Groundwater Sustainability Assessments: A Review of the Department of Water Resources’ Determinations on Groundwater Sustainability Plans in Critically Overdrafted Basins

Of the 46 GSPs submitted in January 2020, the Department of Water Resources (DWR) determined eight GSPs to be adequate and 34 GSPs to be incomplete. In this paper we evaluate to what extent DWR’s determinations provide oversight on the key issues of drinking water, disadvantaged communities, the environment, stakeholder involvement,and climate change. We summarize the corrective actions that DWR is recommending or requiring, as well as compare DWR’s determinations to the assessment of 31 GSPs that we conducted in 2020. We also reviewed the 11 comment letters submitted by the State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB), 25 comment letters submitted by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW),
and seven comment letters submitted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to compare deficiencies identified in GSPs across agencies.