2026-06-26

Desalination in California, Part II:

Who’s at the Table

A Water Policy Series — June 2026

Introduction

The first article in this series established that desalination and managed aquifer recharge fail under opposite conditions — desalination is expensive and ecologically costly but precipitation-independent; MAR is cheap and ecologically generative but useless in the multi-year droughts that matter most. A sensible portfolio uses both, in proportion. The question this article asks is simple and largely unanswered in California’s water policy: who actually decides that proportion? The answer is no one, in any accountable, enforceable sense — and the gap left by that absence is filled by a specific, unequal set of actors whose incentives don’t line up with each other, governed by agreements that are renegotiated in crisis rather than adjusted continuously.

I. The Governance Gap

No single body sets a statewide ratio of desalination to recharge. The proportion that actually emerges is the byproduct of three semi-independent layers. At the state level, the Department of Water Resources and the Natural Resources Agency publish framing documents — the Water Resilience Portfolio and the Water Supply Strategy — that set out aspirational sequencing (recharge, recycling, and conservation before desalination) but do not bind any local agency to follow it.¹ The real lever is funding: the 2014 Proposition 1 water bond funds both a Desalination Grant Program, which has awarded roughly $123 million across 65 projects, and a Sustainable Groundwater Management Grant Program, through which DWR has allocated more than $500 million for recharge planning and implementation.² Whichever program receives more money in a given budget cycle tilts the statewide balance — a legislative appropriations decision, not a hydrological one. The State Water Resources Control Board adds a second, asymmetric layer of friction: the Ocean Plan’s Desalination Provisions make seawater plants categorically harder and slower to permit, while SGMA implementation effectively requires groundwater sustainability agencies to pursue recharge as a matter of course.³

The decisions that actually build or kill a plant happen locally. Individual water district boards — South Coast Water District for Doheny, the San Diego County Water Authority for Carlsbad — vote to build and negotiate the contracts, with public rate-setting hearings as the primary accountability mechanism, while the Coastal Commission and State Lands Commission function as centralized veto points that have no equivalent on the recharge side.⁴ Groundwater Sustainability Agencies, created under SGMA, make the parallel decisions for MAR — and their boards typically include not just elected representatives of member water districts but an appointed agricultural groundwater user and a non-agricultural domestic well user, both named by county boards of supervisors.⁵ That detail matters more than it first appears: agriculture has a formal seat at the table for recharge decisions in a way it structurally does not for desalination siting, which runs through coastal and municipal bodies where agricultural voices rarely appear at all.

II. Best and Worst Outcomes

The evidence on which governance model actually works is lopsided. California’s groundwater sustainability agencies collectively reported an average of 2.5 million acre-feet of managed recharge a year across 2022–2024, across more than 1,500 projects statewide.⁶ The Pajaro Valley Water Management Agency, managing its basin since 1984 — a decade longer than SGMA itself has existed — runs a Recharge Net Metering program that pays landowners to dedicate farmland to aquifer recharge, and recently won an $8.89 million state grant to tie recharge directly to habitat restoration.⁷ In Kern County, twenty separate groundwater sustainability agencies coordinate conjunctive-use programs that bank wet-year surface water underground for drought-year recovery — the clearest working example of interagency cooperation functioning at scale rather than fragmenting.⁸

The comparable flagship on the desalination side is harder to point to with pride. Doheny is the procedural model — careful aquifer modeling, subsurface intake, a clean 2026 federal sign-off — but it has no operating record; it won’t open until roughly 2029. Carlsbad, the only large-scale plant with a multi-year track record, is the plant now associated with ratepayer cost overruns and the $35 million take-or-pay dispute described in the first article.⁹ The recharge side has multiple decades-proven, multi-stakeholder successes to point to. Desalination’s flagship example is also its main cautionary tale.

III. The Stakeholders

Legislators. The most concrete recent action is SB 72, chaptered in October 2025, which writes the portfolio framing into statute by requiring DWR’s California Water Plan to address storage, recycling, desalination, conjunctive use, and transfers together, and which expands the Plan’s advisory committee to formally include Tribes, labor, and environmental justice representatives for the first time.¹⁰ The bill also requires DWR to set an interim 2050 planning target accounting for urban, agricultural, tribal, and environmental beneficial uses as co-equal categories. The legislature is not picking a winner between desalination and recharge; it is formalizing who gets a say in the choice.

