Multiple entities in the region that includes the nortwesternmost tip of San Bernardino County are awaiting Orange County Superior Court Judge William Claster’s determinations with regard to a complex set of contentions among numerous governmental and business entities pertaining to water rights and usage in the West Mojave Desert.
At stake is how the overdrafting of the water table in the Indian Wells Valley, which lies at the confluence of San Bernardino, Kern and Inyo counties.
Under scrutiny is the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority’s Ground Water Sustainability Plan, the strategy designed by the controlling majority of that regional joint powers authority to share the valley’s precious water resources, which some interested parties hail as necessary and other entities consider unfair and unworkable.
Complicating the matter is that the Indian Wells Valley Water District, which is the dissenting member of the groundwater authority, in September reinstituted a legal challenge to the sustainability plan in the form of a reverse validation action.
The issues at play extend back more than a decade.
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 in Kern County, 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 Indian Wells Valley 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 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. Searles Valley Minerals is located in Trona, the once flourishing but now far less populated town that lies at the furthest western extention of San Bernardino County.
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 then and continues to object 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 2024 Groundwater Authority report, 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 pursuing the adjudication lawsuit, the water district intends 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.
The entire matter was removed to Orange County Superior Court to preclude any conflict or conflicts of interest that might arise if the matter were to be heard in Kern County, San Bernardino County or Inyo County.
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.
In July Judge Claster rendered a tentative decision which he finalized on September 15, 2025 that China Lake’s claim to a 6,783 acre-feet historical water right was derived from the base’s water consumption in 1970, the single highest year of water usage in the base’s 80-year history. The Navy’s utilization of water has since dwindled to an average of 1,644 acre-feet per year over the last decade, and he ruled that the Navy’s water allowance under the adjudication should be 2008 acre-feet yearly.
In September, the Indian Wells Valley Water District filed a reverse validation action in Orange County Superior Court. Specifically, the water district is contesting the validity of the science used to calculate the sustainable yield – the amount of water that can be pumped from the basin without impacting or causing a drop in the level of water in the valley’s aquifer – of the groundwater basin presumed by the groundwater authority as the basis for its plan.
The water district, Searles Valley Minerals and several agricultural interests in the valley are attempting to utilize the comprehensive water rights adjudication process to establish that they have a right to an amount of water, based on their historic water use patterns, without being subject to the replenishment fee. It would only be those entities’ use of water beyond that amount that would trigger the replenishment fee regime being applied to them.
Searles Valley Minerals is represented by the law firm of Best Best & Krieger. The groundwater replenishment fee, Best Best & Krieger maintains, is unprecedented and exorbitant, and is increasing the company’s water costs by 7,000 percent or $6 million per year – and is thus on the brink of pushing Searles Valley Minerals out of business after more than 140 years of operation, thereby threatening the livelihood of the company’s 700 employees. The groundwater replenishment fee ignores and violates Searles Valley Minerals’ 94-year-old adjudicated water rights, the most senior in the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Basin, according to the lawsuit brought on behalf of the company by Best Best & Krieger.
In its September filing, the Indian Wells Valley Water District, represented by James A. Worth of the Bakersfield-based law firm of McMurtrey, Hartsock, Worth and St Lawrence as well as Douglas J. Evertz and Emily L. Madueno of the Costa Mesa-based law firm of Mrphy & Evertz, “since as early as February 16, 2021, the district has paid the replenishment fee to the authority under protest, signaling the district’s position in opposition to the authority’s actions, including the replenishment fee.”
In the same way that the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority’s contention that Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake was entitled to the free and unencumbered use of 6,783 acre-feet of water on an annual basis was dismantled during phase one of the comprehensive water rights adjudication trial, the water district believes its reverse validation action will result in a critical reexamination of the science the groundwater authority is relying upon in its plan, resolving in the water district’s favor other water use in phase two of the comprehensive water adjudication trial.
The trial is set to begin on June 1, 2026. Riding on the outcome of that trial is whether the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority will be able to proceed with the Groundwater Sustainability Plan as it has formulated it in total, whether it will be able to proceed with the Groundwater Sustainability Plan subject to alteration and/or whether it will be able to proceed with the Groundwater Sustainability Plan at all.
Judge Claster is set to rule on the pertinent matters of contention enumerated in the Indian Wells Valley Water District’s reverse validation action on February 4, 2026.