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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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.
Drinking water for at least one of every seven Americans –
about 49.5 million people – contains unsafe levels of “forever
chemicals,” according to new test results the Environmental
Protection Agency published in November. … USA TODAY’s
analysis of the records shows water utilities in
Anaheim and San Jose, California, and
Brownsville, Texas, have now joined the 944 systems scattered
across the country that have recently failed to meet the new
EPA standards. … The count of municipalities not meeting
these two limits is likely to grow as the EPA wraps up a
three-year initiative that required all public utilities
serving at least a few thousand customers to check for forever
chemicals in their drinking water.
The Trump administration’s speedy timeline for enacting a major
Clean Water Act rule has drawn pushback from state regulators,
local governments, utilities and environmentalists, who said
they will be scrambling over the holidays to digest the
proposal. EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers gave the public
45 days to comment on the proposed new “waters of the U.S.”
definition unveiled Nov. 17. … The proposal would
shrink the number of wetlands and streams regulated by
the Clean Water Act. It seeks comment on a range of
technical issues, including how “wet” wetlands and small
streams must be to qualify for the law’s protections.
… Tijuana River pollution dates back to at least the 1930s,
when the U.S. and Mexican governments built the first
cross-border sewage plants. As Tijuana’s population soared with
its booming industry, the city’s waste outstripped its
treatment systems. … After decades of
deterioration, major improvements came online this year. The
South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant, which was
barely operable, is now fully functioning and expanded its
capacity from 25 million to 35 million gallons of wastewater
per day. The project was expected to take two years, but was
completed in 100 days, according to the U.S. International
Boundary and Water Commission.
California’s infrastructure earned a C- grade in a new report
that highlights where improvement and resources are needed the
most. … The California Section for the American Society of
Civil Engineers released its 2025 report card for the state on
Wednesday, Dec. 3. … There are some challenges in
delivering drinking water to Californians.
Over 85% of water utilities surveyed for the report “indicated
that portions of their pipelines or facilities have exceeded
their design life,” according to the report.
… Additionally, about 103 million gallons of
water statewide were lost annually due to system
leakage based on data reported by urban retail water suppliers
from 2017 to 2020, the report cited.
The 31 national monuments designated since the Clinton
administration, which could be downsized as the Trump
administration pushes to open more public lands to extractive
industries, safeguard clean water for millions of Americans,
according to a new analysis from the Center for American
Progress. … The report found that the water supplies for more
than 13 million Americans are directly provided by watersheds
within or downstream of these national monuments. About 83
percent of the water passing through these public lands has no
other protection besides the monument designations, it found.
The U.S. House Water, Wildlife, and Fisheries Subcommittee held
a hearing on sea lion predation on salmon and the effectiveness
of killing the mammals to slow down the trend. Under the
Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA), sea lions skyrocketed from
a population of roughly 10,000 in the 1950s to 250,000 today.
That spike has been seen as a success story for the MMPA, but
it’s also had a major impact on salmon populations.
… That predation has undermined the federal government’s
attempts to help salmon recover in the Pacific Northwest, which
includes tens of millions of dollars in funding every year.
… Monterey One Water held a ribbon-cutting on Dec. 2 at its
Marina facility for a new food waste receiving and co-digestion
program that will divert up to 51,000 tons of organic food
waste from local landfills annually. … By adding a
food-waste receiving station and upgrades to existing anaerobic
digesters, Monterey One now combines food waste with wastewater
biosolids to significantly increase biogas production.
… The new infrastructure project at Monterey One Water
was made possible by a $4.2 million grant from CalRecycle.
On November 21, 2025, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and
the National Marine Fisheries Service released four proposed
rules revising implementation of the Endangered Species Act.
Two proposed rules issued jointly by USFWS and NMFS relate
to (i) interagency consultation and (ii) listing/delisting of
species and designation of critical habitat. Two additional
proposed rules issued solely by USFWS relate to (iii) critical
habitat exclusions and (iv) threatened species protections.
These alterations to the ESA framework could impact local land
use and economic development priorities, advancement of public
infrastructure, and federal water project
operations.
The federal government is limiting which bodies of water are
eligible for protection under the Clean Water
Act. Now, Colorado is working on its own set of rules
for places that will no longer be federally protected,
following a 2024 bipartisan law. … The Sackett
ruling, along with the new proposal to only protect permanent
rivers and wetlands directly connected to them, poses a problem
for Colorado and other Mountain West states. Because of the
region’s reliance on snowmelt for much of its water supply,
bodies of water are often ephemeral, or intermittent.
… The Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center has a sprawling
landmass greater than the city of Denver. It is home to the
largest data center in the US, built by the company Switch. …
The Truckee River supplies the industrial center with water and
also serves as the primary source of water for Pyramid
Lake. … And as data centers continue to proliferate
in water-stressed areas around the globe, which can offer cheap
land and energy as well as low humidity for easier chip
cooling, one of the central concerns in local communities is
what happens if the water runs dry.
