SVGMD Awarded $5.45 Million by CDWR

On September 12th, California’s Department of Water Resources (CDWR) announced the Sierra Valley Groundwater Management District (SVGMD) had been awarded full funding for its request for resources needed to implement the Groundwater Sustainability Plan (GSP) submitted to CDWR this past June and approved by CDWR in late July.

The $5.45 million provided by CDWR’s grant will fund continued data collection and management, annual reports, a five-year update to the GSP, projects and management actions designed to sustain beneficial groundwater uses and groundwater-dependent ecosystems, and grant administration. A grant contract between CDWR and the SVGMD is expected to be executed at some point between November 2023 and January 2024.

CDWR’s evaluation of the SVGMD’s GSP did include several Recommended Corrective Actions to be addressed “as soon as possible”:

1. Investigating the basin fill and bedrock units to identify the appropriate principal aquifer(s);
2. Providing more information about how SVGMD will utilize data from the adjacent Chilcoot Subbasin during the plan’s implementation;
3. Amending the definition of undesirable results for the chronic lowering of groundwater levels;
4. Amending the definition of undesirable results for land subsidence and establishing sustainable management criteria based on groundwater surface elevation changes;
5. Providing a rationale for why water quality conditions in 2021 were selected;
6. Continuing to fill data gaps, collecting additional monitoring data, coordinating with resources agencies and interested parties to understand beneficial uses and users that may be impacted by depletions of interconnected surface water caused by groundwater pumping, and potentially refining sustainable management criteria; and,
7. Providing updates to the monitoring network.

Failure to address these issues before future plan evaluations may lead to the SVGMD’s GSP being deemed incomplete or inadequate.