Report says most irrigation districts broke 2007 state law
During California’s epic five-year drought, most of the state’s irrigation districts didn’t comply with a 2007 law that requires them to account for how much water they’re delivering directly to farmers, a Bee investigation has found.
State regulators are largely powerless to stop them, but they don’t seem too bothered by it. They say they’d rather switch to a different form of reporting.
Farm-advocacy groups say irrigation districts have been bombarded with a confusing slew of state and federal laws and regulations that often have overlapping reporting requirements, so it’s no wonder their compliance rates are low.
“I’m not surprised there’s confusion in this among districts on what their requirements are because it’s been a moving target going back to ’07,” said Mike Wade, executive director of the California Farm Water Coalition. “There have been so many changes and so many things being asked of them.”
A decade ago, California lawmakers passed Assembly Bill 1404 with the goal of keeping better track of farm-water use in a state where some 80 percent of the water used by people goes to agriculture. The law called for collecting “farm-gate” data to allow the state to monitor surface water delivered to farmers’ irrigation ditches. The idea was the reports could help regulators and the public better understand how much water is being used and where it’s going.
The law is explicit: Any water agency must file the reports with the Department of Water Resources if it supplies at least 2,000 acre-feet of surface water to farms or if the district serves 2,000 or more irrigated acres.
Ten years later, the state’s data is so full of holes that it’s effectively useless.
Some districts say they don’t have to follow the law, so they ignore it. Some say they had no idea they even had to comply. No state agency keeps a tally of how many districts fall under the law’s requirements. Because water districts self-report, the only way to know they’re required to file with the state is when they choose to submit records. The law doesn’t allow the state to issue fines for noncompliance.
The Sacramento Bee analyzed the filings made from 2012 through 2015 by 123 of the largest irrigation districts, the ones reporting use of more than 10,000 acre-feet of water.
During the heart of California’s drought, just 24 of the 123 water suppliers reported each of the four years, and several of those appear to have turned in reports with incomplete data.
Most districts reported just once or twice — or not at all.
The low compliance rates frustrate environmentalists. They say the data is among the few publicly available sources of information that could be used to track California’s largest water users with any sort of precision.
“It’s important for the public to know how the state’s water resources are being used,” said Laura West of the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The fact there’s no incentive to turn (the reports) in or no penalty for not turning them in, it seems like it should be fixed.”
Responses varied when The Bee asked some of the districts that didn’t file farm-gate reports at various times during the drought to explain why they chose not to.
Byron-Bethany Irrigation District in the southern Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta supplies water to nearly 30,000 acres of cropland, according to its website. Yet the agency didn’t report any farmgate data during the drought.
In a written statement, spokesman Nick Janes said the agency has “aggressively worked” over the years to improve its agricultural water accounting and reduce its water use. He said the agency regularly submits water-use data to the state and will submit data from “farm-gate deliveries in the future.”
Berbach said that a few years ago he sent a mass mailing reminding agencies of the law.
Many of them responded by saying, “‘Oh, my gosh, I completely forgot about this,’” Berbach said.