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Greater Kaweah GSA March 14, 2022

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ConterraThe Greater Kaweah Groundwater Sustainability Agency held its Monday, March 14, 2022 board of directors meeting at its Farmersville offices in the Kaweah Delta Water Conservation District headquarters and online on Zoom. I find Zoom to be a superior meeting platform to all the others. If MS Teams isn’t the worst it’s so close to the bottom its keel must be wearing thin. Just plowing through the murk of the decaying online computer swill knocking lose barnacles, nails and rivets. Chairman Don Mills called the meeting to order at 1:00pm and took roll call. There was a quorum.

The Meeting

The minutes were approved and General Manager Eric Osterling had the unwanted task of telling the board there’s less water in the remaining snowpack than was expected. In fact the supplies are so low the trigger date to start capping the pumping from landowner wells may have to be moved up. It was pointed out the harm to growers will be more in Greater Kaweah than the Mid Kaweah GSA. Someone spoke out there’s more water in Mid Kaweah thanks to Tulare ID and much less white area. It was said TID might not even run this year. It’s pretty dry when those folks don’t run.

The original plan was to implement the pumping restrictions in October but things are not as rosy as when the original plan was proposed. This led to the discussions about the comments on the draft rules and regulations. Since SGMA implementation kicked in there really hasn’t been much precipitation in the state. Folks were hoping for some normal to wet years to help prepare for when things get bad. Things got bad before there were any rainy years.

Osterling said Kaweah Delta Water Conservation District’s GM Mark Larsen has some suggestions about cleaning up the rules and regulations draft update before posting it. The comments will be posted as soon as they can be but the draft itself will be edited a little by Osterling and attorney Aubrey Mauritson. She said it would be a good idea to not change the draft currently posted and instead show which matters are being addressed to avoid redundancy. The final can then be posted later. The 90-day comment period is up in May if I understood.Technoflo

Osterling said last month the board decided to set up a one time 10 percent reduction in carryover of any pumping saving. If a grower goes over the pump cap up to 10 percent they will be allowed to only pump 90 percent.

Dennis Mills from Kings County said it is important to know treating groundwater like a monetary bank account is not a good idea. He said subsurface flows are going to change underground supplies giving more to one area and less to another. This entire topic will be further picked over in closed session.

Task Orders & Grants

Osterling announced Rebeca Quist of the Kings River Conservation District has moved to Provost & Pritchard engineering to help that firm with outreach. A testament to KRCD’s outreach powers is the board’s willingness to approve a new task order for P&P to provide more outreach services. Osterling gave a quick update on the status of various grants.

Tomorrow will be the first Land IQ Workshop, virtually, and there will be an in person workshop with Dr. Joel Kimmelshue at the World Ag Center later on the 25th from 10am to 2pm. Much of this will be about how satellite monitored evapotranspiration can measureLand IQ water usage and a chance to introduce the Kaweah Water Dashboard. This is an online feature to gather data on a large scale to help growers make decisions in regard to SGMA. Osterling said Land IQ loves to hear from growers. He said they “geek” out on getting the most accurate data possible.

GSP & DWR

Osterling said GKGSA had a very productive meeting with DWR about addressing Kaweah Subbasin’s Groundwater Sustainability Plan determination. Like all the other GSAs in the Valley GKGSA’s GSP as deemed incomplete. He said having seen what other GSAs have gone through GKGSA had a good list of questions and he said the results are not nearly as scary as they could have been. It sounded like Osterling was very optimistic to modifying the GSP into acceptance.

He also reported the outreach and communications efforts are in good shape. Lots of good articles and educational pieces on the GKGSA website www.greaterkaweahgsa.org By the way, most of the WaterWrights.net reports include links to the entity being covered and hopefully accurate names of board members and titles of staff. Often there is a short history lifted from the entity’s website. It’s all in the fine print at the bottom of the report.

Osterling also said the dashboard is going to help a lot with presenting usable information on ET. The raw data obtained by satellite goes through ground-truthing at stations and any anomalies are double checked. The data format is delivered by a monthly report in a raster file and shaped file. In the raw form it isn’t really user friendly, I mean what raw satellite data is? There are ways to present the data so applicable information can be obtained by non-rocket surgeons.

Osterling said Semitropic WSD has been doing this for some time and he believes there are lessons to be learned there. Dividing by fields or APNs and what about roads? Lots of questions to be answered. Someone said Land IQ is getting the data and the user friendly interface dialed in pretty good. As an example; accounting for the times where neighboring fields encroach on others’ property and that will change the outcomes. But the granularity of detail is already impressive and improving.

Osterling said getting the various committees together has been a bit of a challenge as spring is a busy season. He’s working on herding the various committee members into the same room at the same time. The next GKGSA board meeting will be April 11th at 1:00pm. The meeting then went into closed session.

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ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.  Copyright 2022 by WaterWrights.net/DAW

SGMA The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act of 2014 calls for the formation of Groundwater Sustainability Areas within Basins and Sub-basins to develop Groundwater Sustainability Plans.

Greater Kaweah GSA JPA – Chair Don Mills-Lakeside Water ID, Vice Chair Chris Tantau-Kaweah Delta WCD, Pete Vander Poel-County of Tulare, Ernie Taylor-Kings County WD, Stephen Johnson-Cal Water Service, Eric Shannon-St Johns WD, Paul Boyer-Rural Communities Committee, Joe Cardoza-Stakeholder Committee & Brian Watte-Kaweah Delta Water Conservation District representative.

Eric Osterling-General Manager/Secretary, Aubrey Mauritson-Legal Counsel

Offices shared with the Kaweah Delta Water Conservation District, 2975 Farmersville Blvd., Farmersville, CA 93223   Tel. 559/747-5601

www.greaterkaweahgsa.org

DWR Listing: Basin San Joaquin Valley, Sub Basin Kaweah 5-022.11

 

 

 

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