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.
Subscribe to our weekday emails to have news delivered to your inbox at about 9 a.m. Monday through Friday except for holidays.
Some of the sites we link to may limit the number of stories you can access without subscribing.
We occasionally bold words in the text to ensure the water connection is clear.
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.
A Trump administration plan to pump more water to Central
Valley farmlands is facing vehement opposition from Democratic
members of Congress who represent the Sacramento–San Joaquin
River Delta and the Bay Area. A group of seven legislators led
by Rep. John Garamendi (D-Walnut Grove) said pumping more water
will threaten the availability of water for many Californians,
disrupt longstanding state-federal cooperation and put the
Delta’s native fish at risk. … Federal officials
have said the changes, adopted this month following an order by
President Trump earlier this year, represent an effort to
balance the needs of communities, farms and ecosystems.
Two U.S. lawmakers representing Colorado are advancing a bill
in Congress to update the country’s snowpack tracking
technology and more accurately predict water supply. The 2025
Snow Water Supply Forecasting Reauthorization Act is sponsored
by Rep. Jeff Hurd, a Grand Junction Republican, and cosponsored
by Rep. Joe Neguse, a Lafayette Democrat. … Their bill,
which passed the U.S. House on Wednesday and now heads to the
Senate, would renew and update the country’s forecasting system
for snowpack melt. In statements, both lawmakers said the
measure is important for their rural and mountain communities,
which rely on snowpack data for irrigation planning, drought
management and annual water allocation.
Water officials in Pinal County experimented with cloud seeding
technology to boost rainfall over the summer, just months after
bills that would have banned the practice failed to gain
traction at the state legislature. … Joe Singleton, the
authority’s executive director, told lawmakers at a Dec. 11
meeting of the Arizona House Committee on Natural Resources
that the test took place between July 1 and Sept. 30.
… According to the final report on the Pinal County
experiment, the three-month test may have resulted in an
additional 0.47 inches of rainfall and in 134,192 acre feet of
water. … But news of the new cloud seeding project in
Pinal County didn’t sit well with the Republican lawmakers who
represent the area.
On Thursday, Gov. Gavin Newsom touted the “comeback” of coho
salmon after state officials spotted juvenile fish in the
Russian River’s upper basin — the first such sighting in more
than 30 years. As the state celebrated the news, however,
federal fisheries officials announced that they would not
designate Chinook salmon as endangered or threatened under the
Endangered Species Act, prompting disappointment from
conservation groups. The two salmon species face different
challenges and are at different stages of recovery, one salmon
expert said. But climate change is increasingly shaping the
fate of both.
Groundwater agencies in the beleaguered Tulare Lake subbasin in
Kings County have released a region-wide pumping allocation
model – but disagreements continue. The proposed methodology
was discussed at the Dec. 9 El Rico Groundwater Sustainability
Agency (GSA) meeting where representatives from four of the
five GSAs were in attendance. The proposed methodology is based
on historical groundwater use within the subbasin. Using a
coordinated methodology for figuring out how much each GSA can
pump is critical to earning approval from the state Water
Resources Control Board, which has already put the subbasin on
probation. … Still, the GSAs found fault with the
proposed method.
During Arvin-Edison Water District’s winter maintenance workers
confirmed detection of golden mussels in their
systems. The golden mussel is an invasive species from
China that was first detected in California in October 2024. It
has been spreading throughout the state with more and more
locations reporting findings of the invasive species. The small
mussels form massive colonies, clogging infrastructure. The
district has been power washing, which hasn’t been successful,
and manual scraping, which is effective, but time
consuming. Samuel Blue, resource manager for the district,
said chemical treatments would have to be done for a long
period of time, between 12 to 30 days.
