On October 9, 2015 Governor Jerry Brown signed into law two bills aimed at making groundwater disputes easier and faster to resolve in court. The new laws—companion bills AB 1390 (Alejo) and SB 226 (Pavley)—streamline California’s onerous groundwater adjudication process, which can drag on for decades. Such adjudications comprehensively establish groundwater right allocations for all users in a covered groundwater basin and, up to now, have been governed by common law...

Last week, the California Legislature sent two important bills on groundwater to Governor Jerry Brown for signature. The bills promise to revamp California’s complicated, lengthy, and arduous judicial process for adjudicating rights to groundwater, and to make the adjudication process comport with 2014’s pathbreaking law governing California groundwater. But as the new laws would speed the judicial process to comprehensively establish all groundwater rights in particular basins, the...

Last Friday, the California Legislature passed three bills that provide for the regulation of groundwater for the first time in the state’s history. Once signed by Gov. Jerry Brown, the bills—currently known as AB 1739 (Dickinson), SB 1168 (Pavley), and SB 1319 (Pavley)—will collectively constitute the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (the “Act”). The Act will establish as state policy that California’s groundwater resources are to be “managed sustainably for...

In October 2013, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issued its draft “Groundwater Remedy Completion Strategy – Moving Forward with Completion in Mind,” which would establish a recommended strategy for an adaptive management-style approach to managing contaminated groundwater sites. The strategy calls for rigorous data assessment of the performance of groundwater cleanup actions to achieve remedial action objectives (RAOs), and clarifies that RAOs and cleanup goals should be...