Crackdown Proposed on Farms’ Water Use : Agriculture: A ground-water agency suggests fines of up to $1,000 a day for growers who excessively irrigate their fields.

For the first time in Ventura County, farmers who waste water by excessively irrigating their fields could soon be subject to fines of up to $1,000 a day.

A proposed ordinance to be considered Friday by the Fox Canyon Groundwater Management Agency, which is empowered by the state to regulate ground-water pumping, would permit the agency to levy the fines.

Officials who drafted the proposal define waste as sprinkling pavement, watering during the middle of the day when water evaporation is highest, overirrigating fields so that water runs off into ditches or needlessly spilling water unchecked from standpipes.

Officials at the agency, which regulates pumping from wells in much of the Oxnard Plain and parts of the Santa Rosa and Las Posas valleys, say the no-waste ordinance will compel growers who depend on ground-water supplies to change wasteful practices.

“An ordinance like this is desperately needed when we get calls from people who say that water is running down their streets and no one can do anything about it,” said John Crowley, deputy director of public works.

But critics say the ordinance, which could become effective as early as May 1, will be difficult to enforce and offenses nearly impossible to prove. To actually collect fines from farmers reluctant to pay them, the agency would have to seek civil prosecution through the Ventura County district attorney’s office.

“What are they going to do, hire a water cop?” asked Lee Waddle, a water resource specialist with the Ventura County Resource Conservation District. The district uses state and local money to teach growers and other industries to use water more efficiently.

“They have better things to do than to chase down water wasters,” he said. Instead, he suggested that the agency work with growers to improve their irrigation systems.

“It’s better to let the growers spend the money that they would pay in fines to upgrade their systems,” he said. In addition, he said, the proposed ordinance is unnecessary because, after five years of drought, most growers are already looking for ways to minimize their waste.

The Groundwater Management Agency had no estimates of how much water the county could save with the ordinance. But because agriculture now accounts for about two-thirds of the total water used in the county each year, 86% of which comes from wells, officials say the savings could be substantial.

The Groundwater Agency, which was created by an act of the Legislature in 1982 to help stop seawater intrusion into fresh underground water, will also consider Friday whether to accelerate the timetable of an existing ground-water pumping rule.

That rule, passed last July to reverse a decades-long overdraft in the Fox Canyon Aquifer beneath the Oxnard Plain, calls for cities and growers to reduce their ground-water pumping by 25% by the year 2010, beginning with a 5% reduction in 1992.

Under the accelerated schedule to be presented Friday, ground-water pumping would be reduced by 5% in July and another 5% in January.

The proposed no-waste ordinance for agriculture will also affect urban water users in cities in the Groundwater Management Agency’s area, including Ventura, Oxnard, Moorpark, Port Hueneme and Camarillo. But most of those cities, except Moorpark, already have no-waste ordinances.

Robert Quinn, who heads the county’s Water Resources division of the Public Works Agency, said he is unaware of any other agency in the western United States that has imposed fines on agricultural water waste similar to the plan being considered in Ventura County.

“We talked with folks all over California and the western United States to find someone with an agricultural anti-waste ordinance and couldn’t find one,” he said. “Everybody said ‘Let us know as soon as you get one. We all need it.’ ”

But Quinn, who serves as adviser to the Groundwater Agency, acknowledged that the ordinance could bring multiple headaches.

For one thing, the ordinance would apply only to water pumped from the ground, but many growers have multiple sources of water. They use well water or imported water from cities or special water districts.

“If we see water running from a standpipe, . . . we haven’t yet figured out how to determine where the water came from,” Quinn said.

The district would also have to hire staff to police the fields or, at the least, respond to calls reporting waste. In addition, to impose the highest fine of $1,000, the district would have to seek civil prosecution by the county district attorney’s office, a process that could take years.

“But the biggest problem is defining waste when you have such a variety of crops and needs,” Quinn said.

Don Reeder, manager of Pro-Ag Inc., a Moorpark-based farm management company that handles more than 400 farms, welcomed the proposed ordinance as a means to ensure that all growers in the county understand the drought’s impact on ground-water resources.

But he said farming sometimes requires irrigation techniques that appear to be wasteful.

“There are times when you have to wash out the salts from the roots that are two feet down on lemon trees,” said Reeder, who is also serving this year as president of the Ventura County Farm Bureau. “Without rain, you have to put a lot of water on the top to force it down deep enough into the soil.”