Pajaro Valley Water Management v. Amrhen
| Decision Date | 26 July 2006 |
| Docket Number | No. H027817.,H027817. |
| Citation | 141 Cal.App.4th 928,46 Cal.Rptr.3d 476 |
| Court | California Court of Appeals Court of Appeals |
| Parties | PAJARO VALLEY WATER MANAGEMENT AGENCY, Plaintiff and Respondent, v. Ray AMRHEN et al., Defendants and Appellants. |
Johnson & James, Robert K. Johnson, Aptos, Attorneys for Defendants and Appellants Ray Amrhen et al.
Harold Griffith, Attorneys for Amicus Curiae for Appellants Ray Amrhen et al.
Nossman, Guthner, Know & Elliott, Stephen N. Roberts, Nicole A. Tutt, Sophie N. Froelich, San Francisco, Attorneys for Plaintiff and Respondent Pajaro Valley Water Management Agency.
San Diego County Water Authority, Daniel S. Hentschke, General Counsel, San Diego, Attorney for Amicus Curiae for Respondent Association of California Water Agencies.
Plaintiff and respondent Pajaro Valley Water Management Agency (Agency) brought this validation proceeding for a judicial determination that its 2003 ordinance increasing the groundwater augmentation fee to be charged to operators of wells within its jurisdiction is valid. Defendants and appellants Ray Amrhein, Guy George, Mark Pista, San Andreas Mutual Water Company, Patrick Layhee, and John Sheffield (Objectors) appeared in opposition to the requested decree. After taking evidence, the trial court held the ordinance valid, rejecting contentions that the matter was not proper for a validation proceeding, that two Agency board members had a disqualifying conflict of interest, and that the ordinance contravened several constitutional provisions limiting the power of local entities to impose property taxes, assessments, and property-related charges. Objectors brought this appeal, contending that the court erred in each of these determinations. We find no error, and affirm.
The area subject to the Agency's jurisdiction is home to around 80,000 persons, about half of them in Watsonville. This area lies atop the Pajaro Valley Groundwater Basin, which was described by Agency witnesses as essentially a single interconnected groundwater basin.1 Extraction of groundwater through wells supplies slightly over 95 percent of the water used in the basin.2 The remainder comes from a variety of surface sources including sloughs, rivers, creeks, and springs. About 86 percent of the water used within the basin goes to agriculture.
Since the 1950's the basin's groundwater supply has been subjected to chronic overuse, resulting in overdraft and seawater intrusion. Overdraft directly depletes supply by extracting more water than is replenished or "recharged" by natural processes. Recent annual extractions from the basin total about 70,000 acre-feet, which reflects an overdraft of about 9,000 acre-feet. This in turn leads to seawater intrusion, which occurs when fresh groundwater is drawn below sea level, causing seawater to flow into the neighboring freshwater, rendering it too saline for use. Freshwater has been drawn to below sea level throughout much of the basin. An Agency witness testified that if seawater were allowed to intrude unimpeded into the areas of declining ground water elevation, As it is, seawater intrusion renders unusable an additional 11,000 acre-feet of fresh groundwater every year.
Because of the depletion that has already occurred, seawater intrusion would not be halted merely by eliminating the 9,000 acre-feet per year of overdraft, or even the 20,000 acre-feet of overdraft plus water lost to increased salinity. Rather, the Agency estimates that to achieve exclusion by reduced extractions alone would require cutting extractions by about 44,000 acre-feet per year.
In 1984 the Legislature created an agency to address these problems through its enactment, as an urgency measure, of the Pajaro Valley Water Management Agency Act. (Stats.1984, ch. 257, §§ 1 et seq., pp. 798 et seq.; 72B West's Ann. Wat. — Appen. (1995 ed.) ch. 124 et seq.) (PVWMAA). The agency is composed of a seven-member board of directors, each of whom must be a voter and resident of the basin. (Stats.1984, ch. 257, § 402.) Four directors were to be elected from districts to be defined by the board. (Id., §§ 402-406.) One each would be appointed by the boards of supervisors of Monterey and Santa Cruz Counties and the city council of Watsonville. (Id., § 402.) The appointed members were required to "derive at least 51 percent of their net income from the production of agricultural products" and could be selected from "lists . . . submitted to the appointing power for each vacancy by the Santa Cruz County Farm Bureau and the Monterey County Farm Bureau." (Id., § 402, p. 805.)
