Wells and water hauling
Last week I ran you up to speed on a couple of undertakings I’m involved with growing out of the drought.
The Board of Supervisors last year created a body called the Ad Hoc Drought Committee overseen by Supes John Haschak and Glenn McGourty.
This committee is looking at various issues related to groundwater including existing wells, drilling new wells, water hauling, and reviving the County Water Agency that was tombstoned a decade ago. The Water Agency issue is actually a separate committee endeavor and process, and we haven’t held a meeting yet. Which is fine with me because Mendocino County does not own a single water right to a single drop of water in this county. So by my reckoning, while a functioning Water Agency may be worthwhile to re-establish, we have larger fish to fry at this time. A Water Agency steering committee has been formed to come up with recommendations to re-raise the defunct agency, and at the end of the month we hold our first meeting. I’ll keep you current on any developments.
I have been working on these water issues with many different people including representatives from water districts, water haulers, ranching, farming, law enforcement, environmental health, and concerned citizens, trying to figure out how to best address these problems.
We meet on a monthly basis for about 60-to-90 minutes, and we’ve been able to put together some recommendations regarding water wells and water hauling that include a general framework of proposed rules and procedures. We’re probably setting a record for brevity of meetings that so far have been very productive, a dynamic that is unheard of (at least in this county). I’ll take some very minor credit for that being the case so far because at our very first meeting I presented a general framework that focused on start use at the water source (private sector wells and local government water utilities, continuing through middle use (water hauling), to end use (water delivery to end user property). More work needs to be done but we’ve made a start at attempting to exercise more monitoring and control over some tough problems that are major concerns of many county residents.
For example, we need to develop standard conditions and guidelines for drilling commercial water wells. Private sector owner/operators of commercial wells should be required to obtain a use permit, business license, perform a hydrological study, maintain records of metering, water sold, who it’s sold to, etc. Likewise commercial water haulers should be required to obtain business licenses and tracking logs detailing gallons of water hauled and location of water deliveries, and would be prohibited from after-dark hauling.
The main reason the process is working so far is because most of the folks participating actually