A collection of top water news from around California and the West compiled each weekday. Send any comments or article submissions to Foundation News & Publications Director Vik Jolly.
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California’s climate is defined by extremes, and water year
2025 put that reality on full display. One month delivered
warm, dry conditions that can typically stress water supplies;
the next brought a surge of winter storms, only for January to
swing dry again. These whiplash shifts aren’t outliers — they
are becoming the new operating conditions for water managers,
communities, and ecosystems across the state. Against this
backdrop, the Drought Resilience Interagency and Partners
(DRIP) Collaborative continued its work to strengthen
coordinated drought planning. … Released in March, DRIP
Collaborative’s 2025 Annual Report highlights the activities,
discussions, and recommendations developed during the task
force’s third year.
A desalination startup company hopes to gain Arizona customers
as the state prepares for more cuts to its Colorado River water
supply. Desalination is the process of taking ocean water and
removing the salt to make it drinkable. California-based
OceanWell is developing a subsea system that is more energy
efficient than traditional onshore desalination. OceanWell is
three years into a five-year research and development phase to
create an underwater operation called Water Farm I about 4.5
miles off the coast of Malibu in Santa Monica Bay. It will
consist of large purification pods that sit on the ocean floor.
The system is designed to use natural ocean pressure to push
seawater through the pods’ reverse osmosis membranes for
desalination.
Lukins Brothers Water Company (LBWC) is aiming to be the first
water company in the basin that is Firewise certified. It’s
already joined the Fire Adapted Communities program and with
new legislation, owner and president Jennifer Lukins hopes it
could potentially lower insurance fees and water rates for the
community. … Lukins believes other water systems could
join Firewise as well, and it’s possible that once LBWC sets
the precedent, more water systems may follow suit—especially as
the water affordability crisis grows more critical in
California with rising wildfire risks and insurance costs.
Best Management Practices (BMPs) have become one of the most
important tools the golf course industry uses to care for the
land responsibly. While the term may sound technical, the idea
is simple: use proven science and practical experience to
protect the environment while keeping golf courses healthy and
playable. … I saw the value of BMPs firsthand while
redeveloping a golf course next to the American River in
Sacramento, Calif. The course sits in an environmentally
sensitive area that includes a major fishery and the 5,000-acre
American River Parkway. State regulations strictly prohibit
fertilizer from entering the river basin, making environmental
protection a top priority.
… Where Govs. Gavin Newsom of California
and Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania are slamming the gas
price spikes stemming from the U.S.-Israel war with Iran,
[Ariz. Gov. Katie] Hobbs is touting Arizona defense
contractors’ work on Tomahawk missiles that the U.S. military
deploys in the conflict. Her aim: to get Trump to
intervene on behalf of the state in the West’s biggest water
war. … Hobbs’s pitch to Trump on the river is
garnering a wide base of support within Arizona. A phalanx of
state and local officials from both parties, business leaders
and even her electoral challengers are joining in the effort.
Aurora City Council members unanimously passed a Stage I Water
Shortage declaration in Monday night’s meeting, putting
restrictions on outdoor water use starting
immediately. The shortage declaration imposes
restrictions on outdoor watering for residents and businesses
and reduces commercial user allocations, such as that for golf
courses, by 20%, according to Aurora Water General Manager
Marshall Brown. With the passage of the shortage declaration
Monday night, Aurora Water officials will also start to ramp up
enforcement. In the past, enforcement was gentle, water
officials said. This year, officials will issue one
warning.
Wyoming has seen a decent amount of snow in the first
week of April, but meteorologists says it’s officially too
little, too late to save the state’s historically low snowpack,
which has been melting for weeks. The spring storm brought
much-needed moisture to several dry spots across the Cowboy
State. … Tony Bergantino, the director of the Water
Resources Data System and the Wyoming State Climate Office,
finally said the word that describes this past winter’s
miserable snowpack. “I guess you could say that it’s
‘unprecedented,’” he said. … Bergantino added that Wyoming
could already be primed for a disastrous fire season.
