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Another legal challenge has been filed seeking to block the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California’s $175 million purchase of five islands in the heart of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. This time, San Joaquin County and a group of Delta farmers allege that the pending sale represents a breach of contract.

Delta Wetlands Property, a subsidiary of Swiss financial services conglomerate Zurich Insurance Group, bought the islands 20 years ago with the aim of converting them into giant reservoirs that could store water in wet years and ship it to Southern California when supplies run low.

Matheny Tract sits deep in the bowl of California’s Central Valley, an area that’s been hit hard by the prolonged drought. Like the nearby community of East Porterville, Matheny is seeing wells run dry, but before East Porterville became famous as the town that dried up, it shared a different kind of water problem with Matheny—one that also affects hundreds of other small, mostly Latino communities in the area.

While the rest of California may still be struggling with drought, Del Norte County is not. And, that has some local officials questioning why the state wants to apply the same tighter water regulations here as elsewhere.

A new regulation requiring water diversion permit holders to monitor withdrawal beyond what they are currently doing — down to the acre-feet-per minute — is drawing fire from Del Norte County Supervisor Chris Howard and other stakeholders because new monitoring systems could cost thousands of dollars to install.

The perhaps not-so-secret nature of California’s major reservoirs — the big artificial lakes designed to impound floodwaters and snowmelt coursing down the state’s biggest rivers — is that they’re little more than big bathtubs. We depend on a beneficent nature to turn on the taps every winter and fill them. And we pull the plug every spring to drain them for use by farms and cities far away. Drought, not very beneficent to us or to anything else that might depend on water, interrupts the cycle of filling and emptying.

For years California was behind the curve on managing groundwater, with dire results. There are now 21 groundwater basins or subbasins in the state that are critically overdrafted. Help may be on the way, though. The state took action in 2014 with the passage of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA). The legislation will take decades to fully implement, but if done well, would provide a crucial framework for managing one of the state’s most important water resources.