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Inyo County and DWP run into murky language in the Long Term Water Agreement

Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on May 24, 2008 at 7:31 am

From the Inyo County Register:

A bit of disagreement has surfaced between Inyo County and the Los Angeles Department over the definition of different types of wells as they’re listed in the manual that governs the two entities’ Owens Valley groundwater management.

The county is concerned the disagreement, due to unclear language in the Inyo-L.A. Long-Term Water Agreement, could lead to wells being sunk and pumped and not scrutinized at the level they should be.
Essentially, Inyo County Acting Water Director Bob Harrington recently explained, the issue comes down to whether a well should be considered a “new” well or a “replacement” well.

Harrington briefed the Inyo County Board of Supervisors on Section VI of the LTWA, which deals with “new” wells and their production capacity. “Within the language here, we’ve run into disagreements with L.A.,” Harrington said. “How this section applies to replacement wells is unclear,” and the Water Department hopes to work with both the LADWP and the Inyo County Board of Supervisors to clarify the language.

In addition to the discrepancies in the language of Section VI of the LTWA, Harrington said that the process of Inyo-L.A. Technical Group evaluations of newly constructed wells, either new wellfields or replacement wells, is also unclear.

As an example, Harrington explained that “LADWP replaced wells on the Bishop Cone and because they were replacements, not new wells, they didn’t go through as much evaluation as a new well would, and ended up with more pumping capacity.” He said the higher pumping capacity was, at least in part, a result of newer equipment being installed in the wells, which were built in the 1920s.