As California struggles against the problems posed by its current drought, there has been a great deal of attention paid to the lack of groundwater regulation. Melody Gutierrez has a great example today, from Paso Robles:

How scant has the crucial underground water supply become around the San Luis Obispo County city? Sue Luft can tell you anecdotally. The water levels in wells that feed homes and wineries around her 10-acre property just south of Paso Robles have dropped 80 feet in some areas, leaving many with no choice but to take out loans to drill farther down. Luft calls it a “race to the bottom.”

Why are they racing? Because they can, I guess:

“The drought is being used as a political mechanism to take away property rights,” said Cindy Steinbeck of Steinbeck Vineyards & Winery in Paso Robles. “We are in a serious drought, but that doesn’t mean individual landowners should have to give up what is theirs by law.”

Groundwater has been regulated in vastly different ways from other water sources. California requires permits and licenses to take water from streams, rivers and lakes, but no such process exists for groundwater. Surface water and groundwater are treated differently in state law in a way that resource experts say makes little sense, given that one affects the other.

“California has the least structure and fewest requirements (compared with any other) state,” said Andrew Fahlund, deputy director of the California Water Foundation. “The system has survived up to this point because we weren’t facing a significant crisis.”

And thus it is framed – property rights versus government regulation. But that’s not quite right.

While Fahlund is right that state government doesn’t regulate, California is home to pioneering examples of communities that, independent of any external regulation, realized the race to the bottom would kill them and found a way to self-regulate to avoid the tragedy of the commons.

Back in the 1950s, water pumpers in the Los Angeles Basin were in a similar race to the bottom. Recognizing the problem, they did the difficult political work of self-imposing a political regime that shared the burden of ending the race. (There’s a great history of this in the Water Replenishment District of Southern California’s annual report – pdf.) It’s where Elinor Ostrom did her pioneering research on common pool resource problems, and it’s fun to read how proudly the WRD folks embrace her work today:

The formation of the Water Replenishment District is one of the studies she used as an example of “how to organize to avoid the adverse outcomes of independent action” and “to obtain continuing joint benefits” in the face of “temptations to free-ride, shirk, or otherwise act opportunistically.”

The details of how the L.A. Basin people did it are beyond the scope of this blog post, beyond noting that Ostrom’s work concluded that there are lots of ways for communities of interest to do this sort of thing. But one of her central findings is that it’s up to the folks in Paso Robles to succeed or fail.

I’ve often written about the ways in which our rivers in the western United States have become like plumbing (and here, here, and especially here). But one of the most interesting things to me about metaphors is when you push them to too hard. You can learn a lot at the point where the metaphor breaks down.

So what does it tells us about the nature of the California “plumbing” system when, as Matt Weiser reports, they have to drive salmon to the ocean in trucks?

On Monday, state and federal wildlife officials announced a plan to move hatchery-raised salmon by truck in the event the state’s ongoing drought makes the Sacramento River and its tributaries inhospitable for the fish. They fear the rivers could become too shallow and warm to sustain salmon trying to migrate to sea on their own.

To folks in many parts of the arid western United States, the notion that some California communities don’t meter residential and business water sales seems crazy.

It is. This may be, by some measures, a record drought in California. But even without it, Californians have known they have serious water stresses. That it has taken this long to get this basic water management tool in place is, in fact crazy. Here’s Paul Rogers:

Despite urgent calls for water conservation amid one of California’s worst droughts, more than 255,000 homeowners and businesses across the state can still use all the water they want without paying higher bills.

And nobody even knows how much water they are using.

Why is this? First, homes and businesses without meters, while large in number, are the exception:

Most California residents have had water meters for generations.

Los Angeles finished installing them in the 1920s. San Jose has had meters on every home since the 1930s. Oakland began installing them in 1906 and was fully metered by 1940.

But people seem to like living in a wet, green world:

But even in a large, prosperous city like Sacramento, plans to require water meters sparked controversy for decades.

“For some people, it’s like going to Alabama and saying you are going to register their guns,” said Barbara O’Connor, director emeritus of the Institute for the Study of Politics and the Media at Cal State Sacramento.

“It’s a visceral reaction,” she said. “People in some places view it as a birthright that they have big trees and green grass. They see the water in the rivers, they walk along it, and they raft on it. It’s part of the right of being a Sacramentan.”

The full article is worth reading for those interested in water policy steps that are relatively straightforward and that can make a difference in building resilience against drought and climate change. “You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” as my business school grad colleague likes to say. And kudos to the Mercury-News for publishing the full data table.

Mark Lubell at U.C. Davis has a fascinating post about the history and politics of drought:

[N]early every scientist, commentator, and politician is using drought to make some call for their preferred political change. Regulate groundwater. More storage. Build the twin tunnels. Pass the long-delayed water bond.

So given that we’ve been here before (click through for useful historical examples), did the hair-on-fire response to previous drought create water systems in California that are more resilient and able to handle the current one?

Therefore, the second key question is whether or not the policy changes stimulated by past droughts have actually improved water management in California. Have we learned anything from our past experiences? Stated more precisely, the question is how much damage will California suffer, given the same level of drought?

I would argue that Southern California’s relative stable situation supports a “yes” answer to the question, but I’d defer to people in the midst of the California drought for a more informed response.