2026-07-20

Who Draws the Line:

A Fresno County Groundwater Board, an Allocation Rule, and the Vulnerability SGMA Built In

A Water Policy Series — July 2026

Introduction

On July 2, three farmers who sit on the board of a small groundwater agency on the western edge of Fresno County sued their own board president. Their complaint alleges that Jimmy Anderson, the largest landowner in the Pleasant Valley sub-basin and the owner of a farming operation called Wheat Land, took control of the Pleasant Valley Water District and its groundwater agency, installed a voting quorum of relatives, employees, and business partners, and used it to rewrite the rules for how the basin’s groundwater is divided — in a way that, they say, forces his neighbors to buy water from him to keep their trees alive.¹ “People who don’t buy credits from the president have trees that are dying,” said Brad Gleason, a plaintiff and former board president. “He can pick and choose who he sells water to.”¹ The plaintiffs say they have already spent $200,000 this season buying credits back from Anderson’s operation.¹ Anderson, reached by a reporter, said he was not aware of the lawsuit and would wait to hear about it at the next board meeting.¹

It would be easy to file this under local feud — a fight among a few dozen farmers in a remote basin, headed for a case management conference in Fresno County Superior Court in October. But it is worth more attention than that, because it is a clean early test of a vulnerability built into the way California manages its groundwater. The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act took a resource that was, for a century, pumped freely and untracked, and turned it into something defined, metered, and tradeable — an asset with a price. Then it handed the job of dividing that asset among landowners to local boards. The Pleasant Valley suit asks the question that design invites: what happens when one person controls the board that draws the line? (A note to avoid confusion: this Pleasant Valley, in Fresno County, is a different basin from the Pleasant Valley near Camarillo this series wrote about earlier; they share only a name.)

I. What SGMA Turned Groundwater Into

To see why controlling a groundwater board is worth a lawsuit, you have to see what the board now controls. Before SGMA, groundwater in most of California was a common pool that anyone with land and a well could draw from, unmetered and unpriced; the only real limit was how deep you could afford to drill. The 2014 law ended that. It required overdrafted basins to bring pumping into balance, which in practice means deciding how much water each landowner may take — assigning allocations, metering use against them, charging steeply for overages, and, in most basins, letting growers buy and sell their allocations as credits.² Water, under this system, moves toward whoever values it most, and those who pump less can sell what they don’t use.²

That is a reasonable way to ration a shrinking resource, and it is more or less what economists recommend. But notice what it creates. The allocation is no longer a technicality; it is the thing of value. In a basin where pumping must shrink, a credit you hold is money, a credit you lack is a dying orchard, and the rule that decides how many credits each acre receives is therefore the rule that decides who prospers and who sells out. SGMA assigned the drawing of that rule to a groundwater sustainability agency — locally governed, often by a board of the very landowners whose water is being divided. In a large basin with many competing interests, that board is a negotiation. In a small one dominated by a single large holder, the plaintiffs in Pleasant Valley allege, it can become something closer to ownership.

II. The Rule at the Center

The specific rule at issue sounds almost anodyne: the board, under Anderson, allegedly gave every acre in the basin an equal groundwater allocation, regardless of how much water that acre had historically used.¹ Here it is essential to be fair, because the equal-per-acre approach is not some invented trick. It is one of the two mainstream ways SGMA allocations are drawn, used across California, and it rests on a genuine legal principle: every landowner overlying a common aquifer holds a correlative right to it, so dividing the water equally by the acre can be seen as the more equitable choice — fairer, arguably, than an alternative that rewards whoever pumped the hardest and drew the basin down fastest.² A rancher or a row-crop farmer who used little water could reasonably say that historical-use allocation would simply ratify the over-pumping of the orchard growers and hand them a permanent entitlement to the largest share.

What the lawsuit alleges, then, is not that equal-per-acre is unlawful. It is that Anderson chose it because it happens to benefit him — that a landowner whose holdings run heavily to an unirrigated feedlot and low-water row crops like garlic and wheat installed a board he controlled and had it adopt the allocation rule that transfers credits away from the basin’s high-use pistachio growers and toward his own dry acres, which he can then sell back to them.¹ That is the difference between a policy choice and a captive market: not the rule itself, but who chose it, and why. And that difference is exactly what a court will have to weigh, on facts not yet tested — Anderson has not answered the complaint, the agency had not been served when its manager was asked about the suit, and every allegation here is a plaintiff’s claim, not a finding.¹ The honest way to hold this case is with both hands: a widely used, defensible allocation method on one side, and a serious, specific allegation that it was adopted through self-dealing on the other, with the truth of the second still unproven.

III. When Local Control Fails, the Courtroom

Whatever the court finds about Anderson, the plaintiffs’ chosen remedy points at the deeper problem. They are not just asking a judge to undo a few board votes; they are seeking an adjudication — a court proceeding that would determine, over the heads of the local board entirely, how much water the basin can yield and who is entitled to how much of it.¹ They are reaching for the courtroom because, as Gleason put it, “this board is arranged in such a way that we can’t overcome the voting bloc.”¹ When the local governance is captured, the vote is not a way out; the only way out is a judge.

This is the part that should trouble anyone who believed in SGMA’s basic promise. The law was written precisely to avoid the courtroom. Groundwater adjudication is the old way — slow, ruinously expensive, and prone to sweeping in every small farmer and rural household whether they can afford a lawyer or not; the ongoing Cuyama Valley adjudication has ground on for years and pulled in exactly those people.³ SGMA offered local self-management as the alternative to all that. But Pleasant Valley shows the alternative can fail from within, and when it does, the basin lands right back in the court SGMA was supposed to keep it out of. And it is failing from two directions at once: the state deemed the basin’s groundwater plan inadequate last year and is weighing whether to put it on probation from above, even as the plaintiffs try to pull it into adjudication from within.⁴ Local control in Pleasant Valley is being squeezed between a regulator and a judge — which is what it looks like when the middle option, the one the whole law was built around, stops working.

Conclusion

Nothing here is settled. The allegations against Anderson are unproven; he has not had his say, and the allocation rule his board adopted is one that reasonable basins use in good faith every day. It is entirely possible a court finds no scheme at all, only a hard fight over a legitimate rule that some growers lost. That outcome would still leave the useful lesson intact.

The lesson is about the design, not the man. SGMA did something necessary and overdue when it turned groundwater into a measured, priced, allocable asset — you cannot manage what you do not count. But in making the water worth dividing, it made the pen that divides it worth capturing, and it left that pen in the hands of local boards without building much of a guardrail against one interest seizing control of a small one. Pleasant Valley is the case that puts the gap on display. Whether or not the plaintiffs prove their scheme, they have already shown what is now at stake in a groundwater board election that a decade ago would have decided almost nothing: not procedure, but water, and the difference between a farm that keeps its trees and one that buys its water from the neighbor who drew the line.

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