In Aurora, data center proposals run through a simple filter.
City officials compare total water use against how much of that
water won’t come back—lost to evaporation. If either number
gets too high, the project doesn’t move forward. When a
developer wants to build in Denver, there is no matrix. That
gap—two cities, two standards, nothing statewide connecting
them—is the center of a question Colorado has avoided
answering: who is responsible for knowing how much
water AI data centers use, and when does that become too
much? The question got harder to ignore this spring.
On March 16, Governor Jared Polis activated Phase 2 of the
state’s Drought Response Plan—the first activation in nearly
six years—after federal water managers ranked this year’s
snowpack 45th out of 46 years on record.
Beneath California’s Salton Sea, there is so
much metal essential to rechargeable batteries that Gov. Gavin
Newsom calls the vast lake “the Saudi Arabia of lithium.” An
estimated $500 billion worth of lithium here could help power
our smartphones, electric cars and electricity grids. … But
not everyone is eagerly welcoming the lithium industry. The
Salton Sea is already an environmental disaster zone. It’s
shrinking, and as it does, it spews plumes of pesticide-laden
dust throughout Imperial County, home to 182,000 people.
Extracting lithium requires a steady supply of fresh
water, and locals worry the process will deplete the
region’s scarce water resources.
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife announced that
Monterey Bay—part of the Central Coast region, which spans from
Pigeon Point south to the Mexico border—will open to
recreational salmon fishing on April 11. For the first
time in four years, the region is also expected to reopen to
commercial fishing sometime in May. It’s highly
anticipated news following years of consecutive closures tied
to low population counts. The commercial fishing season for
Chinook has been closed since 2022. … As part of a
broader plan called California Salmon Strategy for a Hotter
Drier Future, which aims to protect native salmon from
extinction, officials will be closely monitoring catch numbers,
especially in a year that is unusually hot and dry.
The White House seeks to slash the Environmental Protection
Agency’s budget from roughly $8.8 billion down to $4.2 billion.
… More than $1 billion would be cut from categorical
grant programs that assist states in enforcing federal
environmental laws like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water
Act. The EPA’s Superfund Program, responsible for cleaning
up contaminated sites, would face funding reductions as well.
This is troubling for environmental groups that fear the cuts
will disrupt projects slated to clean up the Tijuana River
Valley, which has been plagued for decades by raw sewage,
chemicals and trash that enter the United States from south of
the border on a daily basis.
As Aurora city leaders consider reducing water usage, a closer
look inside the city’s purification system shows how reused
water from river basins is transformed into drinking water
through a multi-step process designed to remove contaminants
for more than 400,000 customers. … Aurora Water said
it’s able to reuse 90 to 99% of its water rights, meaning it
can be reused several times before traveling down the river.
… Binney is one of three purification facilities in
Aurora, but it is its most advanced and in-depth plant. Aurora
Water said on high demand days in the summer, 85 million
gallons of water can be purified across the three locations.
30,000, of which, get processed at Binney.
… [A] 2008 legal mandate means the Truckee Meadows Water
Authority (TMWA) is required to align regional growth with its
two main critical water resources: the vibrant, snow-fed
Truckee River and the deep, silent aquifers lying beneath the
valley floor. … Adam Sullivan, the former state engineer for
Nevada, confirms the scale of the problem. He notes that
about half of Nevada’s 256 groundwater basins are
“over-appropriated,” meaning more water rights exist on paper
than the land can yield, and 25% are already being
over-pumped. The fear that development will outpace the
aquifer isn’t hypothetical; other western cities have already
hit the wall.
