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CCID official urges Los Banos to amend groundwater sustainability plan, warns of 60,000-acre-foot overdraft
Summary
Benjamin Fenters, deputy general manager of CCID, told the City Council during public comment that the subbasin faces an estimated 60,000 acre-foot annual overdraft and urged amendments to the City of Los Banos's Groundwater Sustainability Plan to prevent increased overdraft from growth.
Benjamin Fenters, deputy general manager of CCID, told the Los Banos City Council during public comment that the groundwater subbasin that contains the city is overdrafted by roughly 60,000 acre-feet per year and urged the council to amend the city’s Groundwater Sustainability Plan before adoption.
“Everyone’s familiar with the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, or SGMA,” Fenters said. “The Groundwater Sustainability Plan is the governing plan for our water subbasin here and is what our GSAs have to abide by and implement to achieve sustainability.”
Fenters said the 60,000 acre-foot annual deficit must be eliminated under SGMA and that the City of Los Banos currently accounts for about 4 to 5 percent of that overdraft. He told the council the plan’s five-year milestones are the measures the state will use to judge progress and that drier hydrology since 2013 has already set back the subbasin’s progress.
“If the next two years are not exceptionally wet, we will most likely be falling short of our milestones for the first five-year milestone,” Fenters said, adding that GSAs must show they are implementing the actions laid out in the Groundwater Sustainability Plan (GSP). He warned that the inaction of one GSA can affect all 23 GSAs in the subbasin and noted that lawsuits have already been filed between GSAs over implementation.
Fenters criticized the draft Los Banos plan (agenda item 8b), saying it does not require offsets for increased groundwater demand from growth and “does the opposite by providing for robust growth of the city without requirements to offset new demand.” He said CCID strongly opposes adopting the plan in its current form and recommended the council direct staff and consultants to insert language that would prevent the city’s overdraft from increasing.
Fenters also reminded the council that the city’s GSP must be incorporated into the city’s general plan, and that a general plan promoting growth without offsets would be reflected in the next five-year update to the GSP.
The comments were delivered during the public comment period and were addressed to the council ahead of its consideration of agenda item 8b. No formal action on the GSP was recorded during the public-comment remarks.
