Groundwater supplies are not infinite - when will we take serious notice of their depletion?

Permitted uses with high water demand impact groundwater supplies. This resource is becoming so valuable that groundwater is the focus of the 2022 UN Water Development Report – Groundwater: Making the invisible visible. 

The UN report sums up the water situation faced by Sonoma County: “Reliance on groundwater will only increase, mainly due to growing water demand by all sectors combined with increasing variation in rainfall patterns.”

The State just completed its recommended Groundwater Sustainability Area (GSA) reports for the Santa Rosa Plain, Petaluma and Sonoma Valley. And, again, the models do not reflect new climate realities; rather, the GSAs used 50-year precipitation data to populate modeled scenarios, tending toward mid-line assumptions versus an analysis of worst-case conditions, even though certain aquifers are in an over-draft condition. 

Sonoma County General Plan’s Water Resources Goal-2 specifies that groundwater should be managed as a valuable and limited shared resource. Again, County officials know that many areas of the County are designated as water scarce, have streams vulnerable to streamflow depletion attributed to groundwater extraction, and aquifers with declining groundwater levels. 

April’s “Seeing the Forest for the Water” expert panel webinar, presented by the Pacific Forest Trust issues more warnings. Experts note that a primary role of forested watersheds is to retain and cleanse our water supplies. And, long term studies of forested watersheds indicate that water retention and releases are diminishing. Thus, with drought and climate driven wildfires, water management models must change.  

Permitting a whole new water intensive use - cannabis cultivation – in fragile watersheds with reduced water retention is irresponsible. Currently, a large proportion of cannabis cultivation draws on the County’s groundwater supplies, and recent water sustainability plans do not account for a large increase in water demand from new cannabis permits.  When groundwater is a scarce common commodity, especially in areas with small, confined groundwater aquifers, uphill pumping or a catchment basin that collects winter rainfall before it percolates to groundwater may threaten neighboring water supplies. 

Not only should project-specific permitting require robust water analyses to ensure the new demand does not jeopardize confined aquifers or draw down neighboring wells, but the County's EIR for the Ordinance update must realistically account for this potentially enormous increase in water demand. This is not the time for optimistic projections and hopeful statements -- we need to seriously contend with whether our watersheds and groundwater basins can sustain these new uses while protecting existing wells from drying out.

In February, 2022, the State of Oregon allocated $1.5 million to address cannabis operation violations of residential and ag water rights – this is a significant issue that must be addressed by Sonoma County as well.