Wednesday May 21, 2025
Monterey Herald —
Two Monterey County agencies have joined ranks to collect water data for wells in the Salinas Valley, an effort to hold off the state from coming in to regulate the over-pumping of groundwater supplying much of the county’s $4.4 billion agricultural economy.
The two agencies – the Monterey County Water Resources Agency and the Salinas Valley Basin Groundwater Sustainability Agency – have separate missions but both are concerned with water quantity and quality within the Salinas Valley Groundwater Basin, which is a series of smaller aquifers that span the entire 90 miles of the Salinas Valley.
A couple of those aquifers, called subbasins, are considered in “critical overdraft” by the state Department of Water Resources because of a century’s worth of over-pumping. The state defines critically overdrafted basins as those in which the continuation of current practices would likely result in significant adverse environmental, social or economic impacts.
A couple of those basins in southern Monterey County are not in overdraft so the task of the agencies is to maintain those water levels to prevent them from becoming over-drafted, said both Ara Azhderian, the Water Resources Agency general manager, and Piret Harmon, the Sustainability Agency’s general manager.