Most California farm-water suppliers are breaking this law. Why doesn’t the state act?

During California’s epic five-year drought, most of the state’s irrigation districts didn’t comply with a 2007 law that requires them to account for how much water they’re delivering directly to farmers, a Bee investigation has found. State regulators are largely powerless to stop them, but they don’t seem too bothered by it. They say they’d rather switch to a different form of reporting.Farm-advocacy groups say irrigation districts have been bombarded with a confusing slew of state and federal laws and regulations that often have overlapping reporting requirements, so it’s no wonder their compliance rates are low.“I’m not surprised there’s confusion in this among districts on what their requirements are because it’s been a moving target going back to ’07,” said Mike Wade, executive director of the California Farm Water Coalition. “There have been so many changes and so many things being asked of them.”A decade ago, California lawmakers passed Assembly Bill 1404 with the goal of keeping better track of farm-water use in a state where some 80 percent of the water used by people goes to agriculture. The law called for collecting “farm-gate” data to allow the state to monitor surface water delivered to farmers’ irrigation ditches. The idea was the reports could help regulators and the public better understand how much water is being used and where it’s going.