Borrego Springs Groundwater Management Revisited

This past May I did a post on the Borrego Springs, CA groundwater management situation.  Quite frankly, I was a bit acerbic about the web page I had run across on this groundwater basin - making the point that the situation was not as bad as it seemed to the web page authors because they had, inadvertantly or otherwise, left out some pretty important groundwater facts.
 
I also just read a report by Rebecca Nelson titled "Uncommon Innovation: Developments in Groundwater Management Planning in California".  This report looked at groundwater management plans that exist in the state and extracted the best, or most promising management approaches from 50 plans that were looked at in some detail.  Incidentally, according to Nelson there are 20-some distinct types of groundwater entities in CA that are authorized to do groundwater management plans, and an estimated 2,300 individual boards, districts, etc. that are engaged. Since they are all local, independent, and lack state oversight, knowing who is doing what and obtaining specific groundwater management plans in the state is difficult at best.

Anyway, in her report Nelson picks several groundwater management approaches from the Borrego Water District's management plan (adopted in 2002) that she cites as innovative and worthy of replication elsewhere.  And they sound really good on paper.  This made me revisit my earlier Borrego Water District post only to discover that I missed the point altogether of the website I visited.  The point of that visited website was that the 2002 Borrego Water District Management Plan, while being adopted by the District governing board, has never been implemented.  This makes their website a bit more meaningful, and Nelson's report a bit more revealing.

I certainly don't profess to know if their management plan has been implemented or not, but if it hasn't, then what's the use?  Nelson does summarize her report with a statement that more research is needed in CA on local groundwater management plans - with questions asked, including:  "Do you actively use your groundwater management plan?" and "Which elements of your plan have been implemented?"  Seems to indicate that groundwater planning for the sake of planning in CA may be a more prevalent practice than most Californian's realize.

A California Water Dialog

I recently ran across a website promoting better groundwater management for a discreet, isolated, inter-mountain valley aquifer in California - the Borrego Valley in Northeastern San Diego County.  http://www.borregowaterunderground.org/.  The website owners are using this site as a call to arms to force the groundwater regulating entity therein - the Borrego Water District - to implement a groundwater plan they alledgedly drafted in 2002 but have never implemented.  This site claims the groundwater levels have been falling at over 2 feet per year for the past 20 years, and this rate is increasing of late.  Prediction is, based on projected extraction rates, another 30 years before the aquifer reaches a critical point.  Other facts are:  a population of 3,000; a 70 sqaure mile area; and withdrawing 24,000 AF per year.  Sounds pretty serious - at least it did to me upon my first read.

The state's information on the valley is a bit different, but a lot more complete.  They report an area of 240 square miles; annual average net use of 15,160 AF; average annual recharge of 8,300 AF; maximum saturated thickness of 4,500 feet in 3 stacked aquifers, but thinning a bit toward the valley flanks; specific yields ranging from 2% in the deepest formation to 25% in the shallowest; pre-development storage of 5,500,000 AF; total net depletion of groundwater (pre-development to 1980) of 330,000 AF - resulting in 1980 storage of 5,170,000 AF.

Amazing how the scope of the problem changes when the rest of the picture is provided.  In fact it was the lack of saturated thickness, recharge and aquifer storage information that got the better of me and caused me to find this out.  There had to be more to this story.  I had started reading the webpage in context of my local groundwater experience and was struck by the reported decline rates.  These are worse than ours, which are locally considered too high.  It wasn't until the scope of the overdraft in terms of the aquifer's storage volumes was discovered that this picture changed.  While any decline is a problem of some degree and should be addressed (with accurate information if possible), and I applaud these folks for pointing out the situation, I have to also believe there are likely bigger problems to get after than this one, at this time - even in Borrego Springs, CA.