Daniel Mufson | Feb 17, 2017

Napa Valley Sustainable Groundwater Alternative

In late December Napa County filed a so-called Alternate water Plan with the California Department of Water Resources (DWR). It basically said in hundreds of pages, costing taxpayers at least $634,200 in consulting fees alone, that the county had done sufficient monitoring of the Napa Valley Sub-basin water supplies over the past ten years to be able to demonstrate that everything would be just fine over the next 20 years, thank you very much. Or in other words, told the state to leave us alone.

Napa Vision 2050 and our affiliates filled comments taking exception with this conclusion as did:

• The Union of Concerned Scientists;
  
• US Department of Commerce, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Marine Fisheries Service;
  
• The Nature Conservancy.

Two trade groups, the Napa County Farm Bureau and the Napa Valley Vintners praised the report as in, it was a heck of a job!

Our key problems with the county's report are:

• Cherry-picked data from a few monitoring wells, errors in calculations.
  
• The role of drain tiles in dumping ground water from vineyards was not appropriately accounted for.
  
• The report assumes that cities will not need to use any ground water as sufficient water will be available to the them from the State Water Project and the city's reservoirs for the next 20 years even in the face of prolonged droughts and raising temperatures.
  
• Assumes that current use of ground water by vineyards and wineries will be sustainable.
  
• Report assumes minimal growth of population and agriculture over 20 years.
  
• The Alternative claims groundwater is sustainable yet the Sub-Basin has undesirable results such as: sea water intrusion, groundwater level declines, declining groundwater quality and land subsidence.
  
• The county does not have, nor desires to have, a mechanism for dealing with well owners and neighbors who are experiencing loss of water supplies. Currently, they want to study the problems...... avoiding any direct help.
  
• The public was afforded minimal opportunity to comment-there was no stakeholder engagement.
  
• Details on these comments can be found here.

More Links to Napa's Sustainable Groundwater Alternative can be found here


Napa County Climate Action Plan

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We wonder just how much it has cost the County (we taxpayers) to fund this report over the several years of its development in consultant fees and staff time? We feel that the County's current development of a Climate Action Plan (CAP) is taking a similar approach; using a consulting company that is trying to minimize the largest sources of GHG production--

Come see for yourself at the WICC Climate Action Plan Workshop next Thursday February 23rd, 3PM at 2751 Napa Valley Corporate Drive, South Campus, Building A, First Floor, Conference Room, Napa CA 94558.

We'll have more on this soon.

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