In the more-than-decade-long give-and-take over water and water rights in Indian Wells Valley, it appears the coalition that has emerged among the valley’s farmers and its major industrial interest has claimed a victory over the City of Ridgecrest, the U.S. Navy and the joint powers authority which has yet to achieve the water importation solution the latter three entities are hoping will ultimately redress the overdraft in the region’s groundwater.
This week, on Thursday, Orange County Superior Court Judge William Claster ruled that the China Lake Naval Air Station is entitled, under a water rights adjudication effort being overseen by the Indian Wells Valley Water District, to far less water on an annual basis than the Navy had previously asserted. The Navy’s monopolization of the larger amount of water it had laid claim to within the confines of the water basin was consistent with the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority’s limitation of water use by a host of other entities vis-à-vis the water use/water conservation effort it is heading up. Several of those other water users, from farmers to a major mining operation within San Bernardino County to the water district that serves customers in Ridgecrest, the most populous part of the Indian Wells Valley, want to forge a more accommodating water sharing arrangement that will not entail an expense so drastic that it will necessitate that agricultural production at the farms end, the mining operation close down or that water district customers lose service.
In 2014, in the face of a persistent drought, then-Governor Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency with regard to California’s water situation and then signed into law the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which classified 21 groundwater basins in the state, including the one in Indian Wells Valley, as being in a state of critical overdraft.
That designation triggered the creation of the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority, a joint powers agency overseen by a board comprised of one voting representative from Kern County, the City of Ridgecrest, Inyo County, San Bernardino County, and the Indian Wells Valley Water District, as well two non-voting members representing the U.S. Navy/China Lake Naval Air Station and the United States Bureau of Land Management.
The Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority took as its charter the commitment to ensure a sustainable water supply for the region by overcoming the depletion of the groundwater basin and its aquifer which underlies 597 square miles and includes the northwest tip of San Bernardino County, the southwest tip of Inyo County and the northeast corner of Kern County.
Both the Indian Wells Valley Water District, which serves as the region’s local water company, and the groundwater authority are intent on achieving a balance of water use and water recharge within the valley by 2040. Some differences between those two entities have emerged on how to best achieve that goal.
After the Groundwater Management Act went into effect, the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority came to the conclusion that a 50-mile pipeline extension from California City, where the Antelope Valley East Kern County Water Agency’s furthest extension of facilities importing water from the California Aqueduct ends, was the most viable solution. The Water District, along with numerous local entities including the Real Estate Association, Chamber of Commerce and the Indian Wells Valley Economic Development Corporation, considers that proposed project/solution to be prohibitively expensive and believes it would likely cause economic harm as well as double the rates paid by the Indian Wells Valley Water District customers for their water.
This led to the rather remarkable circumstance in which the two major entities in the region devoted to the management of the precious water resources in the area found themselves working at cross purposes. This was taking place in the context of other water use management/water conservation measures being instituted which imposed limits, hardships and expense on companies and corporations in the area involved in agricultural and industrial production.
To a greater extent, the voting board members representing Kern County, the City of Ridgecrest and Inyo County were on board with the water importation concept, as was San Bernardino County to a lesser extent. The Indian Wells Valley Water District, concerned that the cost of the water importation infrastructure would raise the cost of water beyond what its customers could reasonably sustain, pressed for alternate solutions to redress the water shortage, including water use efficiency, recycling and measures to lessen evaporation, as well as purchasing water from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which has already constructed a pipeline conveying water from Owens Valley to Los Angeles through the area.
The Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority pursued a strategy of establishing, based upon a survey of water usage patterns of well owners undertaken by an engineering consultant, Carlsbad-based Stetson Engineers, water use entitlements for those well owners in the valley, using its own formula. The authority assigned water use allowances to the region’s water pumpers. Excess use fees, referred to as augmentation fees, were formulated for application to those well owners who pumped above their allowances as well as on farmers who went beyond their respective share of the water supply set aside for agricultural usage. The authority’s intent is to use money generated in this way to purchase imported water and pay for the infrastructure needed to bring in the imported water. An element of that approach was to get the region’s agricultural users to agree to eventually decrease and then cease altogether pumping groundwater from the basin and coming to rely on water imported from Northern California. Simultaneously, the cost of water being used in the area, due to the excess use fees, was escalating, threatening to make both agricultural and mining operations unprofitable and therefore unsustainable. Large agricultural concerns such as Meadowbrook Dairy and Mojave Pistachios objected to that approach and withheld payment of its excess use fees, as did Searles Valley Minerals, which uses water in its mining process, soaking areas of Searles Valley Dry Lake as part of a mineral and chemical extraction process. Searles Valley Minerals went further, initiating a legal challenge in which it asserted that its water rights, based upon water use extending back into the latter part of the 19th Century, gave the company water rights that were senior to all other entities in Indian Wells Valley.
