Siskiyou County, Calif. — With groundwater a recurring topic at the Siskiyou County Board of Supervisors’ recent meetings, one issue that has arisen is the approaching deadline for compliance with Senator Darrell Steinberg’s Senate Bill 6, which passed the California Senate in 2009.

The bill requires Department of Water Resources-identified (DWR) groundwater basins to be provided with groundwater monitoring plans by Jan. 1, 2012. The entities that can participate in the monitoring plan include counties in which the basins exist, watermasters or voluntary monitoring groups, among a number of others.

The bill reads, “It is the intent of the Legislature that on or before January 1, 2012, groundwater elevations in all groundwater basins and subbasins be regularly and systematically monitored locally and that the resulting groundwater information be made readily and widely available.”

The information that the bill allows to be retrieved includes the total number of wells drawing from a subbasin, the irrigated acreage overlying the basin or subbasin and the population overlying the basin or subbasin, as well as other information.

According to the bill, the entity responsible for monitoring groundwater must notify the DWR of its intentions by Jan. 1, 2011, and DWR will, by 2012, determine whether or not the monitoring effort is sufficiently informing the statewide monitoring program.

The bill allows DWR to conduct the monitoring in a basin itself if it finds the basin monitoring to be insufficient, and to then disqualify the responsible entity or entities access to water grants or loans administered by the state. The department would also be allowed to request reimbursement for its management of the groundwater basin monitoring. SB 6 goes into effect with the passage of SB 1 and SB 7, also from Steinberg. SB 7 sets a target reduction in urban per capita water use in California of 20 percent by Dec. 31, 2020, and would set requirements for agricultural water suppliers to implement “efficient water management practices.”

Information about the aforementioned bills can be found at www.leginfo.ca.gov.