Bloomberg Businessweek - Online (September 17, 2014) - California is finally joining the rest of western U.S. states to regulate how it pumps and protects its groundwater. Governor Jerry Brown signed a trio of laws passed by the legislature in late August that, for the first time, require the amount of water pumped out of the ground be balanced against how quickly the water supply is replenished.The new laws, which go into effect in January, operate under the premise that groundwater isn’t just a private matter, connected only to land under which it sits. Instead, in the words of University of California Davis law professor Richard Frank, the laws recognize “that California’s surface and groundwater resources are in many respects part of a single complex, interconnected water system.”