I liked this part in particular:
Transferring power to local agencies may simply represent a higher body’s abdication of responsibility, rather than a strategic allocation of powers. In this case, the California legislature did not have the mettle to create a robust groundwater management scheme. Kicking the can into the local agencies’ driveway was a more attractive option for legislators than dealing with the problem head-on.
This is the second time we’ve needed people who are employed by universities, not water agencies to tell us this. There is certainly no will to acknowledge this from within the state bureaucracies. Local agencies are not magic: some are good, some are inept, some are overwhelmed. We will find out which ones are which, but we’ll have lost years to the process.
On the public record 
You had mentioned sometime in the past about the questionable obfuscated sale and permanent transfer and sale of water by the Dudley Ridge Water District. It was the Kings County Grand Jury that brought this outright theft and sale of the public’s water by a private individual and his corporation rather than return the so called excess water to the state. The Dudley Ridge Water “District” paid for the use of the water, not ownership. And how and individual board member of a public agency was allowed to personally and privately profit at the public’s expense is just mind boggling.