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 Chris Bowman.
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The Biden administration just approved a massive geothermal
energy project in Utah, marking a significant advance for a
climate-friendly technology that is gaining momentum in the
United States, the White House confirmed to The Washington Post
on Thursday. The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land
Management gave final approval to Fervo Energy’s Cape
Geothermal Power Project in Beaver County, Utah, the White
House said. Once fully operational, the project could generate
up to 2 gigawatts of electricity — enough to power more than 2
million homes. … Despite its climate benefits, some
environmentalists oppose enhanced geothermal because of its
reliance on fracking, which has the potential to
contaminate drinking water and trigger
earthquakes or tremors.
The Bureau of Reclamation [Oct. 17] announced the availability
of $25 million from the Inflation Reduction Act for fish
habitat and facility improvements in the Sacramento River
Valley. This funding will complement the State of California’s
Healthy Rivers and Landscapes program, which is working to
increase river flows, restore ecosystems and strengthen water
supply reliability across the state. The rivers of the
Central Valley support populations of fall-run Chinook,
spring-run Chinook, winter-run Chinook salmon and steelhead
trout. Due to water resources development, stream channel
changes and other recent actions historical salmon habitats
have been reduced and modified.
A neighborhood election affecting less than 0.1% of
California’s population — roughly 37,000 people — is one the
most heated races in Sacramento County. Campaigns for
seats on the Fair Oaks Water District (FOWD) board of
directors are smeared with
misinformation. ABC10 spent weeks gathering
information and statements from both sides.
The Colorado River watershed, a vital source of water for seven
U.S. states and Mexico, is in historic crisis. This major river
system irrigates vast agricultural lands in the West, supports
cities, generates hydroelectricity and is used by 40 million
people. But since the turn of the century natural runoff in the
watershed has dropped by 13 percent, and the two largest
reservoirs in the system haven’t been anywhere near full since
1999. Drought, overuse and climate change mean that water
levels will likely remain seriously low, even despite the
occasional wet period, according to Jack Schmidt from Center
for Colorado River Studies. In a recent special edition of PBS
Newshour, Schmidt explained why matching supply and demand is
so difficult in the high-stakes political environment in which
future management is now being negotiated on a state and
federal level.
A group of environmental nonprofits and southern Utah residents
are suing a mineral company and the state engineer who approved
its application to produce lithium along the Green River.
Filed on Tuesday in Utah’s 7th District Court in Moab, the
lawsuit names Utah Division of Water Rights director Teresa
Wilhelmsen, who also serves as the state engineer, and
Blackstone Minerals, a subsidiary of Australian-based Anson
Resources. … In 2023, the company filed an application
seeking 19 cubic feet per second from aquifers near the Green
River — that’s about 14,000 acre-feet of water each year,
roughly enough to fill some of the state’s smaller
reservoirs. The water, called brine, has a high
concentration of salt. Through a relatively novel process
called Direct Lithium Extraction, Blackstone would separate the
lithium from the brine using what’s called lithium extraction
resin and additional water pulled from the Green and Colorado
rivers.
Families in the South Bay are being asked to share their
concerns regarding sewage pollution along the Tijuana River
Valley for a health assessment being conducted by the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC arrived to the
region Thursday to begin the assessment intended to gather
information about the needs arising due to concerns about toxic
air pollution in the South Bay stemming from sewage overflow in
the Tijuana River Valley. Over the last few weeks, more than
6,000 homes were expected to receive flyers informing them of
the Community Assessment for Public Health Emergency Response,
or CASPER, Volunteers wearing reflective vests will begin
distributing the flyers door-to-door on Oct. 3.
The San Pedro River, nestled in southeastern Arizona’s San
Pedro Valley just north of the US-Mexico border, is one of the
last undammed rivers in the Southwest and is considered a
biodiversity hotspot. Lined with cattails, willows and
cottonwoods, the marshy waterway shelters hundreds of diverse
bird species, including many considered endangered and
protected by federal law. The area is also home to the Fort
Huachuca US Army base, which has been heralded as an example of
the military’s efforts to become more environmentally
conscientious due to its use of solar power and other “green”
initiatives. Ten years ago, Fort Huachuca forged a plan to
achieve “net-zero” by 2025. But today, that goal has been
largely abandoned, and an expanding group of critics says the
installation’s well-meaning conservation efforts are falling
short, and the Army instead is posing a dire threat to a
protected conservation zone as a result of the base’s rampant
pumping of precious groundwater.
