A collection of top water news from around California and the West compiled each weekday. Send any comments or article submissions to Foundation Writer Matt Jenkins.
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The headlines below are the original headlines used in the publication cited at the time they are posted here and do not reflect the stance of the Water Education Foundation, an impartial nonprofit that remains neutral.
The Chico City Council discussed protests over a sewer rate
hike and a third-party review of the Chico Police Department’s
audit of its automated license plate reader program at its
meeting Tuesday night. The Chico City Council began a
public hearing on recently approved sewer rate
hikes. … The council decided to continue the
hearing on November 17th after the city received protest
letters from property owners. The protest letters are part of
the Proposition 218 process, which limits local governments
from increasing property-related fees without specific taxpayer
consent or voter approval. … The city council approved
the rate increase in June. It amounts to, on average, more than
a 160-percent rate increase over the next 5 years.
Parts of Merced County have slowly sunk over time because large
amounts of groundwater have been pumped from beneath the San
Joaquin Valley, according to the U.S. Geological
Survey. One of the most heavily affected areas is near El
Nido, south of Merced. USGS has mapped a large sinking area
covering about 1,200 square miles. The area stretches roughly
from Merced to Mendota and from Los Banos to Madera.
… USGS researchers found significant sinking near El
Nido between 2007 and 2014. At the fastest point measured
during that study period, the ground near El Nido was sinking
at about 270 millimeters per year.
The Carmichael Water District (CWD) Board of Directors is
pleased to announce the appointment of Pablo Arroyave
as the district’s new general manager. Arroyave will
lead the public agency responsible for providing water to
Carmichael residents and oversee its operations, workforce,
finances and customer service. … Arroyave joins CWD from
the San Luis & Delta-Mendota Water Authority, where he has
served as chief operating officer since 2019. … Arroyave
previously held senior leadership positions with the U.S.
Bureau of Reclamation, including acting regional director and
deputy regional director for the Mid-Pacific Region.
Tucson’s long-term water supply “is in significant danger” if
PFAS contamination of the city’s central wellfield isn’t
addressed, City Manager Tim Thomure says. He made the statement
Tuesday in a pitch to the City Council to approve what he said
is a first step toward launching a cleanup: the proposed
agreement between the city and a private, nonprofit group of
Air Force veterans, which sources previously told the Star
would result in the Air Force helping to pay to start PFAS
cleanup. … In the past 20 years, the city has stopped
using most of those [contaminated] wells in favor of the
renewable CAP water delivered from the Colorado River. But with
CAP supplies jeopardized for the long-term due to river flow
declines, city officials may need to rely on city groundwater
supplies to some extent instead.
A federal judge appears split on a bid to stop the expansion of
a pit mine in eastern Arizona that has reduced the flow of a
nearby creek by more than 90% in the last decade. The Pinto
Valley Mine uses more than 5 trillion gallons of water per
year, extracting copper from the Tonto National Forest east of
Miami, Arizona, and consequently reducing subflow of Pinto
Creek, home to at least two species of endangered birds.
Because the mine extracts most of its water from privately
owned wells on private land outside Forest Service
jurisdiction, the government claims it has no authority to
limit how much water the mine can pump. In a Phoenix courtroom
Tuesday afternoon, Thomas Delehanty said the federal government
can and should regulate activity on private land if the result
of that activity materially harms conditions on nearby public
land.
Americans have a lot of questions about their drinking water.
How is it treated? What’s in it? Most importantly, is it safe?
“I’ve even been out to eat where people overhear me talking
about my work and come over to ask me a question about their
tap water,” said Kimberly Parker, an environmental engineer who
studies chemical contaminants in drinking water at Washington
University in St Louis. Most Americans have access to municipal
water, which “tends to be really well treated” and largely safe
to drink, said Parker. Across the US, water is monitored for
contamination via centralized infrastructure at federal and
state levels. In Parker’s experience, “many environmental
engineers choose not to use filtered water” because of their
informed confidence in the safety of tap water, she said.
Officials in the Upper Colorado River Basin plan to continue
draining Flaming Gorge in Wyoming to protect Lake Powell, one
of the basin’s largest reservoirs. The Colorado River
Basin, which extends from Colorado to California and northern
Mexico, uses a network of reservoirs to store vital water
supplies for cities, farms, recreation, the environment and
millions of people. But the basin’s overall storage has
dropped to a third of its capacity, officials said
during an Upper Colorado River Basin meeting
Monday. Lake Powell holds about 22% of its total
capacity. Since April, the Bureau of Reclamation has
released about 450,000 acre-feet of water to help boost storage
in Lake Powell. Colorado and other Upper Basin state officials
agreed Monday that those releases should continue
through April.
