Check The Box, Yolo Capay’s Hungry Hollow Farms are in a Water Crises

By Scott Steward

We have a Groundwater Sustainability Agency called the Yolo Subbasin Groundwater Agency (YSGA).  Evidently, the word "Sustainability" is optional when considering well permits in Yolo County, as Annie Main found out after a 2-year struggle to point out the obvious to the Yolo County Supervisors who voted 3 to 2 on April 8th last week to add another high capacity 350 gallons per minute corporate well to further drain Hungry Hollow's already well documented declining water table.  The Boundary Bend well could mean the end of her Good Humus third-generation farm.  What's worse, there are four more deep well applications on the way to Hungry Hollow.

You can't see our groundwater, but according to our Groundwater Sustainability Agency there are 346,000 acre feet that can be drawn from our 540,000 acres of ag land. That's 2.6 billion bathtubs worth of water.  That's our budget; use more and our invisible mega bathtub might not re-fill as high – ever.  Consider Annie Main, the most recent canary in a long line of canaries in the water coal mine, Yolo County the aquifer of choice for corporate tree crops (olives and nuts) and our County Supervisors, for now, the court of last resort.  

Hungry Hollow family farmers like Annie Main of Good Humus are under threat of disappearing. Her area of land is in a designated "Focus Area." Focus Areas are so named because of the historical steady Hungry Hollow drop in the water table and because it's taking forever to get decent monitoring wells into place to "understand" what locals have been saying for the last two decades (no more additional well capacity!).  

State and local water policy that was not enforced on April 8th.

In 2014, Governor Jerry Brown. signed three bills known collectively as the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA)

requiring local agencies to form groundwater sustainability agencies (GSAs) for the high and medium-priority basins. GSAs develop and implement  groundwater sustainability plans (GSPs) and are not supposed to do things that might jeopardize those plans in the meantime.

The YSGA Board is a collection of Yolo County city representatives, County Districts, and Reclamation Districts, totaling 19 people, and a Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation member to make 20 members.  Along with their Executive Director, Kristin Sicke, these are the people responsible for implementing our groundwater sustainability plan. (Next Board meeting: May 19th, 2025 according to the website).

They are having a hard time doing a good job of that right now, and their ability to do so in the future looks questionable after what took place at the April 8th Supervisor hearing. That's when the Board of Supervisors made it clear that they are not going to stand in the way of obvious misuse of our GSA.

What the public found out at the April 8th Yolo County Supervisors' meeting is that replacement does not really mean replacement, and sustainability does not really mean sustainability because the box was checked.  So said the County Counsel, who argued that the Supervisors consider no other contrary facts. County Counsel said the appeal to make Boundary Bend reapply was unfounded because…

"I have not seen a process where the office with the responsibility for primary approval is on the verge of making its decision; I have not seen one that would require you, the primary agency, to go back and reconsider its decision if its (the approval office's) rules have changed in the interim." This statement is admittedly a little hard to make sense. makes the case that the supervisor's use of common sense would be very much out of character with the expected practice of not questioning the decision of a "primary agency." 

The lawyer from Kronick (representing Boundary Bend) was very complimentary of the County administration's conclusion.

YSGA checked the box for replacement on March 29, 2023, but Boundary Bends well is not a replacement well.

Somehow it did not matter that Boundary Bend misrepresented the well they applied for and just thought nothing of checking the replacement box and then YSGA, once that box was checked, did not think they had the authority, the right, the something, to rescind their verification of Boundary Bend.

Replacement vs. new well application does not do justice to the discrepancy here.  Here is an analogy.  The ordinance for building near a park states that only daycare centers may be built near parks. Boundary Bend is building a shopping mall, but Boundary Bend checked the box "daycare center". The permit is approved as presented by the "primary agency" (YSGA).  Neighbors and park advocates are sure this can be corrected and then the magistrate says you have no recourse; the elected representatives are beholden (says County Council) to their duly appointed "agency’s" approved shopping mall next to the park. "We are obligated to sacrifice this park for the shopping mall."  Too bad public.

What the public and many advocates argued was that the Supervisors were completely within the law to rescind the well application.  This was thoroughly explained prior to the hearing and at the hearing.

The Board was not beholden to the YSGA mistake because the State expects use of judgment when it comes to sustainability.

The County and the YSGA were operating under a State Government Executive Order to make it clear that any well must not endanger sustainability.

Executive Order N- 7-22 on March 28, 2022 and later EO N-3-23 (“EO”) issued on February 13, 2023, required coordination between well permitting authorities (Yolo County) and GSAs before issuing new well permits.

That Executive Order part 4b(ii) exempted wells "that will exclusively provide groundwater to public water supply systems …or (iii) that are replacing existing, currently permitted wells with new wells that will produce an equivalent quantity of water as the well being replaced.

The Boundary Bend's well application was none of these, not a public water supply, not a replacement (there had been no operating well on the property for 60 years). There was no way to measure "an equivalent quantity of water" for Boundary Bend's application. You can listen to Annie Main's presentation (7 minutes, starting at  -2hr 6 minute mark) and the six minutes (starts at -1hour 38minute mark) of UC Davis Law School Students from the UC Davis Small Farmer Water Justice Clinic, Lev Boraz-Beaumont, Laretta Johnson and Drew Parrish.  They make it abundantly clear that Boundary Bend's checked "replacement" box on the application was a mistake.

