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.
The Trump administration gave the OK for California’s Sites
Reservoir on Friday, clearing a major hurdle for what would be
the state’s largest water project in decades. … The
“record of decision” issued by the U.S. Interior Department on
Friday grants formal federal approval for the reservoir, with
the agency having completed the required environmental review.
The move also authorizes the federal government to fund up to
25% of the reservoir’s cost. The federal government,
through the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, will be entitled to a
share of the reservoir’s water in proportion to what it pays
toward the endeavor.
While they don’t appear to see eye to eye on anything, Colorado
River officials do agree on this much: The courtroom is the
last place that technical decisions should be made about how to
share a drying river that serves 40 million people. Two states,
however, are publicly anticipating they will need to defend
their interests in what would be a high-profile,
taxpayer-funded court battle. … At a committee hearing
Tuesday, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said the state
has invested in hiring more staff water law attorneys and said
his office is preparing for a fight he increasingly sees as
inevitable. … The other state prepping for an impending
lawsuit out in the open is Arizona.
… As of Jan. 23, the snowpack at the [UC Berkeley’s Central
Sierra Snow] lab stood at 61% of average for this time of
year, with about 2 feet of snow covering the ground around the
facility. Other areas are faring worse. In parts of
Utah, Colorado and other Western states,
federal data show snow levels at some locations are at or near
record lows. Across the Sierra Nevada,
measurements show that California’s snowpack stands at 66% of
average for this time of year. There are regional differences,
with the northern Sierra measuring 50% of average and the
southern Sierra at 86% of average. … California’s
snowpack has traditionally provided nearly a third of the
state’s water supply.
Other snowpack and water supply news around the West:
One of several “causes of action” was cut out of the ongoing
Kern River case in a ruling issued Jan. 22 by Kern County
Superior Court Judge Gregory Pulskamp. Plaintiffs Bring Back
the Kern and Water Audit California had claimed in their
lawsuit against the City of Bakersfield that … it was
illegally flouting California Fish and Game Code 5901, which
states that it’s illegal to put anything in a river,
such as a dam or a weir, that impedes fish passage.
Late last fall, agricultural water districts … filed a
motion to boot that particular cause of action from the overall
case. They argued that Section 5901 can only be enforced at the
discretion of the Department of Fish and Wildlife, not private
parties. Judge Pulskamp agreed and removed that issue from the
upcoming trial, which is scheduled for Feb, 8, 2027.
Johnny Amaral, a veteran of California water politics, was
named as Friant Water Authority’s new chief executive officer
at its Jan. 22 meeting. His appointment is effective
immediately. … Amaral said wrapping up litigation
is one of many issues facing Friant. But he is also looking to
maintain Friant’s “core team” of water operators, many of whom
hold expert knowledge in their fields. … Amaral also
said he is looking forward to leveraging his previous career
experiences to Friant’s benefit. He worked as a deputy general
manager at Westlands Water District for four years and as a
chief of staff for former Rep. Devin Nunes for 13 years.
Data centers are popping up around the United States, and in
more arid areas like Colorado, experts say the huge complexes
should come with a warning label when it comes to water use.
… The boom in data centers is already raising concerns
about ripple effects in other industries, including agriculture
which is the largest water user in Colorado. … On-site
water use at data centers in five Western states — Arizona,
Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah — might grow by about
21,600 acre-feet by 2035. But if you count off-site water use
by power plants, a data center’s total water use balloons to
over 89,700 by 3025.
Invasive golden mussels have now been found in the Wheeler
Ridge-Maricopa Water Storage District system, Engineer Manager
Sheridan Nicholas reported at the board’s Jan. 14 meeting. This
was the first detection for the district. … Nicholas
told the board that he had informed the Kern County Water
Agency about the mussel discoveries and urged that board to
create a region-wide task force as many districts are finding
the equipment- and pipe-clogging critters but fighting it
individually. At the Kern County Water Agency’s Jan. 22
meeting, staff confirmed they are creating a task force to
include local water districts as well as others that receive
water through the Central Valley Project that extends to
Millerton Lake.
