photo credit: USDA/Lance Cheung
Part of an agriculture well system sitting at the edge
of a plum orchard outside Yuba City in California's
Central Valley photographed in 2015.

The county of Sonoma has already been sued once, accused of harming local rivers and streams by not keeping tabs on water wells. That suit was settled out of court. Now, environmental groups are suing the county again.

The plaintiffs aren't exactly calling the county's actions since the settlement 'bait-and-switch', but the groups, led by the California Coastkeeper Alliance, have refiled against the county, accusing it of not going far enough. The suit, like lots of litigation in California, is over water, said local environmentalist Rue Furch.

"Basically, we have one glass of water and multiplying straws," Furch said.

Furch, an environmentalist focused on water issues, and a local League of Women Voters spokesperson, said she has been keeping careful track; and that pressure is growing as more homes are built and vineyards laid out.

“Groundwater is sort of like a savings account,” Furch said. “We have to know how much we're taking out of our savings account in order not to overdraw. So we really, really need to have a very clear understanding of what our resources are and how much we're using relative to how much we actually have.”

Currently, according to Furch, county staffers are writing up implementation plans for the new ordinance, which was approved in April. She said despite the new rules, some issues remain.

"California Coastkeeper Alliance and other allies went through the entirety of the new well ordinance and determined that it still wasn't in compliance," Furch said.

Drevet Hunt is the lead lawyer for California Coastkeeper Alliance on the lawsuit.

“Groundwater is not an unlimited resource and the county's ordinance continues to treat it as such,” Hunt said. “It doesn't require or mandate any reduction in overall use, including in the groundwater basins within Sonoma County that are already understood to be overdrafted and being used unsustainably.”

The Coastkeeper Alliance and Russian Riverkeeper are accusing Sonoma County of failing its duties under the Public Trust Doctrine. That by allowing so many water wells, as the initial complaint states, "the extraction of groundwater interconnected with nearby streams and rivers impacts streamflow and public trust resources and uses, such as the fish and availability of water for recreation, in those surface waters."

Furch argues that by approving hundreds of groundwater tapping wells, the dewatered underground aquifers get refilled by water seeping in from rivers and streams, thereby reducing river volumes and potentially even making streams vanish.

“There are some real problems with the thresholds that were set by the Board of Supervisors to issue permits,” Furch said. “The county used a two acre feet of water for average residential use, which is what the county is saying is adequate for across the counter permits. Two acre feet is eight times the state's estimated use.”

Furch said she fears all that pumping is going to add up in a bad way.

“So, that's one issue we really feel needs to be amended,” Furch said. “A new well can be drilled without any analysis of cumulative impacts and possibly cause acute impacts on existing wells and interconnected groundwater and stream flows."

Russian Riverkeeper Executive Director Don McEnhill weighed in on the lawsuit as well.

“The lawsuit is intended to get the county to spend more time evaluating the impact of a new well on, say, Mill Creek outside of Healdsburg,” McEnhill said. “And will that dry up that stream in the summer or reduce the flow in that stream to the point where it's disconnected and all the juvenile salmon are dying.”

One of the most basic problems: state law considers water in rivers, creeks and lakes, termed 'surface water' as entirely distinct from what's in aquifers, termed groundwater.

Furch, Coastkeeper and science generally disagrees with that distinction.

"We have a finite supply,” Furch said. “It basically comes down as precipitation, it circulates by way of lakes and streams and rivers, and then there's groundwater, but it's only one resource."

As he previously mentioned, McEnhill said to see the connection between surface water and groundwater we need look no further than a waterway like Healdsburg’s Mill Creek.

“In the sixties, when I was a kid, there was pools that were six feet deed that today in a big rain year like this year, that pool’s may be two feet deep because so much water is being drawn out of the system by wells,” McEnhill said.

Water watchers like Furch say the exemptions in the current ordinance may be letting the degradation continue, and that without a way to collect data, officials won't even know.

And McEnhill, while he did commend the efforts of county staff to get the rules right, said there’s a clear path to get things fixed.

“If the county supervisors had decided in that hearing that we are gonna commit to this adaptive management plan, we wouldn't have grounds for a lawsuit,” McEnhill said. “They punted on that. There's no assurance they're ever going to do this analytical work to ensure that the updated ordinance will make sure we don't dry up streams and existing wells.”

To get a sense of the stakes, McEnhill said we just need to look inland.

“Look at the Central Valley and look at where unrestrained well drilling will take a community, and we've already seen many, many of our salmon streams just dried up,” McEnhill said. “I think, beyond the public trust issues raised by the lawsuit, when you look at where we're going with climate change, it's imperative that we manage well permit issuance and acknowledge the reality that some areas of our county are water scarce.”

The California Coastkeeper Alliance’s lawsuit against Sonoma County and its well rules comes back before a judge in January.