… As local and national opposition to data centers
has grown, so, too, have concerns about their environmental
impacts. Earlier this week, more than 230 green
groups sent a letter to Congress, warning that AI and
data centers are “threatening Americans’ economic,
environmental, climate and water security.” … But as the
number of data centers continues to grow across the country —
and as President Donald Trump’s administration rolls back
environmental protections to encourage more development — it’s
worth understanding what, exactly, data centers are using water
for, and how popular estimates are produced. And it’s worth
having a bigger conversation about how and why we’re choosing
to use water to cool data centers in the first place.
The State Water Resources Control Board has added a new chapter
and made other language updates to its draft Bay-Delta
Plan. … ”The release of these documents puts us on
track for updates to the Bay-Delta Plan to come before the
State Water Board for adoption in 2026,” E. Joaquin Esquivel,
chairman of the board, said in a statement. … In July 2025,
staff proposed updates to the plan that would allow water right
holders in the Sacramento/Delta to comply with water quality
requirements by either leaving a percentage of unimpaired flow
instream … or implementing a combination of flow and
habitat restoration commitments as a party to the [Healthy
Rivers and Landscapes] program. … The July 2025 proposal
also incorporated tribal beneficial uses and a formal
designation of tribal tradition and culture beneficial uses in
the Bay-Delta watershed.
For three days [this] week, water leaders from across the
Colorado River Basin will gather in Las Vegas to talk about
water and the looming failure of the seven basin states to work
out differences on a plan to manage the river through drought.
Tribal leaders and water protectors will arrive with their own
goals and a clear message for delegates to the Colorado River
Water Users Association conference. They’re worried about not
being at the negotiating table despite holding about 20% of the
Colorado’s senior water rights. They want to see a more
holistic approach to river management as the Southwest’s
long-term drought threatens to permanently impact the
Colorado’s flow.
Snow season is off to a rough start for Utah and its neighbors.
Most of the West is in a snow drought, with so little white
stuff covering the ground that the region hit a 25-year low. If
the trend continues, it could be a recipe for disaster for the
Colorado River and its reservoirs. That
includes the nation’s two largest, Lake Powell
and Lake Mead, which prop up a system that
provides water to communities on the Wasatch Front and tens of
millions of other Americans across the West. A new report from
more than a dozen Colorado River experts projects that even
near-average snowpack this winter could send the two reservoirs
to record lows in 2026.
Other snowpack and water supply news around the West:
After years of water shortfalls that have cost Texas farmers
about $1 billion annually, Mexico agreed late Friday to begin
immediate deliveries of water to the United States, averting a
5% tariff threatened by President Donald Trump. In a statement
late Friday, USDA announced Mexico has agreed to release
202,000-acre-feet of water – 65.8 billion gallons — to the
United States with deliveries expected to begin this week.
… Under the 1944 Water Treaty, Mexico is obligated to
deliver 1.75 million acre-feet over five years to the United
States from the Rio Grande River. The United States in turn
delivers 1.5 million acre-feet of water to Mexico from the
Colorado River.
The rapid growth and impact of massive data centers, especially
for AI and cryptocurrency companies, this year has had big
economic benefits, especially for construction and design firms
and their workers. … But there’s increasing
blowback to that rapid expansion, with more individual
communities opting against new data center projects because of
their gargantuan need for electricity and
water, which is driving utility rates for residential
customers higher. That blowback is getting more coordinated as
a coalition of more than 230 environmental, tribal and
community groups is calling for a national moratorium on such
construction.
The Pacific Ocean remains officially locked in a La Niña phase,
but the mechanisms keeping it there are beginning to sputter.
On Thursday, the Climate Prediction Center left a La Niña
advisory in place, confirming that cool sea surface
temperatures continue in the equatorial Pacific. But it
won’t last much longer. The agency expects the La Niña phase to
fade by February. … After February, the agency expects a
neutral phase, where neither El Niño phase or La Niña
conditions exist. But mounting evidence suggests that the
neutral phase won’t last long and the Pacific could snap back
to an El Niño phase as early as next summer.