At the state and local level, ballot measures give voters an
opportunity to influence policy and spending decisions. Several
of those measures relate to water. There are fewer big-dollar
measures in 2024 compared to past years. But many smaller
considerations dot ballots from New Mexico and Minnesota to
Colorado and California. Water infrastructure
spending is a typical ballot question, and one that voters
generally endorse. Three states and a handful of towns and
counties will ask voters to approve funding measures for land
conservation, water quality protection, and climate resilience.
The biggest outlay would be in California, which has a $10
billion water and climate bond on the ballot.
In 1998, Tony Kay, who was president of Colorado Trout
Unlimited at the time, knew something was wrong at Windy Gap
Reservoir. Aquatic life was dying at the spot where the
Colorado River had been dammed. Northern Water’s Municipal
Subdistrict had created the reservoir near Granby through a
diversion damn that disconnected the river. The project,
completed in 1985, helps store and supply water to the Front
Range — but it had unintended consequences. Kay partnered with
Colorado Parks and Wildfire biologist Barry Nehring, who was
conducting studies about whirling disease at Windy Gap. This
unsettling disease had devastated the area’s rainbow trout. It
also was the “seed of the project” that eventually led to the
creation of the Colorado River Connectivity Channel. Today,
this channel is almost fully completed.
In California, groundwater has long been a critical resource,
especially for agricultural landowners. The passage of the
Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) in 2014 marked a
turning point in the state’s water management strategy, aiming
to address persistent issues of groundwater overdraft. SGMA
seeks to ensure sustainable groundwater use, but it has also
introduced new regulatory limitations that affect property
owners’ rights to extract groundwater beneath their land. The
California State Water Resources Control Board plays
a central role in enforcing SGMA’s objectives. As local
Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSAs) work to implement
Groundwater Sustainability Plans (GSPs), the SWRCB intervenes
when these plans are inadequate or absent. This expanded
authority raises significant legal questions about the balance
between protecting water resources and respecting property
rights. This article explores the SWRCB’s evolving role and how
its enforcement actions under SGMA intersect with property
owners’ groundwater rights, especially considering potential
regulatory takings claims.
In a landmark report, the Global Commission on the
Economics of Water recently identified water markets as a
fundamental solution to the world’s escalating climate-driven
water crisis. The logic is simple: When something is scarce, it
becomes more valuable. By pricing water appropriately and
creating markets to allocate water based on demand, we could
promote more efficient use and incentivise conservation. Yet
while the concept of water markets appears promising, Chile,
Australia, the United States, and other countries’ experiences
show that implementation can prove challenging. -Written by Eduardo Araral, associate professor, former
vice dean for research, and former co-director of the Institute
of Water Policy at the National University of Singapore’s Lee
Kuan Yew School of Public Policy
Buildings and vast stretches of pavement in dense cities trap
and generate heat, forming urban heat islands. Similarly, urban
development can boost rainfall. Around the world, these
so-called urban wet islands have seen precipitation almost
double on average over the past 20 years, according to a study
published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences of the United States of America. “What we knew
up to now has been very focused on particular cities,” said
Jorge González-Cruz, an urban climatologist at the University
at Albany in New York who wasn’t involved with the work. Places
such as Beijing and Houston have served as case studies showing
that cities can influence temperature, rainfall, and storms.
But the new study shows that the phenomenon occurs at a global
scale. The analysis revealed certain factors that influence the
wet island effect.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday appeared to side with the City
of San Francisco in its unusual challenge of federal water
regulations that it said were too vague and could be
interpreted too strictly. The outcome could have sweeping
implications for curtailing water pollution offshore and would
deal another blow to the Environmental Protection Agency, which
has faced a string of losses at the court over its efforts to
protect the environment. The case has given rise to unusual
alliances, with the city joining oil companies and business
groups in siding against the E.P.A. In arguments on Wednesday,
it was the conservative justices who seemed the most aligned
with a city best known as a liberal bastion. At its core, the
case is about human waste and how San Francisco disposes of it
— specifically, whether the Clean Water Act of 1972 allowed the
E.P.A. to impose generic prohibitions on wastewater released
into the Pacific Ocean and to penalize the city.
