www.montereycountynow.com JUNE 25-JULY 1, 2026 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 23 debated as a fast-approaching deadline approaches: By August, plans must be provided to the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) for review. If a solution isn’t proposed and approved by DWR, the state could assume control of local water sources, imposing pumping restrictions and fees—although whether or not these pumping cuts would be valley-wide is up for debate. While the exact impact to the county’s largest industry, agriculture, remains unclear, officials underscore the cost and ripple effects will be huge. Estimates from water experts project annual economic losses of anywhere from $1.3 to $1.9 billion if pumping restrictions are imposed. But while the cost of doing nothing is high, so is the cost of doing something. “The greatest fear that we have among the grower community right now is how much this is all going to cost,” says Norm Groot, executive director of the Monterey County Farm Bureau. “The projects that we’re facing are astronomically expensive, over $1 billion in proposed projects, probably closer to $2 billion. That’s just an astronomical number that the community is worried about.” Though mitigating seawater intrusion remains the top priority, other subbasins face their own urgent challenges and deadlines, and must meet sustainability requirements by 2042. But in a world where water knows no boundaries, yet is regulated within a fragmented governance structure, the question persists: Who benefits, and who pays? The yellow posts that dot the Salinas Valley easily go unnoticed. Each one marks a monitoring well, protected by a yellow metal casing, scattered across roadsides and agricultural fields. Hydrologists with the Monterey County Water Resources Agency visit 130 of these each month to get a picture of how groundwater levels in the Valley’s aquifers are changing. “[Some areas] tend to see faster recharge since they’re next to the river,” says Guillermo Diaz-Moreno, a hydrologist with MCWRA who collects data from wells from Castroville all the way to San Ardo. “But overall, there’s been a decline since we started measuring.” Underneath our feet is a vast and largely unseen world of water, its movement monitored and increasingly, though not completely, understood. Since the 1940s, MCWRA has been measuring groundwater levels, historically relying heavily on privately owned wells for data. As people drilled additional and deeper wells over time, the agency has accumulated decades of historical records. Combined with data from its own monitoring wells, and data collected from the U.S. Geological Survey, hydrologists gained an understanding of the valley’s water table and underground sediments, forming the basis for groundwater models now used under SGMA. “We have a really large effort that we usually do in November-December, when pumping has slowed down but before we tend to get winter rain to help us understand how much the natural system is recovering as we decrease pumping,” says Amy Woodrow, senior hydrologist at MCWRA. More intensive groundwater monitoring hinges on water usage by agriculture, she explains. All of this knowledge gave the County an advantage when it came to understanding our groundwater systems, how it can be stored and how people depend on it—influencing nearly every decision about water management— and eventually shaping projects for SGMA. “Water always flows downhill,” SVBGSA Advisory Committee Chair Curtis Weeks says, “or towards money.” Years before SGMA, the subbasins that make up the Salinas Valley were mapped to reflect how groundwater moves underground as it travels from the southern parts of the county and northward alongside the Salinas River, before emptying out into the Pacific Ocean. Groundwater in California during this time went largely unregulated. Scientists and water managers had ways to observe what was happening underground, but few effective tools to manage it strategically. Legal pressures mounted, then came years of drought. Beginning in 2012, groundwater basins in agricultural areas experienced drastic declines. Land subsided, some wells ran dry. In the coastal area of Castroville and Moss Landing, abnormally dry conditions furthered the spread of seawater into the shallow aquifers. Following a declaration of a drought state of emergency, the California Legislature passed SGMA, signed by former Gov. Jerry Brown. “Groundwater management in California is best accomplished locally,” said Brown in signing SGMA. The legislative package required local agencies to form groundwater sustainability agencies (GSAs), then develop groundwater sustainability plans (GSPs) for basins that were designated by SGMA as high or medium priority. The hydrological boundaries of the Salinas Valley were then transformed into legal management units. The six primary subbasins today that make up the Salinas Valley Groundwater Basin include: 180/400-foot Aquifer Subbasin, Eastside Aquifer Subbasin, Wells used to monitor groundwater levels are scattered across the Salinas Valley. Above, Guillermo Diaz-Moreno, a hydrologist with the Monterey County Water Resources Agency, collects data from these wells monthly. Right: Diaz-Moreno checks the depth down to the water table. Every three months, more intensive monitoring is done using special instruments to take more precise measurements before downloading the data.
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