40 per acre-foot of water extracted, calling those amounts “excessive,” and said the state lacks authority to impose such fees. He said based on the amount of water pumped annually from an estimated 2,300 wells in the area, those fees could total more than $31 million.

Doug Verboon, a fourth-generation farmer in the region and a member of the Kings County Board of Supervisors, isn’t sure he wants the state coming in, either. But he recognizes problems with the lack of government oversight when it comes to the Tulare Lake Basin and its water — although not the same ones the state has identified.

Tribune News Service