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.
… A year ago, we argued in Charging Forward that the
clean-energy transition would only be part of a “just
transition” if the communities living at its frontlines were
full partners in shaping it. That principle is being tested
now. … In September 2025, Comité Cívico del Valle
… and Earthworks released The Devil is in the Details, a
powerful report detailing deep community concerns with the
project’s Environmental Impact Report. They argue it
underestimates the risks to water supplies,
ignores air-quality and toxic-waste implications, and fails to
safeguard sacred Indigenous lands around the Salton
Sea. But this is not just a story of opposition.
A new regional coalition, Valle Unido por Beneficios
Comunitarios … is pressing for a Community Benefits Agreement
(CBA) that would guarantee tangible returns to frontline
communities.
California water officials can move ahead with enforcement of
the state’s landmark groundwater regulation after an appellate
court ruled Wednesday that a state crackdown on pumping in
Kings County is likely, in large part, legal. State
regulators had worried that their ability to enforce the 2014
Sustainable Groundwater Management Act had
been eroded when a Superior Court judge last year temporarily
halted state sanctions in a heavily pumped, agricultural
stretch of the San Joaquin Valley. … But in a 41-page
decision, the 5th District Court of Appeal in Fresno reversed
the injunction on the state’s enforcement actions, which were
to remain in effect as the case played out.
Seven states in the Colorado River Basin are days away from a
Nov. 11 deadline to hash out a rough idea of how the water
supply for 40 million people will be managed starting in fall
2026. … The rules that govern how key reservoirs
store and release water supplies expire Dec. 31. They’ll guide
reservoir operations until fall 2026, and federal and state
officials plan to use the winter months to nail down a new set
of replacement rules. But negotiating those new rules raises
questions about everything from when the new agreement will
expire to who has to cut back on water use in the basin’s
driest years.
In the scrub-brush foothills between the long flat fields of
the San Joaquin Valley and the mighty peaks and Sequoia forests
of the Sierra Nevada, state leaders and elders from the Tule
River Indian Tribe gathered Wednesday to mark the return of
17,000 acres of ancestral land to Tule River Indian tribe.
… The Tule River acquisition restores some of the
tribe’s sacred homeland, and will enable a host of conservation
projects, including protecting the Deer Creek
watershed, protecting habitat for California condors
and reintroducing tule elk. The tribe last year worked with
state officials to reintroduce beavers to the south fork of the
Tule River.
After fretting for a day over claims the government is
poisoning citizens by spraying chemicals in the sky, a Wyoming
legislative committee endorsed a bill banning the release of
“atmospheric contaminants” above the state. … Vapor-like
trails that appear behind jets — also known as contrails and
widely understood to be water vapor from engines — are actually
poisonous sprays intentionally released by the Department of
War to change the climate, witnesses said. … Water users
from Wyoming’s portion of the Colorado River
Basin and others representing ag interests
successfully asked that cloud seeding be
exempt from the proposed geoengineering ban.
A new climate report emphasizes that not only was 2024 the
hottest year on record, but it may have also been the warmest
in at least 125,000 years. … The report comes just
a week before the 30th U.N. Climate Change Conference in
Brazil, where world leaders, scientists and organizations will
gather to focus on the implementation of the 2015 Paris climate
agreement and how to limit the global temperature increase to
1.5 degrees Celsius. Exceeding that 1.5-degree increase
… is expected to lead to increasingly frequent and dangerous
weather events like heat waves, droughts, wildfires and
flooding.
The Tijuana River has been in the news lately as pollution
pours into the US from Mexico. To help us understand what’s
happening, we spoke with former PPIC Water Policy Center
advisory council chair Celeste Cantú, who currently sits on the
San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board. … [Celeste
Cantú:] Tijuana is at the end of the drought-prone and
dwindling Colorado River system. All of us will need to thrive
with less water from the Colorado River. I would love for
Tijuana to augment its water supply with indirect or direct
potable reuse, with US support to build a plant for that.
EPA has billions of dollars on hand to stay open through the
government shutdown and is using it to fund a new approach to
this funding lapse: sending some staffers home while many
others stay on to support the president’s priority projects.
… EPA staff and outside observers who engage with them
say that virtually everyone who is working to undo marquee
Biden-era regulations for air pollution, climate change and
water quality is still on the job … while teams at EPA’s
water and air offices continued to work on priority policies
that the agency has promised to deliver at a breakneck pace.
… As California entered the 20th century, massive public
works projects surfaced to encourage economic expansion and
transformation, notably in Southern California. Mid-century
also saw arguably the state’s last truly transformative public
works project, the California Water Plan. … The last
decades of the 20th Century and the first decades of the 21st
have been a period of stasis in public works. Projects such as
the tunnel to carry water under the Delta and the Sites
Reservoir to divert and store high flows on the Sacramento
River have kicked around for decades. … Looking back,
it’s amazing that the 363-mile Erie Canal could have been dug
by hand in just eight years, or that the two San Francisco
bridges were erected in just a few years. –Written by CalMatters columnist Dan Walters.
The Mendocino County Board of Supervisors recently
discussed dueling resolutions on PG&E’s position in the
decommissioning of the Potter Valley Project’s dams.
… Two different non-binding resolutions were discussed
during the board’s Oct. 21 meeting regarding the
decommissioning of the Potter Valley Project. After hours of
tense discussion and public comment, the board decided to move
forward with a resolution sponsored by Supervisor Ted Williams,
placing it on the consent calendar for the board’s next meeting
on Nov. 4.
