The Salinas Valley Basin Groundwater Sustainability Agency was purportedly established in 2017 under California's Sustainable Groundwater Management Act.
A new well water monitoring system went into place recently but one of the Directors has been exposed for making a lot of false statement under penalty of perjury, while concealing massive commercial networks.
As a Monterey County Supervisor, he pushed the monitoring system through the Board of Supervisors with no reasonable outreach to those who would be funding it -- and the EHB also failed to outreach to well system managers, and they too have been exposed for improper commercial dealing.
There's a lot of money involved with all of this and discerning the difference between grifting and sincere science these days gets harder every year.
The new well monitoring system and even the science behind this all should be revisited by the public, given what is known now about a man who was involved with this from it's founding.
In 2017, Glenn Church was involved in this program. At that time he filled out an SEI 700 form while not disclosing relationship to 12M in Commercial Real Estate and his wife's' family's direct partnership in an LLC with Commercial Real Estate Brokers -- with 50 year ties to the Pajaro and Santa Cruz County area. Church's exit document was so incomplete, another County Official decided to fill out his Verification block with improper information. That was the first known opportunity for anyone in the County to express concern about Church and the mindset he brought to civil service.
In 2022, Church was elected as Supervisor and he took office in 2023.
In a video in early 2023 Church states he was assigned to 27 boards and agencies as part of his new position - and that didn't include sub agencies, yet only three were reported on an initial SEI 700 filing and none were reported on a subsequent filing that were processed at nearly the same time as the video.
Full SEI 700 Audits for Church's documents ranging from 2016 to 2026 have shown an egregious level of amorol, immoral, unethical and/or fraudulent statements under penalty of perjury. In addition, Church consciously engaged in "bifurcated e-filing " of data (the filing of different data sets) to the county and state in 2024, 2025 and 2026.
One example of commercial concern of some kind of self dealing related to Church includes the Castroville street project where Minnesota tagged trucks got some of that work and Church's family is known to have prior business ties to Minnesota. And there are other concerns with Church potentially dealing in insincere ways with a Waste Management call center, an illogical increase in feees for EHB, and a complex scheme related to the Suppression of ADU permits one of two way.
Science is not black and white. It can and is influenced by commercial forces all the time for various insincere interests. Apparently there was an award for a $70 Million dollar Castroville Saltwater intrusion project in recent past. Getting grants funded like that is huge money for people who might not otherwise have work if the science doesn't support it.
As a Leader, Church pushed through a Ground Water Monitoring program with the SVBGSA -- with no material notice to the well systems that might be affected. Why would that be? he also advocated for distribution of costs by well, not connection, thus grossly burdenening single connection well owners in an illogical manner that seemingly was opposed by at least one other supervisor, and this was all done in a hurried manner, given the timeline to reach sustainability was more than a decade away -- and something that may not happen anyway.
As of now, there are concerns that he may have been working to push this through with less public discussion than was proper to benefit himself or others in a commercial network he had hid from all who did not know him intimately.
In summary, his involvement in and around this combined with what has been exposed about his SEI 700 filing has taintead all his work -- -and this is a big issue that now needs to be reconsidered properly given the facts about him that have been exposed.