… [S]omething unusual is sliding up the west coast of Mexico
right now, and it is aimed squarely at California. A mass of
warm, elevated ocean water hundreds of miles long is
moving north at roughly 6 mph — about the pace of a
jogger — and currently less than 350 miles from Southern
California’s beaches. … For Sacramento and the Delta
region, the connection is closer than it looks on a
map. The Delta is tidal, and in early fall — when
river flows are near an annual low — the ocean’s twice-daily
pulse reaches all the way up the Sacramento River to downtown.
A higher ocean at the Golden Gate Bridge also
translates into a smaller but measurable lift in water
levels through the Delta’s leveed margins upstream. It
also shifts the balance in the ongoing tug-of-war between river
outflow and salty bay water pushing inland.
The Tule East Groundwater Sustainability Agency in southern
Tulare County just can’t seem to put a foot right. The
state is bearing down, demanding an end to overpumping that has
sunk huge swaths of land – taking the critical
Friant-Kern Canal with it. Surrounding farmers and water
managers want action and they want it now. Tule East directors
and staff are still dotting the “i”s to create a
legitimate governing agency. Meanwhile, Tule East
farmers have apparently abandoned all restraint and are
“pumping like it’s the wild west.” The situation is a mess,
according to someone familiar with the process and the players
who agreed to talk with SJV Water.
Byron Sher, a collegial Stanford University law professor who
ran for Palo Alto City Council in the 1960s after losing a
battle over the widening of a local street, then rose to the
state Legislature, writing many of California’s landmark
environmental laws over three decades, has died. … Over
a career that stretched from 1980 to 1996 in the state
Assembly, and from 1996 to 2004 in the state Senate, Sher
passed dozens of groundbreaking bills that made California a
national leader in environmental policy. Among them are the
California Clean Air Act in 1987, the state’s Safe
Drinking Water Act in 1989, and a complex deal with
former Sen. Dianne Feinstein in 1999 to preserve thousands of
acres of old-growth redwoods at Headwaters Forest in Humboldt
County.
Hand-width cracks crisscross Armin’s pistachio orchard in
southeastern Iran, damaging irrigation pipes and swallowing
precious water as the ground beneath him sinks. … The region
has long covered much of the world’s demand for pistachios, but
a combination of drought and groundwater
extraction for irrigation has made Rafsanjan one of the
fastest-sinking areas in Iran. One study found parts
of the ground are dropping by up to 37 centimeters (14
inches) annually. And that is impacting
production. It’s a similar picture in California,
where some pistachio farmers are also seeing their ground
sink. … The link between growers in the two
countries goes back to the 1960s when US famers started
building a pistachio industry. They did it using an
Iranian variety.
In a rugged, sparsely populated patch of Arizona, there’s a
fragile system of rivers and creeks that cuts through
the desert. The San Pedro River and its tributaries,
locals and environmentalists say, are a unique gem. Now,
they’re sounding the alarm about a number of potential
threats to its water and surrounding ecosystems.
Residents are pushing back on a number of proposed
developments, including two mining projects, a natural gas
pipeline and a petroleum pipeline. Organizers say they could
harm the San Pedro, one of the last undammed,
free-flowing rivers in the Southwest, and the Aravaipa
Canyon area, a striking section of wilderness that attracts
tourists from around the state. Melissa Crytzer Fry, chair of
the board of directors for the Lower San Pedro Watershed
Alliance, said new mining activity could pose a “grave danger”
by leading to over-pumping of groundwater.
Members of Arizona’s congressional delegation on Monday
announced a $2 million investment into water reuse
research for semiconductor manufacturing. The federal
funding will go to Arizona State University to “develop, test,
and demonstrate innovative water reuse technologies.” The
announcement comes from Democratic Sens. Ruben Gallego and Mark
Kelly, along with Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari and Congressman
Greg Stanton. The project will test out various water
treatment technologies at ASU’s MacroTechnology Works
facility in Tempe. Researchers will measure each
technology’s water savings, cost reductions and any operational
benefits. The data can inform what works best for
water conservation.
