The ripples are still being felt from a Kings County farmer’s decision last year to sell $73.2 million in water rights to a Southern California water agency. The Kings County grand jury recently issued a report arguing that more should have been done to stop the sale and keep the water in the area, which relies on its agricultural economic base.
Now a bill designed to make such sales harder in California is bubbling back to the surface.
Originally authored by Assemblyman Juan Arambula, D-Fresno, in response to the Kings County sale, the bill died in the Assembly earlier this year amid a wide range of opposition.
The proposed law has been resurrected under the co-authorship of Sen. Fran Pavley, D-Agoura Hills.
When Arambula first proposed his bill, he was upset about the sale in which Sandridge Partners sold water from the Dudley Ridge Water District in western Kings County to the Mojave Water Agency for urban development in Lancaster-Palmdale.
The bill would require an economic impact study on how permanent transfers would affect the area losing the water. Current law doesn’t require that economic hardship be included in the environmental impact studies of such transfers. The bill would also forbid anybody selling surface water supplies and then pumping groundwater to make up the difference – unless the groundwater source is monitored.
Arambula, perhaps understandably, didn’t get the support of his fellow Democrats in the Assembly, many of them from urban districts that would have no problem securing additional water from the San Joaquin Valley.