A federal district court in California failed to consider
impacts to other endangered species before
ordering San Luis Obispo County to develop a flow and release
plan for local steelhead trout, a federal appeals court ruled
Wednesday. The injunction blocking the Lopez Dam expansion “may
benefit one protected species at the expense of other protected
species,” and the US District Court for the Central District of
California didn’t consider this factor or the public interest,
the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said.
… The Tribal Council of the Colorado River Indian Tribes
decided to recognize the river as a legal person under tribal
law. It’s the second time a Native tribe has declared legal
personhood for a river in the United States. The Yurok Tribe in
Northern California in 2019 declared the Klamath River a legal
person. I was interested to learn more about why the leaders of
the Colorado River Indian Tribes, or CRIT, wanted to take this
step, and Chairwoman Amelia Flores agreed to talk with
me.
California can still wring water out of its rivers — in theory,
and only if you’re willing to pay an increasingly steep premium
for it. Take Sites Reservoir, which could become the first new
major reservoir in California in decades. It would pull water
from the Sacramento River to fill a valley in the
coast range with enough water for roughly 3 million households,
then distribute it to the local farmers and Southern California
cities that would partly fund its construction. Sites has
serious political weight: it’s on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s
priority list, has growing interest from the Trump
administration and is drawing on tens of millions in state
dollars reallocated from other now-defunct water projects.
… The 2023 judgment of Las Posas v. Fox Canyon appointed Fox
Canyon as the regulatory “watermaster” with ultimate oversight
of the basins and allocations. Voices of dissent quickly
emerged, claiming that the judgment appeared to favor large
landowners. Lana Franklin, Rob Perry and Debra Tash, who own
smaller properties in and near Somis, were left with no water
allocations at all. … Franklin, Perry and Tash joined a
group of farmers who are currently appealing the outcome,
claiming that they never received proper notification through
certified mail, and were never alerted that they needed to join
the comprehensive adjudication in order to maintain their water
allocations.
For the first time in 70 years, adult Chinook salmon have been
spotted swimming the 86 vertical feet needed to return to
Alameda Creek in lower Niles Canyon – and it could be a turning
point in the decades-long effort to restore the East Bay’s
watersheds. … Since the beginning of November,
volunteers from the nonprofit group Alameda Creek Alliance —
which has worked to remove dams and install fish ladders since
1997 — have recorded nearly a dozen specimens of Chinook
Salmon. These sightings come just weeks after PG&E and the
nonprofit CalTrout finished a $15 million project to remove a
gas pipeline that was the last barrier impeding fish migration
upstream.
… While dry weather continues in California, high clouds from
the distant storms will dot the sky from San Francisco to
Sacramento, creating ideal conditions for colorful sunrises and
sunsets Thursday and Friday. A big high-pressure system
blocking storms from hitting California is steering them toward
the Pacific Northwest. … California’s Del Norte and
Humboldt counties could get hit with passing showers from the
storms, but rainfall totals are predicted to remain light.
… Atmospheric rivers hitting the Pacific Northwest leave
Northern California on the warm side of the moist air mass, and
temperatures from San Francisco to Lake Tahoe could be 10
degrees or more above normal next week.
Other weather and water supply news around the West:
Dr. Paula Stigler Granados, a researcher from San Diego State
University, says “without a doubt” pollution in the Tijuana
River Valley is making people sick. Her comments are based on
findings from an online survey being conducted by her and other
scientists who are studying the effects of raw sewage and other
contamination on those who live along the Tijuana River Valley,
which is polluted by effluent and chemicals that flow in from
south of the border. Studies have shown that contaminated water
that splashes on rocks or is churned by the surf in the ocean
releases dangerous gases such as hydrogen sulfide into the air.
… It’s just the latest phase in a drought that has crushed
the Southwest over the last two and a half decades: the driest
period the region has seen in 1,200 years. Even the
lashing rains of the atmospheric rivers that have swept over
the Southwest in recent winters have done little to alleviate
the trend. Drought, it seems, is here to stay for many more
years. In fact, the current dry spell could last another two
decades, according to a paper recently published in Nature. The
results of their analysis, which relied on the data of over 500
climate simulations produced by world-leading research
institutions, rewrite our understanding of one of the key
climate systems controlling weather in the western United
States.
ASCE [American Society of Civil Engineers] Region 9 released
the 2025 Report Card for California’s Infrastructure, assigning
the state an overall grade of C-, unchanged from 2019 and below
the national grade of C. The report evaluated 17 infrastructure
categories and found that while six sectors improved,
several—including dams, drinking water, schools, and
stormwater—received lower marks than in the previous
assessment. Stormwater infrastructure was graded D, reflecting
persistent challenges with aging systems, climate-driven
extreme weather, and funding gaps.
The State Water Resources Control Board today announced six new
appointees and three re-appointments to the Safe and Affordable
Funding for Equity and Resilience (SAFER) Advisory Group. The
advisory group, which meets quarterly, consists of volunteers
who provide local perspectives to the State Water Board as it
works to improve access to safe drinking water in
disadvantaged communities throughout the state. The
new and re-appointees join ten continuing members, all with
diverse drinking water backgrounds and experiences.
