During California’s epic five-year drought, most of the state’s irrigation districts didn’t comply with a 2007 law that requires them to account for how much water they’re delivering directly to farmers, a Bee investigation has found. State regulators are largely powerless to stop them, but they don’t seem too bothered by it. They say they’d rather switch to a different form of reporting. Farm-advocacy groups say irrigation districts have been bombarded with a confusing slew of state and federal laws and regulations that often have overlapping reporting requirements, so it’s no wonder their compliance rates are low.
Archive for date: May 21st, 2017
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In 1992, prospectors in Los Angeles hatched an idea for a new water supply that was improbable and speculative, even by Southern California standards. Far off in the Mojave Desert, beneath the flat dry lake bed of the Cadiz Valley, millennia’s worth of groundwater could be pumped and piped 43 miles to the Colorado River Aqueduct, the crown jewel of the Metropolitan Water District’s massive web of infrastructure. The water then could be sold to any of the 26 member agencies of the MWD.