Close to Home: Plugging leaks in Sonoma County’s well ordinance
The Sonoma County supervisors missed an opportunity to better manage water when they adopted new well drilling regulations.|
A water meter shows how many gallons have been drawn from a well. (CHRISTOPHER CHUNG / The Press Democrat, 2022)
DONNA ROPER
DONNA ROPER IS PRESIDENT OF THE SONOMA COUNTY CHAPTER OF THE LEAGUE OF WOMEN VOTERS.
July 27, 2023, 12:04AM
Updated 2 hours ago
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and don’t necessarily reflect The Press Democrat editorial board’s perspective. The opinion and news sections operate separately and independently of one another.
The Sonoma County supervisors missed an opportunity to better manage water when they adopted new well drilling regulations, and the League of Women Voters urges them to change their policy.
In this era of extreme droughts driven by climate change, we believe the county’s new ordinance offers inadequate oversight of water usage and public trust resources.
Donna Roper
California Coastkeeper Alliance filed a second lawsuit challenging the new ordinance. To settle the first lawsuit, the county paid Coastkeeper’s legal fees ($325,000) and agreed to develop a new well ordinance.
The league followed the process and identified the following ways the amendments adopted April 18 are inadequate:
The county used 2 acre-feet of water for average residential use, instead of a more realistic 0.5 acre-feet. Two-acre feet is 651,702 gallons a year. This is a preposterous amount of water, especially when the state’s indoor water-use standard is 55 gallons per person a day.
New wells extracting up to 2 acre-feet per year can be drilled without analysis of cumulative and possibly acute impacts on existing wells and interconnected groundwater and stream flows.
The new regulations are based on speculation rather than actual data from monitoring water use, and rely on voluntary conservation. If science is to be incorporated into policy, the usual and best way is to collect data and then draft the policy. To quote Supervisor Susan Gorin, a former league president, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”
The ordinance doesn’t require measurement of existing water extraction from smaller wells. Permits will be reissued without evaluation of cumulative impacts and without a requirement to measure, let alone reduce usage, even though some areas are overdrawn.
Roughly 45% of the wells drilled from 2017-2021 are on parcels that intersect the Public Trust Resources Area. To protect this area, the county must set a reasonable limit of 0.5 acre-feet per year for new wells receiving over-the-counter permits, and require measurement of actual water use by all wells.
California’s water wars will continue until measures are taken to mitigate usage, and extreme weather from climate change will make future action even more difficult. Sonoma County can do its part now by passing a well ordinance that requires measurement and data collection, sets reasonable usage limits for existing wells and restricts drilling of new wells.
Donna Roper is president of the Sonoma County chapter of the League of Women Voters. She lives in Sebastopol.