![]() ![]() In the past four decades, thousands of wells have been drilled in Marin to allow homeowners, commercial enterprises and public entities to avoid restrictions on water use imposed by drought conditions and overuse of our water supplies. Marin Voice: Search for firm supply starts with recycled water infrastructure Yet Marin lacks a study, a water replacement district and a water conservation district. Groundwater is a local responsibility under the state Constitution, although AB 3030 has had the effect of increasing water basin and other studies of groundwater since 1990 and Proposition 13 (the one passed in 2000, not 1978) allocated money to the counties to do so. This was done to avoid the law passed in 2014 requiring counties across the state to develop groundwater plans to achieve control of losses to over use and to develop recharging methods. As reported by the Marin Independent Journal in 2018, the Marin County Board of Supervisors modified boundaries over the Sand Point Area Basin giving away control over the Wilson Grove Basin (physically located in Marin) to Sonoma County. As of 2019, there were only plans to monitor five more.įormer Supervisor Katie Sears is right in her comments about the abdication of the supervisors’ responsibility for the groundwater basins in Marin. According to the information submitted by Marin, only two wells in the county have been monitored. According to the California in 2014 Department of Water Resources data in Bulletin 118, no Bay Area county had one and none had yet passed a groundwater ordinance. The main problem we face with groundwater resources is that Marin has no countywide groundwater study or plan. But it has had little effect, due partly because 2020 was the first year for compliance and it has little teeth or enforcement staff. Laws passed in 2014, especially the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act should have made a difference. After decades of intense pumping (2 million more pumped out than is recharged) the state legislature passed laws regulating pumping. At the state level, California officials are finally doing something about water wells. ![]()
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