Tag: water use

New Water Laws Address Groundwater, Marijuana

As the California legislative session came to a close, Governor Brown signed more than 20 bills that address different aspects of water policy, ranging from water conservation and measurement to water quality. Two bill packages took important steps toward improving groundwater management and reducing the negative environmental impacts of marijuana farming.

New tools for groundwater management

Our recent report What if California’s Drought Continues? noted that improved management of our groundwater resources is critical to weathering droughts now and in the future. The 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) seeks to ensure long-term viability and reduce over-pumping by setting deadlines for local agencies to develop and implement plans for basin sustainability. Before SGMA, groundwater users in some Southern California basins recognized the need to balance their groundwater use and went through a legal process called adjudication, in which courts determine individual rights to groundwater and appoint an entity to oversee its use. By clarifying pumping rights, adjudication makes it much easier to manage basins. But the time and cost of some adjudications have discouraged the use of this tool in other regions. Two new bills will make adjudication more suitable for managing the state’s groundwater resources:

  • AB 1390 streamlines adjudication by expediting the identification of groundwater use in a basin, giving courts new power to quickly resolve disputes among pumpers, and other procedural improvements. The goal of the bill is to create a more affordable, easier, and faster adjudication process that is applicable to any groundwater basin in the state.
  • SB 226 is designed to ensure that streamlined adjudication doesn’t conflict with SGMA by requiring severely over-drafted basins to comply with its provisions and deadlines regardless of ongoing adjudication actions. The bill also is intended to provide guidance for courts to align adjudications with SGMA requirements such as groundwater sustainability plans and groundwater sustainability agencies.

Marijuana regulation

Another challenge highlighted by the current drought is the impact of marijuana cultivation on our water resources and environment. The State Water Resources Control Board and the Department of Fish and Wildlife (DFW) are running a joint pilot project to address these issues in the North Coast region. The Cannabis Pilot Project evaluates potential policy solutions for reducing the environmental impact of cultivation practices and managing illegal use of stream water for irrigation. The medical marijuana bill package —AB 243, AB 266, and SB 643—creates a foundation for making this pilot permanent and building a statewide program to regulate the impact of marijuana on water and the environment.

For example, AB 243 and SB 643 direct the Water Board and DFW to take statewide regulatory actions that protect instream fish spawning, migration, and rearing from the damaging impacts of marijuana cultivation.

Questions remain about how to fund this new effort, however. The Cannabis Pilot Project is funded for just three years, and covers just a small portion of the state. Additional funding will be required to expand regulations to cover California’s estimated 50,000 marijuana growers. AB 243 proposes a $10 million loan from the state’s general fund to jumpstart the new Bureau of Medical Marijuana Regulation in the Department of Consumer Affairs, but these funds will not support the environmental programs run by the Water Board and DFW. A fee on all marijuana cultivators is the best way to fund these programs over the long term, and the Water Board has authority to establish such fees.

Learn More:

Visit the PPIC Water Policy Center drought resource page

California Streams Going to Pot from Marijuana Boom

California has seen a recent boom in marijuana farms, mostly on private lands but also illegal grows on public lands such as national forests. Hard data are hard to come by for this crop, which is mostly grown in the shadows. But California Department of Fish and Wildlife officials estimate that production on public lands has increased by 55 to 100 percent in ecologically fragile north coast watersheds over the past five years alone. This surge is having a decidedly unhealthy effect on some of California’s rivers and streams. The situation is heating up as many of the state’s waterways are at all-time lows and some at-risk fisheries nearing collapse.

A study of four northwestern streams by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) found that marijuana plants consumed 20-30% of streamflow during the dry summer low-flow season—a crucial period for salmon and other species – as well as marijuana cultivation. Illegal marijuana growing also can bring a host of other environmental problems, from polluted runoff to habitat damage from improper road construction.

Peter Moyle, a fisheries expert with UC Davis and a member of the PPIC Water Policy Center research network, says, “All of these operations are taking water directly from streams, sucking away water from endangered Coho salmon, steelhead, tailed frogs, and other stream-dwellers, while damaging the banks of the streams. These diversions require permits—both from CDFW for stream alteration and from the State Water Board for diverting water—but few such permits seem to have been issued.”

Last year, Governor Jerry Brown marked $3.3 million in his budget proposal for enforcing pot growing rules in an effort to protect both the water supply and endangered species affected by growers.

Various state and local efforts are underway. The multi-agency Cannabis Pilot Project will enforce environmental protections in cannabis cultivation. The state’s Fish and Wildlife Watershed Enforcement Team inspects farms and seeks to permit them and bring them into compliance, but the understaffed team has been able to visit only a tiny portion of the state’s farms. New permitting processes to address illegal water diversions are in the works at the State Water Resources Control Board, but funding for compliance will be an issue. A recent a senate hearing called for a crackdown on illegal water diversions by marijuana growers.

In addition to highlighting the need for better regulation on the ground, the water impacts of marijuana growing are an example of the need for targeted and reliable sources of funding to address California’s environmental challenges. Currently, none of the tax revenue from California’s nearly $1 billion-a-year medical marijuana market is allocated for environmental protection.

Next year, Californians will likely be asked to vote on a ballot initiative to legalize possession of marijuana for recreational uses, as has been done in four other states and the District of Columbia. The potential ballot initiative provides an important opportunity to address a number of policy trade-offs, including the issue of how to pay for the environmental impacts of marijuana legalization.

Read “Regulating Marijuana” from the PPIC blog and Californians’ Attitudes Toward Marijuana Legalization.