How much water is in the ground?

SACRAMENTO - Legislation that would help reveal how much drinking water remains beneath California communities scored an unusual victory Tuesday.

Sponsored by state Sen. Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, the bill would require local entities to monitor how deep they must delve before hitting groundwater, then report it to the state. Los Angeles, Ventura, Riverside and San Bernardino counties have been measuring how much water is taken from the ground since 1955.

No one knows how much water is left beneath the Central Valley, but the lakes of water lying beneath the Central Valley form, collectively, the second-most pumped aquifer in the nation. So much water has been sucked out of the ground that the land above has sunk in some places.

The Legislature has passed the monitoring bill two years running, only to see it vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger - whose veto message employed arguments used by the California Farm Bureau Federation to oppose the bill.

But Tuesday, the Farm Bureau dropped its opposition, and Steinberg's bill passed the Assembly Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee 7-2.

Assemblyman Tom Berryhill, R-Ceres, voted against the measure but left open the possibility he'd vote for it once he got a chance to read the latest version.

Nearly two-thirds of San Joaquin County's water supply comes from groundwater, and experts say such heavy use lowers permanent water levels in the aquifer by 200,000 acre-feet of water each year - enough water to supply the entire city of Stockton for a year.
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