Thursday September 8, 2022
Capital Press —
Dropping aquifer levels in the Klamath Basin have convinced Oregon regulators to weigh in on groundwater management across the state line in California.
The Oregon Water Resources Department has found fault with how groundwater resources are characterized in a management plan for the Tule Lake area of northern California.
“We felt pretty strongly they were not appreciating the decline concerns that we have on the Oregon side of the border,” said Tom Byler, the agency’s director, during a recent meeting of the state’s Water Resources Commission.
The OWRD objected that Tule Lake’s groundwater sustainability plan analyzed data from 2015-2018, which doesn’t consider vigorous groundwater development in earlier years or other problems that have developed more recently.