In creating the Agency the Legislature found that "the management of the water resources within the Pajaro Valley Water Management Agency for agricultural, municipal, industrial, and other beneficial uses is in the public interest and that the creation of a water agency pursuant to this act is for the common benefit of all water users within the agency." (Stats. 1984, ch. 257, § 101, p. 798.) The declared purpose of the Agency is "to efficiently and economically manage existing and supplemental water supplies in order to prevent further increase in, and to accomplish continuing reduction of, long-term overdraft and to provide and insure sufficient water supplies for present and anticipated needs within the boundaries of the agency." (Id., § 102, subd. (f), p. 799.) It decreed that the Agency "should, in an efficient and economically feasible manner, utilize supplemental water and available underground storage and should manage the groundwater supplies to meet the future needs of the basin." (Id., § 102, subd. (g), p. 799.) It decreed that the management of water resources under the Act should be carried out in light of a number of objectives, including "the avoidance and eventual prevention of conditions of long-term overdraft, land subsidence, and water quality degradation" (id., § 102, subd. (a), p. 799), the establishment of "reliable, long-term supplies" rather than "long-term overdraft as a source of water supply" (id., § 102, subd. (b), p. 799), the reduction of long-term overdraft "realizing that an immediate reduction in long-term overdraft may cause severe economic loss and hardship" (id., § 102, subd. (c), p. 799), and the achievement of economic efficiency by "requir[ing] that water users pay their full proportionate share of the costs of developing and delivering water" (id., § 102, subd. (d), p. 799). The Legislature anticipated that "long-term overdraft problems may not be solved unless supplemental water supplies are provided." (Id., § 102, subd. (g), p. 799.) Accordingly it declared that the Agency could appropriately "acquire, buy, and transfer water and water rights in the furtherance of its purposes." (Id., § 102, subd. (e), p. 799.) It declared that "[a]gricultural uses shall have priority over other uses under this act within the constraints of state law." (Id., § 102, subd. (d), p. 799.)
The PVWMAA specifically empowers the Agency to adopt ordinances levying "groundwater augmentation charges on the extraction of groundwater from all extraction facilities within the agency for the purposes of paying the costs of purchasing, capturing, storing, and distributing supplemental water for use within the boundaries of the agency." (Art. 10, § 124-1001, at p. 1001, p. 687.) It also authorizes the Agency to "regulate, limit, or suspend extractions from extraction facilities" (art. 7, § 124-711, p. 680), and provides criteria for the allocation of rights to use available groundwater (id., § 124-712). It empowers the Agency to commence a "groundwater rights adjudication" (art. 11, § 124-1106, p. 690), which would effect "the determination of substantially all rights in the groundwater basin or the area subject to the adjudication" (art. 3, § 124-310, p. 666).
An economist testified about the effects on the local economy of a "worst case scenario" in which a groundwater rights adjudication would reduce groundwater extractions to 24,000 acre-feet per year, of which 12,000 would be allocated to residential use, leaving about 0.4 acre-feet per acre for farmers. He testified that this scenario would result in the loss of 9,000 jobs and an annual reduction in agricultural production of $360 million.3
In 2002, the Agency enacted, by unanimous vote, a Revised Basin Management Plan (BMP), which evaluated the problems of overdraft and seawater intrusion, examined a variety of potential solutions, identified a preferred solution, and recommended specific projects to implement it. The result was a plan whose primary components were (1) construction of a 23-mile pipeline from San Benito County to the coast; (2) construction of a coastal distribution system for delivery of water to the area west of Highway 1 within the Basin; (3) procurement of water, or water rights, from owners in the Central Valley; (4) development of additional water supplies from local sources4; and (5) eventual delivery of the resulting supplies to coastal farmers as well as some farmers along the pipeline route.5
An Agency expert opined that the plan represents a reasonable engineering approach to achieving Agency goals, and is the most reasonable of many alternatives considered in terms of cost, environmental effects, and ability to meet those goals. The plan would bring in a total of about 18,500 acre-feet composed of 1,000 from Harkins Slough, 4,000 in recycled Watsonville water, and 13,400 in pipeline imports. The plan also sought to achieve savings of about 5,000 acre-feet through conservation. An Agency witness opined that these measures would solve the problems of overdraft and seawater intrusion, even though they fall well short of the amount by which extractions exceed the safe yield. He gave two reasons for this conclusion, the first of seemed to be that by eliminating coastal extractions and replacing them with irrigation from...
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