San Juan Hills Golf Club Sues City for Damaging Aquifer

Originally posted at 12:30 p.m. Sept. 2, 2014. Edited with new details.

The San Juan Hills Golf Club is suing San Juan Capistrano for interfering with what club officials say are their rights to the aquifer water flowing beneath its property.

The lawsuit, dated Aug. 28, also accuses the city of draining the aquifer faster than nature can replenish it, endangering the underground river as a future source of water and damaging the club’s pumping equipment.

A spokeswoman from the city of San Juan Capistrano said she had no comment, as officials are “still investigating the issue.”

Since 1997, the Golf Club has had an agreement in place with the San Juan Basin Authority which allows it to tap into the aquifer, as much as 550 acre feet of water a year, to irrigate its grounds. An acre foot is a unit measurement that’s equivalent to the amount of water it would take to fill up one acre to the depth of one foot.

Attorneys for the Golf Club say this agreement gives their clients first dibs at using the water, regardless of drought conditions.

San Juan Capistrano now pumps “over one half billion gallons of water each year from the aquifer, depriving The Golf Club of water it needs for its property and threatening to destroy the aquifer, which would be an ecological and economic disaster,” says the lawsuit.

The recent drought only makes things worse, the Golf Club contends. With natural rainfalls unable to replenish the water table, “water levels are dropping faster than what is permitted for a ‘safe yield,’” the lawsuit says.

Still, “ the city continues to pull massive amounts of water from the Aquifer at unsustainable rates,” the lawsuit contends.

The situation got so bad, that this year, the Golf Club cannot irrigate the golf course and is forced to buy water from the city, water that club officials consider “stolen.”

The suit not only seeks damages and a halt to the city’s tap, it challenges the city’s legal right to the water in the first place.

PHOTO Patch photo credit: Vicki Finelt