Agriculture. The sector’s position on desalination is close to unanimous, and the reasoning is arithmetic. Desalting brackish groundwater for crop use costs roughly $800 an acre-foot, while many farmers holding senior water rights pay as little as $3 an acre-foot for fresh surface water.¹¹ A PPIC agricultural economist put it bluntly: desalination is “a nice solution that’s appropriate in some contexts, but for agriculture it’s hard to justify, frankly.”¹² California’s actual agricultural investment points the other way — $110 million over three years to repurpose farmland toward groundwater recharge and habitat restoration, paying farmers to host the infrastructure MAR depends on rather than subsidizing a technology they can’t afford to use.¹³ A related asymmetry worth naming: California cities routinely pay far more for water than agricultural districts, some of which receive water at little or no cost under senior pre-1914 rights — meaning the sector best insulated from desalination’s cost premium is also the sector least exposed to paying for it.¹⁴

Tribes. This is the clearest unmet stakeholder claim in California’s water system. More than thirty California Tribes hold state water rights or water rights claims to surface water and groundwater, but only sixteen have ever had those rights formally quantified, and few Tribes have chosen to participate in the SGMA process despite a legal requirement that lead agencies consult with Tribes before approving groundwater recharge and diversion projects.¹⁵ The consultation requirement that exists runs through the recharge side of the system; there is no comparable tribal consultation infrastructure built into desalination’s coastal permitting process, though pending 2024 amendments to the Ocean Plan’s desalination provisions list tribal engagement as a topic under discussion.¹⁶ Recent funding responses — a $15 million tribal water supply agreement, an Underrepresented Communities Groundwater Technical Assistance Program, $100 million for a Tribal Nature-Based Solutions Program that has returned roughly 103,000 acres of ancestral land — are real but address land and technical capacity more than the underlying water-rights gap.¹⁷ SB 72’s new advisory seat is a process opening, not yet a demonstrated outcome.

Municipalities. Cities occupy the most exposed position in the whole system. They are the primary advocates for desalination’s drought-proofing case, the parties that actually fund and contract for it, and the parties whose ratepayers absorb the bill and the political backlash when costs run over — the San Diego rate increases and the Carlsbad take-or-pay dispute land squarely on municipal water boards, not on the state.¹⁸ Those same boards also run the full desalination permitting gauntlet — Coastal Commission, State Lands Commission, CEQA — a regulatory and litigation burden that groundwater sustainability agencies pursuing recharge largely do not face to the same degree.

IV. The Same Problem, Larger Scale

Zoom out from California’s internal politics and the pattern repeats at every larger scale, which suggests the desalination-versus-recharge debate is a symptom of something underneath it rather than the root problem itself.

Within the state, the central fault line remains Delta exports — Northern California water moving south to both San Joaquin Valley agriculture and Southern California cities. A $2.9 billion voluntary agreement backed by Governor Newsom and major urban and agricultural suppliers proposes letting water users fund habitat restoration and forgo some water in place of hard regulatory flow mandates; environmental groups say it trades away too much protection for too little water.¹⁹ The $20 billion Delta Conveyance tunnel is itself a flashpoint for the same reason — its costs and disruption are borne by Delta communities while its benefits accrue to water users hundreds of miles away.²⁰ Agriculture is being squeezed from two directions simultaneously: pressured to reduce San Joaquin River diversions to help Delta flows, and required under SGMA to reduce groundwater pumping because overdraft is causing land subsidence — which is precisely why the state’s farmland-to-recharge funding functions as a release valve rather than a pure mandate.¹³ A concrete 2025–2026 flashpoint: Central Valley Project contractors south of the Delta were allocated only 15 percent of their contracted supply, an allocation agricultural groups and legislators have publicly argued doesn’t reflect actual hydrologic conditions.²¹

