Courtesy: Calif. Dept. of Water Resources
Graphic showing interconnectedness of water

Behind the big checks handed to local groundwater agencies by the state water agency last week, lay one simple goal, a process that started with the 2014 passage of California's Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, known as SGMA.

Keith Wallace from the Department of Water Resources' Sustainable Groundwater Management office summed up hundreds of pages of legalese into a single sentence. "The intention of both SGMA, and the sustainable groundwater management grant program, is to make groundwater more reliable," Wallace said.

Last Monday's low-key ceremony was held just prior to a Sonoma Valley Groundwater Sustainability Agency board meeting. The checks will help pay for additional study of how local aquifers work and how best to refill them.

For those using wells for water, the biggest changes will be metering and billing, but only for those using at least two acre-feet annually.

That's somewhere between two and four-times what an average California household uses, according to Sonoma Valley's groundwater agency.

While the benefits may seem elusive, Wallace said those dependent on wells will get something, even if it's not immediately tangible.

"The goal of SGMA is really to make sure that the actual groundwater basins that those wells are drawing upon, are healthy and being sustainably managed so that all users within the basin, including domestic well users have the ability to draw on those aquifers for the long term," Wallace said.

As to why the state is committing millions of dollars on more studies, when it's long been fairly clear that water can prove scarce in California and groundwater is essentially being mined, Wallace was just as clear.

"Some of this funding is going to be for aquifer recharge, or at least the exploration of it, but it's important to investigate because there's some conditions that just really aren't effective at replenishing a groundwater aquifer, for example areas with loose silty soils are much more effective at having water infiltrate, than say an area that has denser, clay-like soil. So if you don't do an investigation, we really risk spending funding on ineffective recharge basins," Wallace said.