The Board of Supervisors finds and declares the following:
(a) There are seven (7) distinct groundwater basins in the City and County of San Francisco. The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission identified the existing and potential uses of some of these aquifers, including but not limited to supply of water for domestic purposes in San Francisco; use of groundwater for irrigation of City parks; landscaping and maintaining natural water features; use of groundwater for emergency purposes; conjunctive surface and groundwater to improve reliability of San Francisco's water system; and industrial use of non-potable groundwater to offset demands for potable water.
(b) Perforations of aquifers beneath the City, such as wells and soil borings, may serve as conduits for chemicals to contaminate the groundwater if the wells and soil borings are not constructed properly.
(c) Because San Francisco is situated at the end of a peninsula surrounded on three sides by salt water, and due to the potential for earthquakes and other natural disasters to interrupt the supply of imported water to San Francisco from Hetch Hetchy and other sources, available groundwater supplies in San Francisco constitute an important resource held in trust for the benefit of the People of San Francisco.
(d) The People of San Francisco have a primary interest in the location, construction, maintenance, abandonment and destruction of wells, such as monitoring wells and cathodic protection wells, and soil borings which activities directly affect the quality and purity of groundwater.
(e) The purpose of this Article is to protect the health, safety and general welfare of the People of the City and County of San Francisco by ensuring that local groundwater resources designated for beneficial uses will not be polluted or contaminated. To these ends, this Article sets forth minimum requirements for (1) construction, modification and destruction of wells and other perforations of the water table, and (2) operation of such wells.
(f) Unmanaged use of groundwater in San Francisco creates a risk of harm to a common resource shared by all San Franciscans as part of the City's historic Pueblo water right to all water, surface and underground, within the historic Pueblo of San Francisco. Potential risks include, but are not limited to, land subsidence; contamination of aquifer(s) through improper well construction and closure; seawater intrusion into coastal aquifers as a result of pumping in excess of the aquifer's safe yield; and adverse environmental impacts on San Francisco's few remaining natural streams and lakes.
(g) It shall be the policy of the City and County of San Francisco to make beneficial use of groundwater where economically and environmentally feasible, and to prevent the use of groundwater when necessary to protect the health, safety and welfare of the People of the City and County.
(Added by Ord. 113-05, File No. 050547, App. 6/10/2005)