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Ready or not, California’s new Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (“SGMA”) is here and mine operators should be vigilant in monitoring and actively participating in developments under the law. Previously, the use of groundwater was largely unregulated.  Now local agencies are in the driver’s seat when it comes to addressing a very complex problem: managing groundwater to ensure sustainability.

Earlier this week, environmental consultant Bob Anderson, of Geosyntec and Stoel Rives attorneys Wes Miliband and Tom Henry hosted a webinar about the implications of SGMA for mine operators.

Releasing its draft Urban Water Management Plan (UWMP), the San Diego County Water Authority said that San Diego County will continue to have a safe and reliable water supply for decades. Urban Water Management Plans must be updated every five years by law.

The draft plan — known as the 2015 UWMP based on when the updating process began — estimates that the region’s future water demands will be about 14 percent lower in 2020 and about 15 percent lower in 2035 compared to projections in the 2010 plan.

As California enters its fifth year of official drought — and its ninth dry year in the past 10 — the elements of a modern, sustainable water system are finally taking shape. The state is improving water efficiency in agriculture and urban areas, expanding wastewater treatment and reuse, figuring out how to capture more storm water, and starting to monitor and manage badly over-drafted groundwater basins.

In Washington D.C., however, special interests are still pushing ineffective and inequitable water strategies. Nowhere is this tension between new water strategies and outmoded federal thinking more apparent than in the California drought legislation currently before Congress.