Board backs new water district
OROVILLE » After a lengthy public hearing Tuesday, the Butte County Board of Supervisors voted 3-1 to support a proposed water district in the northwest county.
The Tuscan Water District would cover 102,000 acres stretching from Butte Valley, north and west to the Tehama and Glenn county lines, excluding Cal Water’s Chico Division. The district name refers to the aquifer beneath the area.
The area is almost entirely dependent on groundwater, and to meet the provisions of a recent state law, the amount that is pumped will have to be reduced.
A group of farmers proposed the Tuscan District to import surface water so less groundwater will have to be pumped. That’s because if conservation and other measures don’t achieve enough of a reduction in pumping, farmland will have to be fallowed.
The district has proven to be controversial. During Tuesday’s hearing before the supervisors, roughly 50 people spoke over the course of three hours, the majority of whom were opposed to district formation. The board also received 160 email comments on the idea.
Many of the speakers had appeared before the county Water Commission earlier this month, and a number of them made the same comments, word for word. The commission also endorsed forming the district on a split vote.
The supervisors’ action was only advisory, as it cannot form a special district. That authority lies with the Local Agency Formation Commission.
Although Board Chair Bill Connelly of Oroville had made that point at the beginning of the hearing, a number of speakers did not understand that and called on the board to “terminate these proceedings.”
LAFCO reached out to the county and a number of other agencies for their opinions on forming the Tuscan District, and that was the point of Tuesday’s hearing.
The controversy
A number of points of controversy have emerged about the proposed Tuscan District, with its governance structure being a main one.
The district is proposed as a “landowner voter district,” which means votes are allocated by acreage owned rather than by the number of registered voters. Since the district’s 75 applicants own 57 percent of the land, they could dominate the decisionmaking process.
On Tuesday that was called unconstitutional and undemocratic. Others spoke of feeling disenfranchised. “Someone will sue,” one speaker told the board, “and they will win.”
“A small number of people will control the water,” another speaker said, “and I expect they will use it for their benefit.”
There’s a fear that projects undertaken by the district might saddle small landowners with costs over which they will have no say.
But the cost of any projects will also be allocated by acreage, those with the largest properties will pay the most.
There are also complaints that some of the largest landowners are out-of-state corporations. The biggest landowner in the proposed district is Deseret Farms, an arm of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The terms “corporate farm” and “industrial agriculture” cropped up repeatedly. “Their responsibility is to their stockholders, not to Butte County,” one speaker said.
Another speaker said district opponents weren’t “anti-farm, we’re pro-Constitution.” But clearly there was some anti-farm sentiment.
“When they say ‘saving the aquifer’,” one speaker said, “they mean ‘keep taking too much.’”
Is it necessary?
A second major argument is the Tuscan District isn’t necessary, that other entities exist that can do what it proposes to do.
Speakers suggested that the county should do the job. After the public hearing closed Supervisor Doug Teeter of Paradise questioned that. “We have people beating us up over the way we operate the landfill.”
The county Resource Conservation District was also suggested, as was the Vina Groundwater Sustainability Agency.
The Vina GSA is a product of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, passed in 2014. The state law says pumping in all groundwater basins has to be managed to avoid “adverse impacts.”
The GSAs are required to prepare and implement what are called groundwater sustainability plans to avoid those adverse impacts.
The law covers the Sacramento Valley floor in Butte County. The area has been divided into three “sub-basins,” two of which don’t have significant groundwater issues.
The third — covering much the same area as the proposed Tuscan District — is called the Vina Subbasin, and there is an overdraft problem there.
Currently, about 243,000 acre-feet of groundwater are pumped in the Vina Sub-basin. The Vina GSA recently determined that a yield of 233,000 acre-feet was sustainable, meaning 10,000 acre-feet has to be cut.
The plan being developed for the Vina Sub-basin has a number of conservation and other strategies that theoretically get close to the amount that has to be saved, but it’s possible something else will be necessary.
The Vina GSA could undertake those projects, but advocates for the Tuscan District say the district would be single-mindedly focused on sustainability. SGMA assigns a number of other tasks to the GSAs that will require attention.
“GSAs have their hands full,” one speaker told the board.
Ulterior motives?
There is also an underlying suspicion that the Tuscan District is not being created not to sustain the aquifer, but to somehow gain control of it so the water can be sold elsewhere.
District applicants have said any water imported into the basin will be kept in the basin, but there were doubts that would be the case in the future.
If the district were to import water and use it for aquifer recharge, it would own that water, but not the whole aquifer.
It’s unlikely the district could export that water though, due to the passage of Measure G in 1996. That prohibited such transfers without a permit.
“Not one drop of groundwater has been transferred out of the county,” said Les Herringer of the M&T Ranch. “That’s what Measure G did. Not one drop of surface water has been transferred out of the county and replaced with groundwater. As far as I know, no one has ever applied for a permit.”
But after the public hearing closed, Chico Supervisor Debra Lucero advanced the theory further.
She said while she believed farmers’ concerns about their future were true, they were “led down this path” by former county Water and Resource Conservation director Paul Gosselin.
She offered the theory that Gosselin had scared farmers into organizing by telling them that if they didn’t, the state would come in and take control of their water.
“And where is he now?” she asked about Gosselin, “Working for DWR.”
Connelly broke in to say Lucero was on “a wild goose chase,” and was angry about the accusation that Gosselin had acted to further his career. “Someone’s got to defend these people.”
Lucero continued that the Department of Water Resources wants to get the local aquifer into its system, tapping that water for use elsewhere.
She said SGMA wasn’t about sustainable groundwater basins, but rather about creating a “groundwater market.” That’s why the state wants to know how much everyone is pumping, she said.
“Everyone is looking at us because we’re the last intact aquifer.”
She said if the district is created, and builds the infrastructure to bring surface water in, those same pipes can be used to take groundwater out.
More comments
Other supervisors didn’t share Lucero’s fears. “I totally believe local people will do a good job,” said Teeter.
Connelly said he had been listening for someone to convince him of a conspiracy, but hadn’t heard it. “I haven’t been convinced that things that could happen will happen. I haven’t heard anything that convinces me this is evil.”
Several speakers had told Supervisor Tod Kimmelshue of Durham that he should recuse himself. Members of Kimmelshue’s family farm in the district, and are among the proponents of the district.
Kimmelshue also sits on the Vina Groundwater Sustainability Agency board, and on LAFCO.
He didn’t recuse himself, and the result wouldn’t have changed if he had. Chico Supervisor Tami Ritter had left the meeting by the time the hearing came up, so the vote would have been 2-1 instead of 3-1.
Kimmelshue said he wasn’t a big fan of artificially recharging an aquifer, but that he was in favor irrigating Butte County crops with the Lake Oroville water the county has rights to.
“It makes me sick when we sell our 26,000 acrefeet down south. How do we use it so we can save our groundwater?”
He said the Tuscan District was “not the end all, be all, but they’re the ones that are getting going.”
“I don’t want it to be just sustainable, I want it to increase.”
Decorum
The hearing was notable in that there was a lack of the rudeness that has become more and more common recently, including during a hearing on mask mandates earlier in the day before the supervisors.
“I may be crazy,” said Kimmelshue, “but I think today was super exciting.”
“It really was,” Connelly added.
“I thank you all for being cordial,” Kimmelshue continued. “That’s the way democracy is supposed to work.”