Phragmites are a tall wetland grass that can grow up to 15
feet, but it’s actually an invasive species that uses up a lot
of water. In 2011, Becka Downard, a wetland ecologist with the
Utah Geological Survey, said phragmites were basically
everywhere there was water. In order to get established, the
invasive species needs to have a source of seeds, disturbance,
and sunlight. … She said they’ll have to spray
phragmites with herbicide, mow and trample it, and then do
follow-up treatments. … She said when they’re
drought-stressed, they can catch fire more easily, and the
three-year treatment won’t work.
… Scientists and officials are now preparing for not one
threatening storm, but a 30-day maelstrom of megastorms unlike
anything seen in the state [Calif.] for almost 200 years. Such
a scenario was always possible, but rising global temperatures
are making it more likely – and far more destructive. “It
was always a when, not if,” says Dr Daniel Swain, a climate
scientist at UCLA, who co-authored the study warning of the
coming storm. “Before global warming, that ‘when’ might have
been centuries away. Now it’s quite likely to be within my own
lifetime.” This storm system, dubbed ‘ARkStorm 2.0’, could
strike this year or in 60 years – no one knows for sure.
Whenever it does, it is likely to be one of the most costly
disasters in global history. The only question is whether
California can prepare in time.
A river access advocacy group is splintered. Landowners are
organized to protect a decades-old “float but don’t touch”
decree. And lawmakers, halfway through the legislative session,
have yet to take up any bill that would change that
state’s murky rules around recreational access to the state’s
waterways. As a short and dry river season takes shape
after a snow-starved winter, it appears the status quo will
hold. But passions are roiling at Colorado’s uniquely volatile
confluence of property rights, recreational pressures and river
safety. … The blend of three divergent arguments — the
right-to float, the right-to-wade and do nothing — seems to
have stymied any new laws.
What many would hope was an April Fool’s Day joke is anything
but, as Utah has recorded its lowest-ever snowpack conditions
as of April 1. In a special report issued Friday, the Natural
Resources Conservation Service said that at no point
since measurements began in 1930 has the snowpack been as low
in Utah. The report was issued ahead of what is
expected to be a dismal Water Supply Outlook Report. The
agency called the 2026 snowpack “truly unprecedented,” with the
next lowest having been recorded in 2015, but it was
approximately five times higher than the current snowpack
conditions.
… [A] group of residents is gathering signatures for a
potential November 2026 ballot initiative that would block data
centers in Imperial County altogether. They’re calling it the
“Imperial County Data Center Prohibition Act.” …
[Developer Sebastian] Rucci has proposed obtaining 6
million gallons per day of reclaimed water from
Imperial and El Centro to cool a massive data center, which
would use 750,000 gallons a day. Rucci said the unused
water would be funneled into the Salton Sea to
ameliorate environmental damage there. Reclaimed water from
both cities is already channeled into the sea, though at a
lesser level of treatment, so the project would ultimately
result in less water in the sea.
… For Colorado River Indian Tribes, one way to be good
stewards was to unanimously approve a resolution to give the
river personhood status under tribal law. The resolution
acknowledges the Colorado River as a living entity whose health
and well-being are linked to the well-being of tribal
members. CRIT’s water rights are some of the most
powerful in the Colorado River Basin. The tribe is
also near growing communities in Arizona looking for
predictable water supplies in the face of potential water cuts
and a changing climate. People have come to CRIT seeking
agreements to lease the tribes’ water. Now, with the
resolution, the tribal council can require them to acknowledge
the river’s personhood as part of the agreement.
Two years ago, Gov. Gavin Newsom unveiled a strategy to save
declining salmon — spotlighting a historic partnership with the
Winnemem Wintu Tribe to reintroduce endangered winter-run
Chinook to the vital, cold waters upstream of Lake Shasta in
far northern California. Now, tribe officials say the
state is ending its support, potentially causing salmon
restoration efforts on the McCloud River to die
mid-stream. The tribe is now grappling with the sudden
loss of jobs, along with the dimming of hope that the
culturally sacred fish will be restored to their ancestral
waters. … State officials say the one-time funds were
tied to the state’s drought response and have now been used
up.