Representatives Jim Costa (CA-21) and Adam Gray (CA-13)
introduced their End California Water Crisis Package (last
week), a suite of bills that would authorize additional
California water storage projects, ease permitting
restrictions, and create enforceable timelines for
environmental review processes. The bills aim to expand
California’s water storage capacity by providing funding and
technical support to both develop and maintain water
infrastructure projects. … The End California Water Crisis
Package includes three bills to stabilize water access in the
Central Valley.
The water that flows down irrigation canals to some of the
West’s biggest expanses of farmland comes courtesy of the
federal government for a very low price — even, in some cases,
for free. In a new study, researchers analyzed wholesale prices
charged by the federal government in California,
Arizona and Nevada, and found that large agricultural
water agencies pay only a fraction of what cities pay, if
anything at all. … Farmers in California’s Imperial
Valley receive the largest share of Colorado River water.
… Tina Shields, IID’s water department manager, said the
district opposes any surcharge on water. Comparing
agricultural and urban water costs, as the researchers did, she
said, “is like comparing a grape to a watermelon.”
… [Last] week, California state officials held a series of
public meetings across the county to discuss public health
responsiveness, wastewater infrastructure and U.S.-Mexico
relations related to the [Tijuana River sewage] crisis. …
Meetings ranged from Thursday’s State Senate Environmental
Quality Committee hearing in La Jolla, chaired by Sen.
Catherine Blakespear, to a three-day California Coastal
Commission meeting in Imperial Beach from Wednesday to Friday.
… Officials repeatedly discussed the so-called “hot spot” on
Saturn Boulevard, where raw sewage and industrial waste flowing
from four concrete culverts create a toxic waterfall that
aerosolizes pollutants.
The Bureau of Reclamation is inviting public input on a draft
environmental impact statement for the Del Puerto Canyon
Reservoir Project. This proposed reservoir, located south of
the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta near Patterson, California,
would provide up to 82,000 acre-feet of new off-stream water
storage. The project aims to enhance agricultural water supply
reliability, improve refuge water deliveries, and offer flood
control. … The Del Puerto Water District and the San
Joaquin River Exchange Contractors Water Authority are
partnering with Reclamation on this project.
The Eastern Municipal Water District will update the
hydrogeologic conceptual model and groundwater flow model for
the San Jacinto Groundwater Basin. … INTERA, Inc., will
update models for the Hemet North, Hemet South, San Jacinto
Upper Pressure, and Canyon groundwater management zones. GSI
Environmental, Inc., will update the Lakeview, Perris South,
and Menifee zones. Geoscience Support Services, Inc., will
handle the Perris North and San Jacinto Lower Pressure zones.
Jacobs Engineering Group, Inc., will provide overall quality
assurance and quality control and ensure the data and
interpretations from all consultants are synthesized,
especially along zone boundaries.
A new study by Colorado Parks and Wildlife researchers suggests
man-made whitewater parks that create “play waves” for kayakers
and other recreationists are having a negative impact on fish
passage. … The study, published in the
peer-reviewed journal “River Research and Applications,” looked
at two white water parks that have incorporated fish passage
structures into the design. … [A]dult trout appeared to make
it upstream past the whitewater park while fewer juvenile trout
succeeded in doing so. There was also a higher concentration of
suckers below the structure than above it, suggesting the park
could be impacting the suckers’ movement.
For months, Sacramento County has been advancing a
25,000-resident community north of downtown in Natomas without
a confirmed water supply. Its new solution is a supply that was
slashed by 82% in the last drought. … Upper Westside’s
new proposed water supplier is the Natomas Central Mutual Water
Company, a long-time provider of untreated Sacramento River
water to Natomas farmers. The company gets its water from
Shasta Dam and the Central Valley Project (CVP), run by the
federal Bureau of Reclamation. … This is where Trump
(and future presidents with similar California water politics)
comes in. Trump has vowed to provide more “beautiful” water to
Central Valley water. That’s impossible to do without
aggressively operating Shasta. –Written by Sacramento Bee columnist Tom Philp.
