2019 marks 5 years since lawmakers enacted, a package of laws that created, for the first time in the state’s history, a framework for sustainable groundwater management. The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act was a response to the more than a century of unregulated overdraft from the state’s aquifers. That has resulted in depleting groundwater basins, sinking land surface and damages to canals, bridges and other infrastructure. Over the past five years, agencies in the state’s groundwater basins have been organizing their local approaches to bring groundwater pumping in balance with the amount that is replenished. Vic Bedoian reports from Fresno.