The Boundary Bend well classification as a replacement "in-kind" "mistake" was made on March 29, 2023, and it was relived and relived again. It is still a mistake – ratified by the 3 to 2 majority of our County Supervisors on April 8th 2025.

What was also established, by over a year of research and documentation, 24 written statements and about 90 minutes of public testimony in favor of rescinding the current well approval and having Boundary Bend reapply, was the overwhelming evidence of the likelihood that Boundary Bend's well will contribute to long-term damage to Hungry Hollow’s water sustainability.  Painfully, the County’s Administration argued, sustainability was a criterion of no meaning because of a checked box.

Before we review some of what your County Supervisors had to say in taking their votes after very effectively presented evidence showed that 1) the Supervisors would have been on solid legal ground if they had recognized the misclassification of the well as replacement and 2) a key criterion for any well approval was the absence of having a negative impact on the sustainability goals for the basin.  Let's review the highlight of the State's Emergency Ordinance in place at the time.  It reads:

To maximize the extent to which winter precipitation recharges underground aquifers…..the Sustainability Agency managing the basin or area of the basin where the well is proposed to be located that groundwater extraction by the proposed well would not be inconsistent with any sustainable groundwater management the program established in any applicable Groundwater Sustainability Plan adopted by the Groundwater Sustainability Agency and would not decrease the likelihood of achieving a sustainability goal for the basin covered by such a plan…

And now the Board of Supervisor Votes:

Barajas: (Voted to let Boundary Bend shopping mall go ahead.) "I know that the intent of the Board and the intent of the Community was to make sure that the well table and the water does not subside and that (the new well) would not have that much impact. And I think there will be more impact, but based on the County ordinance, and rules and laws, Boundary Bend is checking off all the boxes."  

Frerichs: (Voted to have Boundary Bend reapply.) "Why did we go through this process over the last couple of years with an increased, temporary pause on new well permits, an increased scrutiny on groundwater Focus Areas, if we are just going to approve wells that have not been used in decades in a historically non-irrigated part of the county or in an area where we know there have been challenges with groundwater recharge in comparison with other parts of Yolo County?" 

Villegas: (Voted to let Boundary Bend shopping mall go ahead.) "There ought to be some assurances for those doing business in our community that they know what the rules of the game are…. Staff has an obligation to follow the path that we created….. I would support continued refining of the process going forward."

Allen: (Voted to have Boundary Bend reapply.) “I am very concerned about the sustainability of water. I am also on the Delta Water Coalition. We are looking at that Southern California needs a lot of water and they want to get it from the delta and what does that mean for all us up here… This is just one well; I don't have enough information about what this one well means for future sustainability because we (the County) are still looking at that.  The Focus Areas are frozen because there are long term sustainability concerns.” 

Sandy" (Voted to let Boundary Bend shopping mall go ahead.) "Decisions we make today are not just for today and next year's crops, they have to be decisions that are supportable 50 years from now. And the focus on sustainability is right. … I also strongly agree that we have a set of rules that guide us, and I'm satisfied that the applicant has met all of the expectations of our permitting process. I don't see any reason to object to that… But the absence of the production of water for however long that's been strikes me as problematic. I am not particularly satisfied with the finding that there will be no net increase in the water draw. I think clearly there will be an increase in the water draw."

On April 8th, Annie lost, and we lost by a vote of 3 to 2, but it could get a lot worse really soon.

Four more Boundary Bend-like well permits are pending in the Hungry Hollow basin.  Boundary and the applicants of the four additional wells are not sympathetic. Their trees take 500 gallons of water to produce a pound of olives, compared to 25-80 gallons for one pound of row crop leafy greens, beans, squash, and melons that grace our local farmer's markets and grocery stores.  Boundary will take 6 times the amount of water annually than a similarly sized row crop farm.  An amount of water not sustainable in an area already known for a steadily dropping water table. 

Groundwater overdraft is trashing our embattled San Joaquin Valley neighbors who are the latest in a line of devastated counties, Kings, Kern and Tulare.  Land subsidence, small farm loss, and land value loss have grown alarmingly.  Your home and your livelihood depend on a healthy aquifer in Yolo County.   A functioning YSGA, one that can enforce a water budget, is all that stands between you and the dusty shadow of a once-thriving landscape.  It will take groundwater accountability and enforcement if you plan on being in Yolo for more than a few decades.

The YSGA and our County needs to implement a water budget – now or never.

Concerning all of us in Yolo should be the unrelenting focus on beating back our commitment to sustainable groundwater.  Just exactly why is one of the most aggressive water law firms Kronick so focused on Yolo County?  Look at the firm’s website article about Yolo County's water policy.  We are in the crosshairs of the power to extract water. Kronick, and the extractive international corporations they represent, would just as soon have Hungry Hollow's farms become a story we tell instead of a self-sustaining community in which we live.