Water group shapes rules

Irrigation runoff management one of ag’s ‘most important issues’

Wes Sander
Capital Press

February 19, 2009

Members of a state-organized workgroup met in Rancho Cordova Tuesday to begin hashing out permanent rules for the monitoring, restriction and enforcement of the discharge of irrigation water.

The group - the Irrigated Lands Regulatory Program Stakeholder Advisory Workgroup - is advising the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board on the shaping of a long-term plan. The board falls under the state Environmental Protection Agency.

The meeting brought the group's first discussions of program proposals. A handful were offered, mostly in generalized form. The next step involves fleshing out their details sufficiently to withstand a California Environmental Quality Act review.

A common theme involved maintaining separate programs for ground and surface water. Another involved the notion that localities should be assigned tailored requirements based on their respective water-quality levels and challenges.

"It may not make sense to invest in an over-arching program when there are not overarching issues," said attorney Tess Dunham of Somach, Simmons & Dunn, representing the group's rice coalition. "We need to have that flexibility for the different areas of the Central Valley."

The workgroup is divided into seven coalitions representing interests within four zones. Existing local programs are the "ideal mechanisms," Dunham said, for regulating groundwater quality.

Discussion further revolved around whether the regional board should govern local areas, and to what extent agriculture is responsible for high nitrate levels.

When discussion turned up a lack of information on the sources of nitrates in ground water, the group considered adding an informational meeting in early March to address the issue.

The current effort reaches back about a year, but it was sparked in 2003, when a new state law ended the agricultural waivers that had for years eased restrictions on the quality of water leaving farm fields.

The waivers virtually exempted agriculture from fulfilling the water-discharge requirements laid out by the Porter-Cologne Water Quality Control Act, a state law enacted in 1969.

When the ag waivers sunsetted in 2003, the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board - one of nine water-quality regions established by Porter-Cologne under the state Water Quality Control Board - extended temporary waivers to agriculture, accompanied by new conditions on wastewater discharge.

In 2006, those waivers and conditions were extended another three years, with a restated commitment by the state to develop long-term guidelines.

"This is one of the most important issues for agriculture," Tim Johnson, president of the California Rice Commission, said at the meeting.

The next meeting to address plan proposals is scheduled for March 30.

Staff writer Wes Sander is based in Sacramento. E-mail: wsander@capitalpress.com.