In 2021, based upon its contention that the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority formulated its strategy to overcome the basin overdraft without having first completed a scientifically sound survey of the extent of the overdraft and the full range of methodologies that could be applied to overcome it, the Indian Wells Valley Water District’s initiated an effort to adjudicate water rights throughout the Indian Wells Valley basin.
The Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority objected to the water district’s water rights adjudication effort, asserting that the adjudication interferes with the groundwater authority’s efforts to manage and reduce the overdraft and that the adjudication will have the effect of benefiting certain agricultural interests and Searles Valley Minerals, who they claim are the most profligate users of water in the basin, while threatening, or at least challenging, the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake’s federal reserved water rights.
Therein lies an important item of contention borne of the belief by some that the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority is being too deferential to the federal government and the Navy by allowing the Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake to tie up more of the region’s water than it is using.
Rather than put up with the water rights adjudication process that the Indian Wells Water District was using to work through the various issues and balance the conflicting/competing interests of those who have to share the region’s water supply, the Indian Wells Valley Ground Water Authority sought to bypass the adjudication or render it irrelevant. Based upon the relationship that some of the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority board members had with Assemblywoman Diane Papan, they prevailed upon her to fashion, with their input, Assembly Bill 1413, which prioritizes groundwater sustainability plans being pursued by state-sanctioned groundwater authorities over the findings and water-use allotments arrived at in water rights adjudication processes in state court, thus obviating the effectiveness of the water rights adjudication the Indian Wells Water District is pursuing in Orange County Superior Court.
The Indian Wells Valley Water District considers this to be a backhanded ploy, particularly since the district believes the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority has miscalculated both water use from, and water recharge into, the basin.
According to the latest Groundwater Authority report for 2024, total water use in the Indian Wells Valley is approximately 20,000 acre-feet annually. Major users include the China Lake Naval Air Station at 1,500 acre-feet of water per year, the water district at 5,500 acre-feet of water per year, farming operations at between 8,000 and 9,000 acre-feet per year, Searles Valley Minerals at 2,200 acre-feet per year, some 800 small well owners at about 800 acre-feet per year, plus a few hundred acre-feet for several small communities.
In its adjudication lawsuit, the water district hopes to establish the groundwater authority’s determined recharge of 7,650 acre-feet per year is scientifically unsound and that the amount of water coming into the basin on average is something closer to 14,000 acre-feet per year.
The water district is looking toward that discrepancy being resolved, with the Phase 2 adjudication trial to determine the recharge scheduled for June of next year. This is despite the consideration that the groundwater authority lobbied for and has a succeeded in getting a bill up for consideration in the California legislature, Assembly Bill 1413, that would deny the court the option to review the water district’s science, thereby cementing the groundwater authority’s recharge number as not challengeable in court.
Despite that, the adjudication process is continuing in Orange County Superior Court.
In its filings with the court, the Navy proposed that it be provided with an annual water use allowance/reserved use right of 6,783 acre-feet of water per year, along with 325 acre-feet per year for future golf course irrigation, as well as 200 acre-feet per year to ensure the survival of a rare fish, the tui chub, which lives on a portion of the base. This request was based on the testimony of its expert witness, Michael Bizon, as well as that of China Lake’s Commanding Officer, Captain Warren Van Allen, and another naval officer with oversight of the base, Rear Admiral Keith Hash.
Testimony for the Phase 1 adjudication trial was conducted over seven days between April 28 and May 14, 2025 before Judge William Claster, with primary participation by the United States government, Meadowbrook Dairy, the City of Ridgecrest and Searles Valley Minerals Inc. Following the trial, the parties filed comprehensive post-trial briefs.
The Navy contended that its federal reserved water right, i.e., the minimum amount of water necessary to accomplish China Lake’s primary purpose of weapons development and testing was nearly 7,000-acre feet per year. There was testimony that over the last ten years, as China Lake has continued its mission, it has used an average of 1,536 acre-feet per year. According to the Navy, its personnel living on the base would on an average day use 104.25 gallons of water. Judge Claster accepted that as a reasonable figure. While the base has been using on average of 1,536 acre feet of water per year going back for a decade, that quantity is a product of only a relative handful of those working at the base – 6 percent – currently living there. That is subject to change, as is the base’s mission, which under differing international or national security demands, could intensify at any time.
Captain Van Allen and Admiral Hash testified they were unaware of future mission growth plans at this time, acknowledging that no substantial growth is forecasted to occur at China Lake in the next four to five years. Despite that and the consideration the 6,783 acre-feet of water per year the Navy was seeking was more than four times the current usage level, the Navy said that allowance was appropriate and indeed necessary given the possibilities of future weapon development and testing programs being assigned to China Lake and a return to on-base housing levels of the 1970s notwithstanding the demolition of most such housing and current Department of Defense policy limiting on-base residences to military personnel.
