By Joel Hastings
President Dave Loquaci called to order the board meetings of the Madera Irrigation District and GSA on June 17, 2025 at 2:05 p.m. at the District offices at Rd. 28 ¼ in Madera. After the Pledge, it was announced there was no reportable action from the closed session held in the previous hour and no potential conflicts of interest on the agenda.
Public Comment
When public comment was invited, local grower Vincent Petrucci introduced himself and said that since May 19 there had been water coming into the basement of his home located not far from a District canal. He said that at the rate of an inch per hour, he had burned through several sump pumps and spent seven to eight thousand dollars trying to stop the flow. He said several staff members had come to see it, but no management or board
members. He said his family has been farming here for over 100 years and he has known several directors for many years. He asked for help controlling what he called seepage from the canal, even though there is no visual breech.
With no other comment, Assistant General Manager Dina Nolan congratulated Director Brian Davis on the recent birth of his baby daughter.
Board of EQ
Convening as the board of equalization, Controller Jennifer Furstenburg read the required script explaining the board’s duties to conduct a public hearing to review any taxpayer concerns about property valuations, assessments or similar issues. With no one present and no one on Zoom, she continued to present the tax rolls saying the total
approximate assessment revenue from property in the District is $6,238,838. This includes property in the city as well as several categories of agricultural land, assessed at different rates. She said some 900 parcels had changed ownership or been split, along with adjustments for lot line changes and assessment categories during the year as received from the county. The final roll will be approved at a special meeting of the board on June 20. Nolan thanked Furstenburg and her staff for tracking these changes throughout the year and presenting the details at this meeting.
SGMA
Convening next as the GSA board, the group heard updates from AGM Nolan. She said there has been good progress on the construction of recharge basins 10 and 11 on parcels recently acquired. Basin 10 is almost complete and work on Basin 11 is well underway, with all trees removed.
She said another exciting opportunity is working with Stanford University researchers on measuring the effectiveness of recharge basins. The grant application to fund this work has been approved. She continued saying there have been meetings with the other GSAs in the Subbasin on developing and implementing a domestic well mitigation program. While there has been some progress, she said, there is concern that some of the GSAs may not want to participate and then we’ll have to figure out what to do… both to address wells going dry and to keep the state from coming in. She said she expects to know more in another month. Loquaci commented that in the end, those GSAs choosing not to participate will regret it.
The Meeting
Reconvening as the District board, the consent agenda was approved including minutes of the April 15 board meeting, approval of warrant list of payments through June 9 totaling $2,764,319.89 and the financial reports showing total cash accounts of both restricted and unrestricted funds of $58,561,919.25 as of April 30.
Charles Contreras, operations and maintenance manager, presented his detailed report that was included in the meeting agenda on eleven pages of text and photos. He noted particularly the installation of 5,000 feet of 21-inch PVC pipe which would provide more reliable water for two users with three turnouts. He also discussed the Rubicon gates which are supposed to allow remote electronic operation, but which seem to present continuing issues, whether mechanical or digital. He said the required annual crop survey had been completed and was being compared with information compiled by the county ag
commissioner. At this point, Erik Rodriguez, community education specialist for Cooperative Extension in Fresno and Madera Counties, inquired how that survey had been completed. Contreras response was that it is a physical audit, then compared with the county information.
GM Report
In his General Manager’s report, Tom Greci said that even after a hub repair, a turbine at the Madera – Chowchilla Water & Power Authority had been taken off line again due to vibration in the axle. He said the water season is going well with growers taking lots of water quickly. A hitch is the now common practice of growers shutting down on weekends. He said he’s optimistic that water deliveries will extend through almond harvest in mid-August, after which demand drops significantly anyway. He said it’s likely there will be no Class 2 water designated.
He continued saying that the July board meeting will be canceled. Two summer interns, students from Cal Poly, are working in the office and in the field starting this week. Doing outreach for the District, he took part in a panel at a pistachio grower meeting along with NRCS staff describing joint projects. He said the District’s recently produced video had been featured at ACWA and will be shown as sort of a preview to the city’s movies in the park nights. The District will be exhibiting at the Madera Fair, and the plan is to stream the video as part of the exhibit. He said the RFP to develop a plan for District facilities had been pulled back because of the many questions that had been posed by respondents. Instead, a more general RFQ (request for quotation) will be put out as a first step to develop a plan.
