The State of California uses more ground water than any other State in the Nation. With a population of over 30 million people, an agricultural economy based on intensive irrigation, large urban industrial areas, and naturally elevated concentrations of some trace elements, there is a wide range of contaminant sources that have the potential to contaminate ground water and limit its beneficial uses. In response to the many—and different—potential sources of ground-water contamination, the State of California has evolved an extensive set of rules and programs to protect groundwater quality, and agencies to implement the rules and programs. These programs have in common a focus on compliance with regulations governing chemical use and (or) ground-water quality. Although appropriate for, and successful at, their specific missions, these programs do not at present provide a comprehensive view of ground-water quality in the State of California.

In October 2001, The California Assembly passed a bill, AB 599, establishing the “Ground-Water Quality Monitoring Act of 2001." The goal of AB 599 is to improve statewide comprehensive ground-water monitoring and increase availability of information about ground-water quality to the public. AB 599 requires the State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB), in collaboration with an interagency task force (ITF) and a public advisory committee (PAC), to develop a plan for a comprehensive ground-water monitoring program. AB 599 specifies that the
comprehensive program should be capable of assessing each ground-water basin in the State through direct and
other statistically reliable sampling approaches, and that the program should integrate existing monitoring
programs and design new program elements, as necessary. AB 599 also stresses the importance of prioritizing ground-water basins that provide drinking water.

The United States Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with the SWRCB, and in coordination with the ITF and PAC, has developed a framework for a comprehensive ground-water quality monitoring and assessment program for California. The proposed framework relies extensively on previous work conducted by the USGS through its National Water-Quality Assessment (NAWQA) program. In particular, the NAWQA program defines three types of groundwater assessment: (1) status, the assessment of the current quality of the ground-water resource; (2)
trends, the detection of changes in water quality, and (3) understanding, assessing the human and natural
factors that affect ground-water quality.

A statewide, comprehensive ground-water quality-monitoring and assessment program is most efficiently accomplished by applying uniform and consistent study-design and data-collection protocols to the entire State. At the same time, a comprehensive program should be relevant at a variety of scales, and therefore needs to retain flexibility to address regional and local issues. Consequently, many of the program components include a predominant element that will be consistently applied in all basins, and a secondary element that may be applied in specific basins where local conditions warrant attention.