Thursday August 15, 2024
Monterey Now —
When the state Sustainable Groundwater Management Act was signed into law in 2014, Monterey County already had a leg up, at least from a data perspective: Since 1995, the Monterey County Water Resources Agency has been tracking groundwater extraction amounts and groundwater levels throughout most the Salinas Valley (called the GEMS program), giving those working to create state-mandated groundwater sustainability plans locally information to base their plans on.
But as the Salinas Valley Basin Groundwater Sustainability Agency has been creating its plans throughout the Salinas Valley sub-basins, it’s run up against a problem: Some areas the state wants data on are outside the area of MCWRA’s GEMS program, so SVBGSA was stuck in a pickle – the data simply did not exist.
Enter new leadership – in 2023, Piret Harmon and Ara Azhderian became general managers of SVBGSA and MCWRA, respectively, and decided to deepen the collaboration between the agencies to leverage MCWRA’s in-house expertise.
Harmon’s agency has been awarded three grants totaling more than $20 million to build up to 20 monitoring wells where gaps in the data exist. Four have so far been built and 10 are being planned. SVBGSA will then convey ownership of the wells to MCWRA.