While California languished in a five-year drought, most state water districts didn’t adhere to a 2007 law that required them to track how much water they delivered to farms, reports The Sacramento Bee.
Roughly 80 percent of California’s water goes to agriculture, which is why the state Assembly demanded that any water agency that delivered more than 2,000 acre-feet of surface water to farms, or supplied more than 2,000 irrigated acres, notify the Department of Water.
But to date, those data are so poorly kept as to be practically useless, says the Bee, which looked at records from 2012 through 2015 by “123 of the largest irrigation districts, the ones reporting use of more than 10,000 acre-feet of water.” Just 24 of those districts turned in records every year, and many of their filings were incomplete.
“Some districts say they don’t have to follow the law, so they ignore it. Some say they had no idea they even had to comply. No state agency keeps a tally of how many districts fall under the law’s requirements,” says the Bee. “Because water districts self-report, the only way to know they’re required to file with the state is when they choose to submit records. The law doesn’t allow the state to issue fines for noncompliance.”
Some districts also say they would rather adhere to the standards set by Gov. Jerry Brown during the drought, which required any district supplying an area larger than 10,000 irrigated acres to develop a water management plan that takes into account factors like “groundwater use and recharge, precipitation and surface water,” says the Bee.
But critics point out that many water districts are years away from having the technology to track groundwater use. They argue that simply tracking “farm-gate” deliveries now would go a long way toward determining how much water is being used, and by whom.