Cambria’s embattled, delayed water reclamation facility took a
major step forward this month after years spent in permit
limbo. … The CSD’s [Community Services District's]
water-reclamation concept and plant, which treat effluent and
brackish water and reinject it into the aquifer, have been a
lightning rod since they were first proposed. Some said from
the outset that it wouldn’t work. Others alleged it would cost
way too much for such a small community of about 6,000 people.
And some environmentalists decried its potential impact on the
sensitive habitat near San Simeon Creek, where the plant is
located.
What if San Diego blanketed land, reservoirs and buildings its
Public Utilities Department owned with solar and used the money
it made off that power to subsidize skyrocketing water rates
for poorer people? That’s the idea San Diego City
Councilmember Sean Elo-Rivera pitched during an uncomfortable
series of debates over raising water rates on San Diegans by 63
percent over the next four years. The Public Utilities
department owns 42,550 acres of land – about the size of
Washington D.C. It could, in theory, lease that land out to
solar developers and help bring down water rates, fix dams or
otherwise prop-up a city department key to ensuring water is
treated and distributed to 1.4 million people.
Oroville city leaders are actively working to combat illegal
dumping along the Feather River by considering a new
designation for the area. Councilmember Shawn Webber has
proposed transforming the river stretch between Table Mountain
Bridge and the Highway 70 Bridge into a city park. However, the
proposal has evolved with growing support for establishing the
area as a wildlife refuge, primarily to protect the sensitive
salmon population that uses this section of the river for
spawning after their journey from the Pacific Ocean.
Water rates for San Diegans will rise 14.7% next year and 14.5%
the following year after the San Diego City Council today
passed an amended water and wastewater rate hike. A staff
proposal before the council was to increase water rates by 63%
through 2029 and wastewater rates by 31% in the same period.
The much- reduced, two-year plan passed by a 5-4 majority
Tuesday was proposed by Councilman Stephen Whitburn.
… The justification for the increase was largely based
on increasing water costs. San Diego’s rates remain below the
county average.
A new kind of gold rush is sweeping the West, and this time the
prize isn’t minerals but megawatts. From Phoenix to Colorado’s
Front Range, data centers are arriving with outsize demands for
power and water. In a new report, the regional environmental
advocacy group Western Resource Advocates (WRA) warns that
without stronger guardrails, the financial and environmental
costs could fall on everyday households. … Where the
potential water needed for new data centers can be estimated,
the scale is sobering. In Nevada, for example, currently
proposed new data centers will consume an estimated 4.5 billion
gallons of water in 2030, if built with conventional
cooling.
After nearly 90 years, Lahontan cutthroat trout have made a
historic return to Lake Tahoe. This milestone is part of a
long-term effort led by the Nevada Department of
Wildlife to restore this native species,
which disappeared from the lake in 1938 due to overfishing,
habitat destruction, and the introduction of non-native
species. In 2014, NDOW began studying non-native rainbow trout
in Lake Tahoe to identify suitable spawning areas for the
Lahontan cutthroat trout. … Over the past several years,
Lahontan cutthroat trout have been gradually reintroduced, with
100,000 fish stocked in Lake Tahoe this year alone.
It now appears San Benito County Water District customers could
be on the hook for more than $730,000—or its roughly equivalent
in stored water under a proposed deal—in sunk costs for the
ill-fated, multibillion-dollar Pacheco Reservoir Expansion
Project. … On Oct. 29, the county water district board
of directors is set to consider a proposal to cover the
district’s share of environmental review costs through December
2021, set at 2.5%, for the $3.2 billion Pacheco expansion,
which was dropped by the Santa Clara Valley Water District last
month.
Just months after the federal government closed on a land
exchange with a billionaire, a proposal to institute a permit
system on the Blue River has ignited a conversation about river
access and fishery health in Colorado. … Blue Valley
Ranch, a more than 2,000-acre property owned by billionaire
Paul Tudor Jones II, and the nonprofit Friends of the Lower
Blue River say a permit system is necessary to manage the
negative impacts of increasing fishing pressure. … As
part of the exchange, the ranch has agreed to cover the costs
of river restoration work for a three-quarter-mile stretch of
the Blue River near its confluence with the Colorado
River. … Anglers who opposed the land swap because
they felt it was tilted toward private interests, said they see
the proposed permit system as the continuation of an effort by
a landowner to restrict public access to the river.
A publicly traded company announced Tuesday that it has secured
$51 million in financing from Lytton Rancheria of California,
marking the first tribal investment in the Mojave Groundwater
Bank, a water supply and groundwater storage project planned as
the largest groundwater bank in the Southwest. Cadiz Inc., a
Los Angeles-based water solutions company, reported it is
raising the capital through Mojave Water Infrastructure Company
LLC, a special-purpose entity formed to construct, own and
operate the project. The federally recognized tribe’s
investment represents the first tranche of approximately $450
million in total equity capital the company is raising for the
project.
The board of the L.A. Department of Water and Power voted
Tuesday to nearly double the amount of water it recycles for
drinking at the Donald C. Tillman Wastewater Treatment Plant in
Van Nuys. The city has been retrofitting one of its
wastewater treatment plants in Van Nuys to recycle water for
drinking in order to boost water supplies in the face of
long-term water shortages driven by climate change and overuse.
Now, if approved by City Council, the plant will be able to
recycle water to its full capacity, producing enough water for
a half-million Angelenos as soon as 2028.