In two items of new business, Director Davis was nominated to continue as a Director of ACWA Region 6. Davis said now that he’s been on the board since 2015, he feels he can
effectively represent the district and more broadly Valley agriculture on that board. He said that even with the wide range of interests and perspectives in ACWA across the state, groundwater is the number one issue.
Director Carl Janzen was again designated as the MID representative to complete the ballot for statewide ACWA officers. He too has been active on ACWA committees for many years.
Director Comments
Comments from directors conclude the meeting each time. Directors Tim DaSilva and Brandon Bishel passed. Davis said it looks like we’re running a lot of water and it’s interesting to see the start times and shut offs. He said he can’t believe how many leaks
must be continually repaired. Greci noted that the big swings for weekend shut downs are hard on the infrastructure and that they are looking for operational basins to hold weekend water.
Director Janzen said the Friant Power Authority had elected new officers and he is still the chair. He said a new lawyer will be selected because of a retirement. There has been a lot of discussion about the big generator at the bottom of the dam which is in St. Louis for repairs. He said he and other board members and staff had attended the Friant dinner on May 29. He said he had attended an outing put on by ACWA Region 4 about a study of salmon survival at the junction of the San Joaquin and Stanislaus Rivers. He said that bass, a non-native species, just love the salmonids and fingerlings, making salmon restocking problematic at best.
He continued saying he had attended the board meeting of the ACWA’s insurance subsidiary, JPIA. Rates for next year will go up with liability at 7.5 percent and workers comp at 15 percent. The self-insurance fund for medical stands at a total of $196 million and earned 7 percent last year. He said he attended an ACWA meeting about river headwaters and had been the only representative from a Valley water district. He said this is where our water comes from and we should probably show more support here.
President Loquaci said that he had attended a meeting of the Madera GSA committee. He said the $246 per acre fee will not be charged by the GSA and so with no funding, there will be no projects. He said the focus is now on domestic well mitigation and to fund that they will be assessing everyone in the white areas. He gave the example of his white area farming, with active acres reduced so that the parcel does not even use its sustainable yield water amounts. He is in fact, he said, subsidizing those who are using transition water. He said owners like him should not have to pay anything and instead, charges should go against those who are over drafting.
He said at the meeting it was said that the GSA had collected over $400,000 in fines for water used beyond the allocation and that this funding should be directed to the mitigation program.
He finished by pointing out that the 30,000 AF of recharge that had been in the original GSA plan was not going to happen since they’re giving up on projects, so that mount of water will need to be found some other way.
The open meeting adjourned at 3:03 p.m. and the board was to return to another closed session. In addition to current and anticipated litigation, the agenda included performance evaluation of Assistant GM Nolan.
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Madera Irrigation District – 12152 Road 28 ¼ Madera, CA 93637 phone 559/673-3514
Staff: General Manager -Thomas Greci, Assistant GM – Dina Nolan
Board: Dave Loquaci – president, Brian Davis – vice president, Brandon Bishel, Tim DaSilva and Carl Janzen
HISTORY: From www.madera-id.org The Madera Irrigation District (MID or District), founded in 1920, encompasses an area of approximately 139,665 acres. MID operates a primarily gravity irrigation distribution system with approximately 300 miles of open flow canal systems as well as 150 miles of large diameter pipelines.
The District has a Central Valley Project (CVP) repayment contract with United States Bureau of Reclamation (USBR) providing up to 85,000 acre feet (AF) of Class 1 and 186,000 AF of Class 2 water per year from the Friant Division (Millerton Lake). The CVP water is released from Millerton Lake through the Friant Dam, and then conveyed through the Madera Canal for delivery into the District’s service area. The District also entered into a CVP repayment contract with the USBR for the yield from the Hidden Unit (Hensley Lake). Under the Hidden Unit contract, the average annual supply available to the District is approximately 24,000 AF per year.
DWR SGMA # 5-022.06
