About Us

The California Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) is a package of three bills (Assembly Bill 1739, Senate Bill 1168 and Senate Bill 1319) that were passed by State legislature and signed by the Governor in 2014. SGMA’s intent is to mandate that groundwater basins throughout the State are managed in a manner that provides long-term stability in groundwater levels while not degrading water quality or creating unreasonable land subsidence. In the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) Bulletin 118, 515 groundwater basins and subbasins were identified and associated boundaries for each were defined. Additionally, DWR analyzed the current groundwater conditions in each subbasin and determined which basins were in need of remedial actions to obtain a state of sustainability. This resulted in DWR’s rating of each basin with either a high, medium, or low-priority status designation, with a high-priority status resulting in the need for immediate action.

The overall intent of SGMA is for local public agencies to develop a Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSAs) over each high and medium priority basin or subbasin described in Bulletin 118. Under SGMA, a GSA is then obligated to develop a Groundwater Sustainability Plan (GSP) that provides a roadmap for managing the basin on a sustainable basis. The timing of development and implementation of the GSPs is a function of the priority status.

SGMA defines sustainable groundwater management as the “management and use of groundwater in a manner that can be maintained during the planning and implementation horizon without causing “undesirable results.” Undesirable results are defined in SGMA and summarized as any of the following effects caused by groundwater conditions occurring throughout the basin:

• Chronic lowering of groundwater levels indicating a significant and unreasonable depletion of supply if continued over the planning and implementation horizon
• Significant and unreasonable reduction of groundwater storage
• Significant and unreasonable seawater intrusion
• Significant and unreasonalbe degraded water quality, including the migration of contaminant plumes that impair water supplies
• Significant and unreasonable land subsidence that substantially interferes with surface land uses
• Depletions of interconnected surface water that has significant and unreasonable adverse impacts on beneficial uses of the surface water