The value of farmland in parts of the San Joaquin Valley,
California’s agricultural heartland, has fallen rapidly this
year as commodity prices lag and implementation of the state’s
Sustainable Groundwater Management Act casts a shadow on the
future of farming in the region. In 2014, when SGMA was
adopted, the value of farmland without reliable surface water
access began to decline. But within the past several months,
those values have plummeted, according to appraisers, realtors
and county assessors. “It’s very dramatic,” said Janie Gatzman,
owner of Gatzman Appraisal in Stanislaus County, who until last
month served as president of the California chapter of the
American Society of Farm Managers and Rural Appraisers.
… The sharp drop in land values this year—a decade
after SGMA was adopted—came as implementation of the law ramped
up. This year, state regulators intervened for the first time.
Humanity has thrown the global water cycle off balance “for the
first time in human history,” fueling a growing water disaster
that will wreak havoc on economies, food production and lives,
according to a landmark new report. Decades of destructive land
use and water mismanagement have collided with the human-caused
climate crisis to put “unprecedented stress” on the global
water cycle, said the report published Wednesday by the Global
Commission on the Economics of Water, a group of international
leaders and experts. … Disruptions to the water cycle are
already causing suffering. Nearly 3 billion people face water
scarcity. Crops are shriveling and cities are sinking as the
groundwater beneath them dries out.
Our Water
Summit on Oct. 30 will take a deep dive on issues
critical to our most precious natural resource in the West but
it’s so much more. During our event, you’ll also have a
chance to network with people from across the
water community from municipal water agencies
to irrigation districts, farming and lending organizations to
state and federal agencies that manage or regulate water to
environmental and other nonprofit organizations. Karla
Nemeth, director of the California Department of Water
Resources, will deliver the opening keynote and
participants will be treated later in the day to a
presentation by visual artists whose work seeks to expand
perspectives on how we relate to water.
It was an idea crafted by the Utah State Legislature to help
ensure that water saved through conservation and other efforts
could make it downstream to places like the Great Salt Lake and
Colorado River. But so far, no farmer has taken the state up on
it. “The truth is that we haven’t had the upswelling of support
and the response for a lot of change applications. And it’s
something, I think, that we are looking into, making sure that
we understand why,” said Great Salt Lake Commissioner Brian
Steed. The Utah State Legislature has spent hundreds of
millions of dollars on “agriculture optimization,” which
are incentives to get farmers and ranchers — Utah’s top water
user — to switch to new technologies that grow crops with
less water. … “Change water applications” then allow a
water rights holder who saves water through conservation to
donate or lease it to someone downstream or places like the
Great Salt Lake or Colorado River.
It seems like an impossible task, cataloging all – or at least
most – of the various water projects underway and planned in
the San Joaquin Valley including new recharge basins, canals,
connections and more. But that’s the near Sisyphean effort two
valley water organizations have been working on over the past
year under a $1 million Bureau of Reclamation grant. The goal
is to have a central report where water managers, as well as
state and federal officials with potential funding, can see
what’s ongoing and where infrastructure gaps exist.
Residents of Imperial Beach in southern San Diego County filed
a lawsuit Tuesday against the operators of an international
wastewater treatment plant — alleging that the site has failed
to contain a cross-border crisis that has long contaminated
their community. The plaintiffs said they are seeking to hold
the plant’s managers accountable for severe environmental and
public health effects that have resulted from an influx of
untreated sewage, heavy metals and other toxic chemicals.
Imperial Beach, which sits just a few miles north of the
U.S.-Mexico border, has long been the recipient of untreated
wastewater that comes from the Tijuana metropolitan region and
ends up on the beaches of San Diego County.
There are few government agencies more central to daily life in
Los Angeles than the Metropolitan Water District of Southern
California, which spends billions of dollars each year ensuring
that 19 million people have enough to drink, in part by
importing hundreds of billions of gallons from the Colorado
River and Northern California. There are also few agencies more
prone to bitter power struggles. The latest drama could reach a
tipping point Monday, when Metropolitan’s board will consider
firing the agency’s general manager — with potentially huge
consequences for our water supplies, depending on whom you ask.
