Winter Newsletter
The year 2025 has been a pivotal and challenging year for your District. At the beginning of this year, our longtime General Manager/Counsel Reid Roberts informed the Board that he would be retiring at the end of the year due to his health conditions. Unfortunately, his condition worsened and he recently passed away in early November. We have since hired Steve Knell as our interim General Manager. Steve has a long career in water management and most recently retired from Oakdale Irrigation District (OID) after being the General Manager there for over 20 years.
We have moved our office as of December 1 from Stockton to our new location in Escalon in the Marval Shopping Center. Our new address is 1900 McHenry Ave, Ste 305, Escalon 95320. Our office telephone number remains the same at (209) 466-7952.
You current Board of Directors consists of President Richard Wagner, Vice President, Grant Thompson, Tony Chiappe, Rick Veldstra, and new board members, Secretary/Treasurer Phil Brumley, and Bryan Van Groningen.
Although we are not currently in active discussions with Stockton East Water District (SEWD) regarding a future merger, these discussions will hopefully start again this coming year.
Compliance with the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), is the biggest challenge facing our District, as well as all of San Joaquin County and the Central Valley. The East San Joaquin Groundwater Authority, of which Central WCD is a member Agency, is the governing body of the 16 member Agencies in the County. Our County is currently over drafting more than 90,000 acre feet of groundwater per year. Central San Joaquin WCD is a part of that overdraft, but we can easily solve our issue with your help. We need to increase our surface water usage. We are currently under- utilizing our water contract with the Bureau of Reclamation and have additional surface water resources available for irrigation. We need those who have access to surface water to convert over to that water source. The District has incentive programs to assist in those conversions. Additionally, we are looking at several projects for increasing our capacity to distribute surface water to areas which currently have only groundwater as their option. We are also in discussions on potential opportunities with our other neighboring irrigation districts.
For any additional information, questions or concerns, please contact any of our Board members or the District office. We will be getting out more newsletters and communications to keep you informed, so keep your eyes open. Thank you.