Municipalities across the Grand Canyon State are raising
concern over the rapid rise of data centers,
especially when it comes to water consumption in the
drought-stricken Southwest. But an Arizona tribe that
shares a 108-mile border with the Colorado
Riverhas enacted a moratorium on its nearly 1
million-acre reservation. The Hualapai Tribal Council
in northern Arizona recently passed a resolution opposing “the
irresponsible development of hyperscale data centers.” Such
facilities powering AI, they say, pose “a direct and severe
threat to the tribe’s sacred water, lands, environment and way
of life.” … According to the city’s project FAQ webpage,
Page has not committed any municipal water source to the
pending data center — adding that rumors about drawing from
Lake Powell remain “speculative at this time.”
NOAA Fisheries is directing $103 million toward habitat
restoration projects across the country, with several of the
largest awards aimed at improving habitat for commercially
important salmon, shrimp, oysters, and other species.
… A significant portion of the funding will go toward
salmon habitat and fish passage projects. … California
projects include $5.4 million for California Trout to reconnect
floodplain habitat for coho salmon in the Klamath River. The
California Department of Water Resources will receive $8
million for fish passage work benefiting salmon and
sturgeon. Farther north, NOAA awarded $6.1 million to The
Freshwater Trust for salmon and steelhead habitat restoration
in Oregon’s Sandy River Basin.
E. coli levels in the Tijuana River watershed are often 30,000
times higher than the federal standard for freshwater bodies,
according to a new report San Diego Coastkeeper released last
week. And chemicals researchers said they can’t find thresholds
for because they’re not expected to be found in water are also
being detected in the binational river. … Coastkeeper’s
findings come ahead of what could be another public health
report on the Tijuana River crisis. San Diego County announced
last week that it’s launching a second survey with the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). … CDC and
county volunteers conducting the survey are expected to select
households randomly Sept. 17 and 18 between 2 p.m. and 7 p.m.
and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Approximately $158.2 million of bond money approved in 2024
will pay for projects in the State Water Project and
Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta levees, according to an
announcement from state Sen. Jerry McNerney, D-Stockton. The
money was approved as part of the budget bill Assembly Bill
113, which passed the legislature in August and is on the
governor’s desk. According to McNerney’s office, the funding
comes from Proposition 4, which California voters passed in
2024. … Part of that money, $90.2 million, will go to
paying for fortification of the Delta’s aging levees, while $68
million will pay for the State Water Project’s California
Aqueduct and canals. … According to a 2025 report from
the California Department of Water Resources, the State Water
Project has suffered from underinvestment and deterioration.
People visiting parks in San Jose and other cities across
California will soon see less grass and more bark as part of an
effort to save water. Cities are making the move to the more
brown look in order to comply with Assembly Bill 1572, which
goes into effect January 1, 2027. “Basically it says cities
generally cannot use potable or drinking water to irrigate
grass that does not serve a recreational, community or public
use function,” said Ed Bautista with San Jose Parks, Recreation
and Neighborhood Services. In San Jose, sections of
non-functional turf at about 50 city parks will be replaced
with tanbark or mulch. ”We’re turning off the irrigation
in areas that are on the periphery of parks, that are not
really recreation areas that are used for sports or designated
picnic areas,” Bautista said.
Stand beside almost any mountain creek in Colorado,
and there’s a good chance no one has ever measured
how much water is flowing past your boots. Of the thousands of
small headwater streams that lace the state’s high country,
feeding its rivers, irrigating its farms, and sustaining fish
and wildlife, only a small fraction has a
streamflow gauge. For the rest, knowing whether a stream is
running high, low, or somewhere in between has traditionally
meant a trip into the field and an educated guess.
Researchers in the Department of Ecosystem Science and
Sustainability, ESS, have built a new tool designed
to close that gap. CSUFlow25, a free, publicly
available web application, lets anyone drop a pin on a Colorado
stream and get a statistically modeled estimate of how that
stream flows across the year, no gauge
or field visit required.
As Clear Lake, which sits in Lake County, north of
Napa, faces mercury contamination, toxic algal blooms
and predatory invasive fish, the Clear Lake hitch — known by
local tribes as the chi — are in serious trouble. Another fish
unique to the watershed, the Clear Lake splittail, is already
extinct. After years of advocacy and on-the-ground work to save
the fish, the seven tribes around the lake signed an agreement
with state agencies and local governments Friday to
formally co-manage the troubled body of water. Nearly
two centuries after Europeans took over these lands, it’s a
literal watershed: the first agreement governing a watershed
since the state launched an initiative to bring 7% of
California’s lands and waters under the care of
tribes. The tribes hope it will turn their ad hoc
emergency work — which has coincided with an increase of chi in
the lake — into a lasting strategy to protect the fish.
