A group of water users in Kern County’s Indian Wells Valley who disagree with how groundwater has been apportioned, won a legal skirmish last month in a court of appeal but the state Supreme Court may have the final word. The issue in the high desert basin is whether the Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority is using an appropriate “safe yield” figure. Safe yield refers to how much water naturally accumulates in an aquifer each year in order to determine how much can safely be pumped out without putting the basin into overdraft. The groundwater authority has used a model showing the basin accumulates only about 7,650 acre feet of natural inflow each year but users pump out nearly 28,000 acre feet, creating a severe overdraft. In order to comply with the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) to bring the basin into balance, the authority severely restricted pumping for most users.