Lodi council gets update on water

Travis Kahrs, superintendent of Lodi’s wastewater treatment plant, gave a presentation highlighting the key steps the Eastern San Joaquin Groundwater Authority has been taking to meet new groundwater management requirements at Tuesday morning’s Lodi City Council shirtsleeve meeting.

“There have been basin-wide information meetings held since August 2018. The meetings were mostly roundtable discussions informing the public about the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act,” Kahrs said.

Former Gov. Jerry Brown signed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act into law in 2014, and it took effect in 2015. SGMA requires local water agencies to form groundwater sustainability agencies and develop plans to address shrinking stores of groundwater by Jan. 1, 2020.

The City of Lodi is one of 17 groundwater sustainability agencies that make up the Eastern San Joaquin Groundwater Authority.

As stipulated by SGMA, the city held a public meeting on March 26 at Hutchins Street Square to provide information to residents about Lodi’s role in local groundwater issues. Since the city formed its own GSA, it must work with the 16 other agencies in the Eastern San Joaquin basin to develop a single plan to address groundwater sustainability.

“The first draft was completed and is now available for public comment. The public has 45 days to provide feedback before the draft is adopted,” Kahrs said.

Members of the public will have until Aug. 25 to provide feedback. Following the public comment period, the GSA will review all comments and adjust the plan as needed.

“I don’t believe there will be many changes to the draft. There was a framework we used to develop the (groundwater sustainability plan),” Kahrs said.

The GSP framework is broken into seven chapters that provide background information about each basin, its groundwater conditions, and its sustainability goal.

Monitoring networks are also included in the plan to assess and compile data about groundwater levels.

As part of the plan, the GSAs have outlined evaluation criteria to monitor water level progress. There will be annual reports and periodical evaluations made by the GSAs.

The GSAs will also develop interagency and basin-wide agreements to prevent issues like chronic lowering of groundwater tables due to use, seawater intrusion, reduction of stored water and more.

Kahrs believes that once the basins adopt the GSP, the next steps will be creating more capturing systems that will collect stormwater during wet years, reducing overall water use, recharging groundwater, and repairing existing water infrastructure to reduce waste.

The California Department of Water Resources will evaluate each plan as part of the process. The state’s GSAs must collect and compile data on historic and current groundwater levels, water quality, the interaction of ground and surface water, and historic and projected supply and demand.

The total cost of the groundwater sustainability project will cost the 17 Eastern San Joaquin GSAs approximately $2.176 million.

A funding allocation of $1.5 million was granted to Eastern San Joaquin Groundwater Basin through Proposition 1B. The remaining $676,420 needed to fund the project came from the San Joaquin County Zone 2 contribution and authority members. As an authority member, Lodi was responsible for $11,664 of the project.

The public will have the opportunity to ask questions and provide input about the groundwater sustainability plan at an informational meeting hosted by the Eastern San Joaquin Groundwater Authority, from 5 to 8 p.m. Thursday at the Robert J. Cabral Agricultural Center, Assembly Room 1, 2101 E. Earhart Ave., Stockton.

This is the final Eastern San Joaquin Groundwater Authority informational meeting before the plan is submitted in January 2020.