SLO County supervisors adopt controversial new Paso Robles basin ordinance 

Despite pleas and legal threats from the local agricultural industry, the San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors narrowly adopted a new planting ordinance for the Paso Robles Groundwater Basin on Dec. 6.

The ordinance—the first major change in county policy for the parched basin in almost a decade—expands landowners' access to groundwater while also imposing a slew of new requirements and regulations for agriculture.

Passed by 3-2 vote, 1st District Supervisor John Peschong, 4th District Supervisor Lynn Compton, and 5th District Supervisor Debbie Arnold supported the policy as a "necessary evil" to fix an "unfair" ordinance that had been in effect for the basin since 2013.

According to them, those prior rules rewarded larger agricultural entities and punished small family farms. It halted expanded irrigation basinwide while allotting properties 5 acre-feet per year pumping exemptions. Under the new ordinance, that exemption increases to 25 acre-feet per year per site—enough water to irrigate a roughly 20-acre vineyard.

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• Map Courtesy Of SLO County
• WILD WILD WATER A new ordinance passed by county supervisors for the Paso Robles Groundwater Basin on Dec. 6 will enable landowners to pump more water each year.

"What I'm trying to change is the fact that for 10 years, some people have been allowed to use most of the sustainable yield, and more [of the basin], and many, many other landowners have had no ability to irrigate on their ag-zoned land," Arnold said. "They had constitutional rights taken from them in a kind of roundabout way and never returned."

Yet, the higher pumping allowance comes with caveats. To comply with the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), the county is establishing a new permit system for planting crops under the ordinance.

Planting applicants will have to abide by requirements, or mitigation measures, for those plantings, like buffering them 50 feet from riparian habitats, enacting dust control and carbon sequestration measures, reporting their monthly water use, and completing hydrology reports.

The new system and its requirements will not only apply to hopeful farmers wanting to take advantage of the 25 acre-feet per year exemption, but likely to any grower who wants to rotate crops or make changes to their farms that fall under the county's definition of a "new planting."

That aspect alone united the county agricultural industry against the ordinance—with the SLO County Farm Bureau going so far as to threaten litigation against the county if it passed.

"We don't want to go to court, but we want you to be aware of the legal implications of what you're doing," SLO County Farm Bureau Executive Director Brent Burchett said at the meeting. "This is the first time in the U.S. that any government—local, state, or federal—has created a mandate for greenhouse gas and carbon sequestration for planting crops."

Several farmers and ag groups spoke against the ordinance during the meeting. Randy Diffenbaugh, a vegetable and grain farmer in Shandon, said that the county will be discouraging farmers from engaging in beneficial practices, like crop rotations, in fear of getting caught up in the red tape.

"This is a far cry from the smaller, more efficient government, lower taxes, and more personal freedom that District 1 constituents have been told to expect," Diffenbaugh said. "There's a reason every ag organization in this county has opposed this."

Others urged the county to pass it, arguing that the prior ordinance favored big groundwater pumpers, hurt those who may have cut back during the drought, and damaged property values.

Candy Nachel, 73, a landowner in Templeton since 1996, told the board that she lost all the water on her property around the time that heavy agribusiness started coming into the North County.

"I have not one, but three wells [go] dry," Nachel said. "I've had to truck in water for myself, my son, and my granddaughter for a year and half now. ... This all started happening when the planning department or whoever governs this let Stewart Resnick, the water banker, and J Lohr move less than a mile from me. ... I can't even sell my property with no water. ... There's gotta be more people like me."

Dissenting 2nd District Supervisor Bruce Gibson and 3rd District Supervisor Dawn Ortiz-Legg focused their concerns on how the expanded pumping allowed by the ordinance could exacerbate the basin's overdraft.

While Gibson agreed that the prior ordinance for the basin created a "tough situation" with regard to equity, "there's a reason," he said. "We have a basin that's in crisis."

"This crisis remains exactly as it was nine years ago," he said. "In those nine years, nothing has been done to correct the overdraft of the Paso Robles Groundwater Basin. In the last two years, because of the recurrence of the drought, we've lost 80,000 acre-feet of storage from the basin."

Gibson, Ortiz-Legg, and other opponents of the ordinance said they favored extending the prior rules and working with local agencies to stabilize the basin via the state's Sustainable Groundwater Management Act process.

"I want to make something very clear," Ortiz-Legg said. "I want to make it clear that the reason why I oppose this is not because I want to penalize the people who lost out initially. I want to make sure there's water for them down the road."

Peschong, an early proponent of the new ordinance with Arnold, disagreed with that timeline.

"We need relief now for these farms," he said. Δ