Brandon W. Nakagawa, PE and
The American West and particularly the State of California is faced with the critical challenge of sustainable development and equitable management of increasingly scarce water resources. The entirety of this concern is framed by greater competition between regional powers for limited surface supplies from major rivers and heightened attention regarding the future use and control of ground water by overlying landowners, appropriative agencies and the State. San Joaquin County, California is currently home to approximately 650,000 people and sustains a $1.75 billion agricultural economy. The population is expected to increase to over 1.17 million by 2030. Water demand countywide is approximately 1,600,000 acre-feet per year, 60 percent of which is supplied by ground water. The California Department of Water Resources has declared the Eastern San Joaquin Ground water Basin (Basin) "critically overdrafted," indicating that the current rate of ground water pumping exceeds the rate of recharge and is not sustainable. The Northeastern San Joaquin County Ground water Banking Authority (GBA), organized in 2001, has provided a consensus-based forum to local, State, and federal water interests to work cooperatively to study, investigate, plan, and develop locally supported ground water banking and conjunctive use programs. Following the completion of the Eastern San Joaquin Ground water Management Plan in 2004 with its adopted Basin Management Objectives, additional stakeholder discussions where conducted to undertake the development of a basin management framework and operations criteria that would be designed to help predict and manage the effects of ground water recharge and use programs to recover from critical overdraft. The development of this effort was based on the assumption that the Eastern San Joaquin Ground water Basin could be operated conjunctively without court-ordered basin-wide adjudication through a stakeholder-supported management framework and operations criteria for enhanced ground water recharge and sustainable use.
