San Luis Obispo County supervisors are proceeding with a new regulatory framework for pumping water in the Paso Robles Groundwater Basin that organized agriculture opposes.
The Board of Supervisors voted 3-2 on April 6 to move ahead on an environmental impact report for a proposed ordinance that would replace the existing ordinance, which essentially prohibits increased pumping from the struggling North County aquifer.
The new ordinance would allow a higher level of groundwater use for hopeful small farmersāallowing up to 25 acre-feet per year of unchecked pumping per property, instead of the 5 acre-feet per year currently allowed.
Led by 5th District Supervisor Debbie Arnold, the proposed change is an explicit effort to redistribute the basin’s water to smaller farms that may have lost their water rights when current ordinance was passed in 2013.
“I think that would be a whole lot more reasonable. It would give properties the ability to go into a commercial farming operation,” Arnold said.
But agricultural groups, from the SLO County Farm Bureau, to the Paso Robles Wine Country Alliance, to the SLO County Agricultural Liaison Advisory Body (ALAB), have come out in strong opposition.
The new ordinance sets up a permit system for irrigated agriculture over the basin. Farmers who use more than 25 acre-feet but aren’t increasing their water use must receive a ministerial permit to do so. New irrigation that exceeds a six-year “look back” of a property’s historical pumping will be prohibited.
Farming groups warn that the ordinance is a slippery slope to more burdensome regulations and roadblocks for agriculture at the county government level, which will have “far-reaching impact on the majority of the property owners, assisting a few farmers while impacting the many,” according to Dan Rodriguez, who chairs the county ALAB.
“It is the opinion of ALAB that this proposed ordinance is bad for SLO County’s $2.5 billion ag economy and sets dangerous precedence for expanding regulatory burdens to local farmers and ranchers,” he said in a public comment.
The groups also worry about how the five-fold increase in what’s considered trivial water use will collectively impact the aquifer, which the state deems in critical overdraft. Opponents prefer that the county extend its current rules and let the multi-agency Paso Basin Cooperative Committee implement a long-term groundwater sustainability plan.
The supervisors’ vote on April 6 authorized the county to expend nearly $400,000 to push the ordinance and its EIR to completion in early 2022. Ī
This article appears in Apr 8-18, 2021.
Always appreciate New Times coverage of ag issues, and the way the Supervisors amended this resolution was confusing, but the main issue here was overlooked: the ordinance’s initial inclusion of a new discretionary permit (including a CEQA review) for new crop plantings. This is the issue that galvanized the agriculture community to comment. The Supervisors thankfully relented and removed this “Tier 3” permit at the urging of farmers and ranchers across the county. A copy of Farm Bureau’s comments are below. – Brent Burchett, SLO County Farm Bureau
ORAL COMMENTS MADE BY SLO COUNTY FARM BUREAU TO BOS APRIL 6, 2021
Madam Chair and Board Members,
On behalf of San Luis Obispo County Farm Bureau members and our local agriculture industry, we urge you to VOTE NO on Agenda Item 26 the Paso Basin Planting Ordinance.
We want to first say thank you to each of you for your willingness to meet with us over the past several weeks to find common ground on this issue. We have not found that yet, but I am hopeful that if we work together we can. We know this issue is not going away anytime soon.
We appreciate that the intent of this ordinance is a positive one, and one that could help some Farm Bureau members. We will continue to meet and work collaboratively with all of you, and we support finding ways to help all of our farmers and ranchers who are not currently able to irrigate more than 5 acre-feet per year. Through conversations with you and outreach among our own membership, we have only identified 6 farmers and ranchers who were actually locked out of irrigating their crops when the Ag Offset Ordinance was implemented. To be clear, we absolutely care about finding a solution for those 6 and any other farmers in the Basin, but we also have to be mindful of long-term impacts to our entire agriculture economy.
County staff has not yet put out the exact number of properties that would be eligible to expand their pumping under this new Ordinance. I believe Supervisor Arnold estimated 4,800 properties in a previous meeting. If 4800 properties pump an additional 20 acre feet per year, thatās 96,000 acre feet of new pumping in the Basin. Let’s say only 10 percent take advantage of this, thatās still nearly 10,000 acre feet per year.
The agriculture community is united against allowing the Board to inject CEQA into farming and ranching. SLO County Farm Bureau, along with your SLO County Agricultural Liaison Advisory Board, Grower-Shipper Association of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo Counties, Paso Robles Wine Country Alliance, the San Luis Obispo County chapter and Santa Barbara County chapter of the Coalition of Labor, Agriculture & Business (COLAB), and other agriculture industry stakeholders, oppose any land use ordinance that includes a discretionary permit for routine agriculture practices like planting crops. Why are farmers in South County and the Coast worried about what youāre about to do in Paso Robles? Because they know what a terrible precedent this is for all of agriculture.
This ordinance is not the way forward. The more appropriate (and inevitable) regulatory pathway for groundwater regulation is the Groundwater Sustainability Plan process, not a new county land use ordinance. The County is the lead Groundwater Sustainability Agency and has the ability to address longterm challenges with groundwater distribution through the Groundwater Sustainability Plan (GSP). We donāt have to wait on approval of our GSP by the California Department of Water Resources (the State has until Jan. 2022 to do so) to begin implementing the basic provisions of reaching groundwater sustainability.
If you are dead-set on a new land use ordinance, there are alternatives that would be preferable to what is presented today. You can extend the look-back period to a time sufficient to redress these farmers situation. You could change the documentation or criteria to determine eligibility to resume historical irrigation. You could keep Tier 1 and Tier 2 and remove Tier 3. But whatever you do, please keep CEQA out of ag.
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