Bizon, testifying in his capacity as the Navy’s expert witness, hypothesized that at some point in the future 80 percent of China Lake’s personnel and their dependents would eventually live on the base.
In the past, there was a substantial population living on the grounds of the China Lake Naval Air Station. In 1954, there were over 3,400 housing units at the base, including 2,227 residences, 946 dormitory/barrack spaces, and 249 trailers. The number of on-base family units stood at 2,916 in 1972. By 1980, on-base houses had fallen below 1,500, by 1990 the number was 818, and by 2004 there were less than 200 residences. At present, only 6 percent of those who work at the base live on the base, with approximately 94 percent of China Lake’s workforce living off the base, primarily in Ridgecrest. On-base housing at China Lake consists of 192 units for family housing, 192 beds for unaccompanied personnel housing, and 24 beds for “geobachelor” housing for service members living apart from their families. Many of those units and beds are vacant.
The Navy’s water needs include 75.5 acre-feet per year provided to the Sands Unified School District facilities on the base, and 20 acre-feet per year for the water needs of horses and burros kept at a Bureau of Land Management facility near the base. According to the Navy, included in its estimate of future water needs at the base is 380 acre-feet per year for future construction, 325 acre-feet per year to irrigate the nine-hole golf course and another 200 acre-feet per year for endangered species support.
Kern County and the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority joined in with Ridgecrest’s brief to the court, which held that the Navy should be provided with even more water than the military service is asking for at China Lake, 7,988 acre-feet per year. That number was derived from the amount of water used in 1970, the single highest year of water usage in the base’s 80-year history.
According to Searles, the Navy is entitled to no more than its most recent 10-year average of 1,644 acre-feet per year, consisting of 1,536 acre feet for all base uses plus 108 acre-feet reserved for firefighting.
Meadowbrook made a similar argument, but conceded through its expert witness that an increase to about 2,000 acre-feet per year was not unreasonable.
Based upon state water law and the customary practice in conducting water rights adjudications of utilizing a five-year survey of water use just prior to or at the time of the adjudication process, particularly given that all other water users in the basin were being subjected to the same standard, Judge Claster never appeared inclined to accept anything near the 6,783 acre-foot annual water use entitlement the Navy was seeking.
“In light of… potential future programs and the fact that an increase in on-base housing is unlikely, the court rejects the Navy’s proposed figure of 6,783 acre-feet per year for its reserved water right” Judge Claster wrote in his decision dated July 31. “The court concludes that the Navy’s federal reserved water right for China Lake is 2008 acre-feet yearly.”
Judge Claster said the allowance the Navy was being given for future water use was at best a guesstimate.
“In this sense, all parties are forced to speculate to a certain extent,” Judge Claster wrote in his July 29 tentative decision. “The Navy and Ridgecrest et al speculate about programs that might come to China Lake, while Searles and Meadowbrook (albeit to a lesser extent) essentially speculate that the volume of work will remain the same. In the court’s view, a number of factors support the notion that there is a reasonable likelihood that additional future programs will come to China Lake. The court is giving the Navy the benefit of the doubt given the overriding importance of its mission. But the same is not true when it comes to the likelihood of increasing the amount of personnel living on the base in future years. Indeed, not only does the evidence strongly suggest this will not occur, but it amounts to a second layer of speculation on top of the layer regarding future programs. While the court can live with that first layer, the second layer goes too far. There was no evidence suggesting that additional housing beyond the 16 houses currently on the drawing board will be built.”
Ridgecrest City Manager Ron Strand on the Ridgecrest Facebook page stated, “This ruling threatens the very foundation of water affordability in Ridgecrest and the ability for our community to grow and prosper. For years, the Indian Wells Valley Water District relied on 4,390 acre-feet yearly replenishment-free water transferred from the Navy’s unused water right to serve its off-base civilian workforce. In 2024, the water district pumped 74 percent of its total use in replenishment-free unused water. This exemption saved the water district—and its ratepayers—millions of dollars annually.”
Strand continued, “Now, with the court’s preliminary ruling in favor of a sharply-reduced federal reserve right for the Navy, that replenishment-free water supply is at risk. Unless overturned, the water district could be forced to purchase water, that it once pumped for free, from local big agricultural interests —forcing Ridgecrest residents and businesses to pay significantly higher water rates. This situation arose because the water district chose to file a comprehensive adjudication when it could have simply filed a lawsuit directly against the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority in challenge of the groundwater sustainability plan. A more narrow legal challenge would have allowed the water district to contest the plan, without opening the door to a full adjudication trial—a process that ultimately placed the Navy’s federal reserve right under legal scrutiny. What’s worse is that the water district has so far failed to publicly support the Navy in this legal fight—even though it stood to lose the most. It is now time for the Water District to reverse course and argue against this preliminary decision and support an appeal if it becomes final —for the benefit of its ratepayers and our community’s largest employer – the Navy.”