SECTION 1.
The Legislature finds and declares the following:(a) Drinking water is a necessity of human life, and contaminated drinking water can lead to sickness and death:
(1) California law provides that every human being has the right to safe, clean, affordable, and accessible water adequate for human consumption, cooking, and sanitary purposes.
(2) Providing safe drinking water is one of the most fundamental duties of any government. While Californians rely on public water systems operated by local agencies and utilities to deliver drinking water to their homes and businesses, the State of California has a duty to ensure that water is safe and clean.
(3) Water for drinking is a natural resource that is inherently public. The people of California own the water within our borders, and the state grants water rights only for its reasonable use for beneficial purposes including human consumption.
(4) The California Constitution requires that all diversions and use of water be reasonable, while the California Supreme Court has recognized that the state holds a public trust responsibility over California’s water resources.
(b) Groundwater provides a significant portion of California’s drinking water, in urban and rural communities alike. From the earliest days of statehood, communities relied on pumping groundwater. While not all Californians enjoy groundwater underlying their communities, those communities that have groundwater have maximized its use for human consumption:
(1) Of the 8,700 public water systems, 7,800 rely on groundwater, at least in part. These public water systems draw on more than 15,000 wells, while individual landowners draw drinking water from thousands more private wells.
(2) Overall, groundwater supplies one-third of the water used in California in a typical year, and in drought years, as much as one-half.
(3) Nationally, according to the United States Geological Survey, 51 percent of Americans rely on groundwater for drinking, including 99 percent of the nation’s rural population. Groundwater provides 22 percent of all fresh water.
(c) The governance of California’s groundwater resources is diffused among many public agencies and private parties:
(1) Landowners enjoy a right to use water lying under their lands for beneficial uses on the surface. When landowners in a basin draw too much water out of their aquifer, commonly called “overdraft,” they may go to a court to adjudicate how much water each landowner may take out.
(2) Based on an adjudication of an aquifer or litigation over groundwater contamination, a court may structure the management of an individual aquifer to address overdraft or groundwater contamination.
(3) Water agencies and groundwater users may voluntarily establish a joint program to manage the aquifer on which they rely.
(4) Counties may exercise their police powers to address certain groundwater issues, including the drilling and operation of groundwater wells. County public health officers also may provide oversight to or regulate the smaller public water systems in their jurisdiction that rely on groundwater.
(5) In state government, the State Water Resources Control Board (the board) has responsibility for protecting groundwater quality and may adjudicate groundwater rights under certain circumstances. The State Department of Public Health (the department) has responsibility for overseeing the operation of public water systems that use groundwater to provide drinking water. The board may regulate drinking water source quality but not the public water system. The department may regulate the public water system, but not the water source.
(d) The Legislature has sought to address the difficulties of communities that suffer poor drinking water quality, especially those in communities that lack the financial resources to resolve their drinking water problems:
(1) In 2008 the Legislature approved Senate Bill 1 of the Second Extraordinary Session of 2008, to address nitrate contamination in the Tulare Lake Basin and the Salinas Valley. That law required study and development of pilot projects to better understand and remediate nitrate contamination in those regions. As required, the board studied and prepared a report addressing nitrate contamination, which was delivered to the Legislature in 2013.
(2) In 2009, the Legislature adjusted the safe drinking water program to maximize use of federal stimulus funds available to communities that lack the resources to improve their water quality to meet safe drinking water standards.
(3) In each annual Budget Act, the Legislature has appropriated funding available from a variety of sources, including voter-approved general obligation bonds, to fix public water systems that do not provide safe drinking water.
(e) In order to provide Californians with a comprehensive system to protect their groundwater for drinking water, the state needs a consolidated and comprehensive strategy and program for protecting and improving the quality of California’s drinking water resources, especially from groundwater. The state needs to improve the quality and availability of groundwater for those communities that rely on groundwater for drinking. State and local leaders need to address the conflicts inherent in competing demands for high-quality groundwater.
(f) The most effective way to create a consolidated and comprehensive strategy to ensure safe drinking water for all Californians is consolidating all water quality programs into the one state agency whose primary mission relates to water quality, the board. The benefits of that consolidation are numerous, including the following:
(1) Greater focus of financial and staff support for the drinking water program.
(2) More coordination and less duplication among programs addressing drinking water quality.
(3) Greater efficiencies of scale and shared resources, resulting in overall lower costs.
(4) Broader array of expertise concentrated on drinking water quality, with agency experience in water quality science and policy.
(5) Coordination between water source protection and drinking water treatment programs.
(6) More accountability for drinking water programs, with a unified agency that has responsibility for oversight and funding and a five-member expert board that makes decisions in public.
(7) Improved understanding and coordination between water quality and water rights programs.
(8) Consolidated reporting of water use and quality in one agency.
(9) Agency experience in fighting fraud, as part of the Underground Storage Tank Cleanup Fund.
(10) Consolidated funding programs for related water resources, including both source water protection and wastewater treatment.
(11) Combined agency experience in working with the private sector to leverage public funds for public purposes.
(12) A board decision process that allows for public airing of the conflicts inherent in managing critical and limited water resources.
(g) Crafting the most effective management structure for achieving a comprehensive strategy for protecting drinking water quality requires broad public participation. It is the intent of the Legislature to lead a public process that includes all stakeholders and agencies that may be affected by these reforms to assess the issues and options for fulfilling the state’s responsibilities to ensure drinking water quality for all Californians.