One level up, California’s two largest water systems can’t fully coordinate with each other. The federal Central Valley Project and the state State Water Project draw from many of the same Delta sources under a 1986 Coordinated Operations Agreement that Reclamation and DWR reviewed and failed to agree on revising back in 2015 — a disagreement that has simply persisted rather than resolved.²² Worse, the rules governing that coordination have been reset by each of the past seven federal administrations, meaning two of California’s largest water systems operate under terms that shift with national electoral politics rather than the state’s own planning cycle. The underlying scarcity explains why the disagreement is so intractable: the Delta system holds roughly 29 million acre-feet of consumptive water in an average year against 153.7 million acre-feet of filed consumptive water rights claims — more than five times oversubscribed — and CVP and SWP both hold comparatively junior rights in that competition.²³ PPIC has proposed unifying the two projects outright, removing the federal-state seam rather than continuing to negotiate around it.²⁴

One level above that, the same structure is playing out on the Colorado River, on a much larger stage and a much tighter deadline. The 2007 Interim Guidelines, the 2019 Drought Contingency Plans, and the related U.S.-Mexico agreements all expire at the end of 2026, with a finalized replacement plan expected this spring — arriving in the same hydrologic year experts are calling the worst on record for the river.²⁵ Lower Basin states, including California, want Upper Basin states to share mandatory drought cuts; Upper Basin states refuse, noting they already use less than their full legal allocation while the river has shrunk roughly 20 percent over the past 25 years from climate-driven aridification.²⁶ Arizona, California, and Nevada reached a 2026 bridge agreement to cut collective use by at least 3.2 million acre-feet through 2028, split unevenly — 27 percent, 17 percent, and 10 percent respectively, reflecting California’s comparatively senior legal position on the river.²⁷ Notably, desalination itself has entered this interstate conversation at a scale far beyond anything in California’s own portfolio: a Gulf of California seawater desalination import platform and a Salton Sea brackish desalination and restoration concept are both under live evaluation as basin-wide “demand relief” tools.²⁸

Conclusion

The same diagnosis recurs at every scale examined here: multiple actors holding competing legal claims to a shrinking, oversubscribed resource, governed by agreements renegotiated in periodic crises rather than adjusted continuously, with no single body accountable for the overall balance. California’s desalination-versus-recharge proportion isn’t an exception to that pattern — it’s the smallest-scale instance of it, decided by which grant program gets more money and which local board happens to act first, rather than by the state’s own stated sequencing logic. The final article in this series asks what follows from that diagnosis, and what, short of building still more parallel infrastructure, California could actually do about it.

Footnotes

Sources

Governance & Funding

California Department of Water Resources — Water Resilience Portfolio, Desalination Grant Program, Sustainable Groundwater Management Grant Program, Groundwater Sustainability Agencies — water.ca.gov

California State Water Resources Control Board — Ocean Plan Desalination Provisions, SGMA overview — waterboards.ca.gov

CalMatters Digital Democracy / LegiScan — SB 72 bill text and tracking

Local Agency Case Studies

Pajaro Valley Water Management Agency — pvwater.org

UC Berkeley Law — Recharge Net Metering (ReNeM) — law.berkeley.edu

Kern County Water Agency — Kern Groundwater Authority — kcwa.com

Stakeholder Reporting

Knowable Magazine — Can desalination quench agriculture’s thirst? — knowablemagazine.org

CalMatters — California cities pay a lot for water; Delta water wars; Delta tunnel reporting — calmatters.org

Public Policy Institute of California — Tribal Water Rights in California; Tribal Water Rights and Water Use in California; Uniting CVP and SWP — ppic.org

Association of California Water Agencies — Tribe, Water Districts Reach Water Rights Settlement — acwa.com

California WaterBlog — Bargaining for Tribal Water in California — californiawaterblog.com

Farm Progress — California ag, lawmakers rip meager CVP water allocation — farmprogress.com

Interstate / Interagency

Congressional Research Service — Central Valley Project: Issues and Legislation; Management of the Colorado River — congress.gov

U.S. Bureau of Reclamation — Colorado River Post 2026 Operations — usbr.gov

Colorado Sun — Feds release draft report on Colorado River’s future — coloradosun.com

High Country News — Why Colorado River negotiations are so difficult — hcn.org

Environmental Defense Fund — Arizona, California and Nevada reached a new Colorado River deal — blogs.edf.org

Maven’s Notebook — Colorado River post-2026 operations — mavensnotebook.com