Say for instance we had a practical realistic state water budget, would it be prudent to plug in a reasonable metric or estimate of what illegal water users are using in order to get a handle on water usage and projected uses?
For instance if a well capitalized business drills 2 separate but close 24 inch bores 600 feet deep within a declining aquifer in a “race to the bottom” and pumps 200 GPM each for commercial use, this adds up to about 2.3 billion gallons a year.
You can’t even begin to figure this problem out in light of other miss-reported or illegal uses with-in the same complex basin. Since the aquifer is misunderstood and comprised of complex sub-alluvial fan deposits it is unlikely that the true damage of the abusive extraction will ever be quantified or modeled properly. (I am talking about the Rohnert Park Graton Rancheria Casino appendix – Y : water well construction description).
So what’s a understaffed regulatory agency to do? I know that the USGS in Palo Alto wishes it got more love. It seems like the problem needs a lot of positive solutions from a lot of different angles.
Lloyd