Drought-plagued Arizona could see state-funded drones spraying
microscopic silver iodide particles into mountain clouds to
boost snowfall if proponents get their way. The state
Legislature is considering allowing the use of money earmarked
for boosting rural water supplies to pay for “cloud seeding”
operations to increase precipitation in the state’s high
country. But the proposal sponsored by Rep. Gail Griffin,
R-Hereford, may have a tough road ahead. That’s because even
some majority Republicans on the committee that heard her
proposal expressed concern about the safety and efficacy of
cloud seeding. It passed Griffin’s committee on Jan. 13 with a
bare majority.
The federal government awarded a $1.1 million contract to an
Ohio company to conduct a pilot project deploying
a technology to kill bacteria and eliminate odors in the
sewage-tainted Tijuana River. It failed, in large part because
the company had never used the technology in an environment
with such a large amount of solid waste pollution and with
unpredictable changes in water flow. The company, Greenwater
Services, uses a nanobubble ozone technology (NBOT) primarily
to attack harmful algae blooms in slow-moving or still water,
such as lakes and ponds. The project at the international
border showed the company’s equipment was ill-prepared for the
conditions that plague the region.
Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs has taken a major step to stabilize
water use in the state’s rural desert, where a Saudi-owned
company established a massive farming operation more than a
decade ago. During her State of the State Address earlier this
month, Hobbs announced she was placing the Saudi alfalfa farm
within an “active management area,” a technical designation
that allows Arizona to slow and possibly even reverse the
growth of groundwater use in a remote desert area of western
Arizona. … In the short term, the designation by itself
cannot reduce the amount of water being used by foreign
megafarms, but it can at least stop new ones from coming in—and
current ones from expanding their operations—in addition to
encouraging farms to reduce their withdrawals.
One of the Bay Area’s most expensive enclaves relies on a
two-lane road that will be covered by rising seas in the coming
decades. … A recent Marin County sea level rise
report for Stinson Beach recommended the road, which is
county-owned, be raised soon, because it’s often impassable
during annual king tides now and is expected to flood during
major storms by around 2050, when storm surge swells the
lagoon, and during monthly high tides by around 2060 to 2075.
… The issue is harder to ignore after record high tides
and flooding hit Marin in early January, probably exacerbated
by sea level rise. It’s part of a broader debate across the Bay
Area over who will pay to shore up public infrastructure.
The Olivenhain Municipal Water District needs to suspend its
water fluoridation program for up to 90 days to look into
employee safety concerns, a majority of the district’s board
decided Wednesday. While the topic of putting fluoride into
drinking water has been a hot-button political issue of late
and President Trump’s Health & Human Services Secretary Robert
F. Kennedy Jr. is encouraging states to ban fluoride in
drinking water contending it’s a toxic substance, OMWD board
member Christy Guerin said the board’s action Wednesday wasn’t
political. Instead, it was in response to safety concerns
related to handling of the huge fluoride bags, said Guerin, a
former Encinitas mayor and formerly worked as a district
director for former U.S. Rep. Brian Bilbray, R-Carlsbad.
… Ephemeral waterways are now under threat. A new rule
proposed by President Donald Trump’s administration would strip
Clean Water Act (CWA) protections from nearly all ephemeral
waters in America. … Removing CWA protections will
imperil Southwestern water as we know it. Ephemeral waterways
make up 81 percent of all streams in the Southwest, supporting
basins from the humblest pool to the grandest reservoir. In
addition to fundamental drinking resource concerns, the
proposed rule threatens our most special places. The crown
jewels of Nevada nature, including Ash Meadows and Lake Tahoe,
rely on ephemeral hydrologic networks. –Written by Dexter Lim, a second-year Juris Doctor
candidate at UC Berkeley; Mason Voehl, executive director of
Amargosa Conservancy; and Olivia Tanager, director for the
Toiyabe Chapter of the Sierra Club.
