Local agricultural groups continue to speak out against a new proposed county ordinance regulating water use from the Paso Robles Groundwater Basin, which will go before the SLO County Planning Commission on Oct. 28.
The new ordinance, championed by a majority of the Board of Supervisors, would lift a basinwide moratorium on groundwater pumping by giving all property owners up to 25 acre-feet per year of exempted water use. The current exemption is 5 acre-feet per year.
After months of negotiating with county officials and dissecting its environmental impact report, SLO County farming groups remain adamantly opposed to the ordinance, claiming that it will exacerbate the basin’s overdraft and add “cumbersome” new layers of regulation on agriculture.
“We urge you to NOT recommend the planting ordinance to the Board of Supervisors,” the SLO County Farm Bureau wrote in an Oct. 24 letter to the Planning Commission. “The costs of unprecedented new mitigation measures on agriculture created by this planting ordinance far exceed the benefit.”
Joining the Farm Bureau in opposing the ordinance were the Creston Advisory Body, the Paso Robles Wine Country Alliance, the Grower-Shipper Association of Santa Barbara and SLO Counties, the SLO County Agricultural Liaison Advisory Board, the Shandon-San Juan Water District, and the Sierra Club, according to public comments.
Most of the opposition’s comments focused on how a five-fold increase in exempted pumping would add stress to an already overpumped resource and how a set of new mitigation measures for those impacts would add costs and headaches for farmers.
“The proposed ordinance fails to recognize and analyze the economic impacts that such a land-use policy will have on existing agriculture,” the Paso Robles Wine Country Alliance’s letter read. “It does not bring relief to the smaller farmers for whom it is ostensibly intended to help due to additional mitigation measures that must be undertaken. The ordinance would create a high-level scrutiny of agriculture, which does not exist anywhere else in the county.”
Initiated by 5th District Supervisor Debbie Arnold in 2021, the intent of the new ordinance is to bring more equity to the Paso basin, according to its proponents. Arnold said that too many farmers lost their water rights during the last major drought in 2011 because they stopped irrigating, and then the county instituted a moratorium on expanded pumping without an offset in 2013.
But the comment letters indicate agriculture’s preference for keeping the county’s existing water offset ordinance, and using the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) as the mechanism to achieve sustainability and equity in the basin.
“We believe [SGMA] remains the appropriate and efficient regulatory vehicle to address the local needs specific to the Paso Robles Basin—not the county’s land-use authority, which has countywide implications and will have many unintended consequences,” the Grower-Shipper Association’s letter read. Δ
This article appears in Oct 27 – Nov 6, 2022.