… Across some of the most productive farmland in the United
States, a nutrient called phosphorus has been accumulating in
the soil for decades, at levels far beyond what crops actually
require. … Unlike nitrogen, which easily escapes from
soil into the air or groundwater, phosphorus sticks to soil
particles. Once it’s added, it tends to remain in place. That
trait made phosphorus seem environmentally
benign. However, phosphorus can still be carried off
fields when rain or irrigation water erodes phosphorus-rich
soil, or some of the built-up phosphorus dissolves into
runoff. Years of application have led to something no one
initially planned for: accumulation.
Climate change increases risks to the operations and financial
reliability of drinking water utilities across the United
States. Here we develop a comparative climate risk index that
includes hazard, vulnerability, and exposure components for
1455 medium and large municipal US drinking water utilities. We
find that 67 million customers are serviced by utilities with
higher climate risk. Drinking water utilities in the Western US
have higher risk due to expected large changes in climate
hazards, while utilities in the Northeast and Midwest have
higher risk due to existing vulnerabilities and exposure. We
use this climate risk index, along with an analysis of
municipal bond official statements, to identify utilities in
need of climate adaptation and resilience planning.
With Western states deadlocked in negotiations over how to cut
water use along the Colorado River, the Trump administration
has called in the governors of seven states to Washington to
try to hash out a consensus. The governors of at least four —
Utah, Arizona, Nevada and Wyoming — say
they’ll attend the meeting next week led by Interior Secretary
Doug Burgum, but California Gov. Gavin Newsom
won’t. Newsom is “unable to attend but plans to send
key representatives of his administration to attend in his
place,” spokesperson Anthony Martinez said in an email.
… As the negotiations remain at an impasse, the
possibility of the states suing one another is increasing.
Gov. Gavin Newsom is stepping into a labor dispute that could
threaten the timeline of one of his flagship water projects:
the planned Sites Reservoir north of Sacramento. Newsom
(D) wrote to the Sites Project Authority Board of Directors on
Friday expressing concern that the board’s choice to finalize a
contract with Barnard Construction Co. to build the roughly
$6.8 billion reservoir was alienating unions. “The
Construction Manager you select must ensure that the project’s
ambitious timetable is not disrupted by the potential for labor
unrest,” Newsom wrote. … Sites Reservoir would be the
first major new reservoir built in California in decades. The
project would divert water from the Sacramento River into an
offstream reservoir capable of holding up to 1.5 million
acre-feet of water.
Wyoming’s top water managers are warning that a significant
drawdown of Flaming Gorge Reservoir this spring is likely
imminent due to low snowpack and generally dry conditions
throughout the seven-state Colorado River
Basin region. Wyoming is a headwaters of the Colorado
River system, mostly via the Green River, which feeds Flaming
Gorge. As of Jan. 8, snow cover across the West was at its
lowest since 2001. … Flaming Gorge, which straddles the
Wyoming-Utah border, is one of the key reservoirs in the
Colorado River system that water managers turn to for extra
releases when there’s a projected shortage — primarily to
ensure operational water levels at Lake
Powell.
Nearly one million young salmon are being released this week
into flooded rice fields near the Yolo Bypass. The project is a
partnership with stakeholders from the Bridge Group and
the Coleman National Fish Hatchery. The juvenile fish,
called salmon fry, will spend several weeks growing in the
shallow fields. After that, they will swim into the Sacramento
River and begin their trip to the Pacific Ocean. The
effort is based on scientific research showing flooded rice
fields can help young Chinook salmon grow and survive.
The South Fork Kings Groundwater Sustainability Agency (GSA)
approved a pumping allocation during a Jan. 15 board meeting.
The policy will allow Lemoore-area pumpers to extract a base
amount of .86 acre feet per acre of land. “I think it’s a
necessary evil, but it scares me and it’s going to be real
expensive and I don’t know how long it’s going to last. I don’t
think it’s sustainable for the farmer. It might be sustainable
for the groundwater, but it’s not sustainable for the farmer,”
Board member Ceil Howe said before the vote. The pumping
allocation policy is just one piece of the puzzle to ensure
that the GSA complies with the Sustainable Groundwater
Management Act (SGMA), which aims to have local
entities bring aquifers into balance by 2040.
