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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Not everyone with a stake in the future of Arizona’s access to
Colorado River water feels as “cautiously optimistic” about
water usage negotiations among the seven Colorado River Basin
states. The governors of six of the seven states,
including Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs, said they were cautiously
optimistic that the states would reach a deal after they met in
Washington D.C. last week to hash things out.
… Gila River Indian Community Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis,
whose community relies on CAP water, shared a particularly
pessimistic message about an agreement, but called for unity
among Arizonans and the Lower Basin states. “The prospects
for success, I think we all know, seem pretty dim at this
point,” Lewis said.
The Bay Area’s warm, dry stretch has spilled into
February. Aside from a paltry 0.13 inches of rain on Jan.
27–28, the region has gone weeks without meaningful
precipitation. … Just three weeks ago, the statewide snowpack
stood at 89% of its historical average after a burst of late
December and early January atmospheric rivers. Since then, it
has collapsed to 59%. … The issue is timing and
temperature. January, typically one of California’s wettest
months, was dominated by warm, dry weather that steadily melted
what the Christmas and New Year’s storms delivered. No
significant precipitation is expected for at least the next two
weeks.
U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nevada, has co-introduced
bipartisan legislation to extend a federal $450 million water
recycling grant for Western states until 2032. The federal
grant, signed by former President Joe Biden in 2021, has
already allocated roughly $308 million on water recycling
projects in Colorado River
states. … The Large-Scale Water Recycling
Project Grant Program funds are available to all Western
states, but have only been granted to five programs in
Utah and Southern California, totaling roughly
$308 million. If the program were not extended, it would expire
at the end of the U.S. government’s 2026 fiscal year on Sept.
30.
Nevada lawmakers are working to revive a bill that would
require state water regulators to take a closer look at how
geothermal operations impact groundwater during the permitting
process. Farmers and hard-rock mining companies that pump
groundwater are required to apply for permits under Nevada law,
but current statutory framework exempts some industrial
groundwater users from the permit process as long as they
return the water they pump back into the ground. Assembly Bill
109 would close a “loophole” that allows developers to
pump water without a permit from the state engineer if the
operation is considered “non-consumptive.”
Meghan Hertel, of Sacramento, has been appointed
Director of the Department of Fish and
Wildlife. Hertel has been the Deputy Secretary of
Biodiversity and Habitat at the California Natural Resources
Agency since 2024. She was the North American Director of the
Land Life Company from 2022 to 2024. Hertel held several
positions at Audubon California from 2010 to 2022, including
Director of Land and Water Conservation, Interim State
Co-Director, Director of Working Lands, Associate Director of
Public Policy, and San Joaquin River Project
Manager. [Hertel is an alum of the Water
Education Foundation's Water Leaders program].
The Green River doesn’t make a lot of sense at first glance.
The Colorado River’s largest tributary flows
through a nearly 2,300-foot-deep canyon inside of northeastern
Utah’s Uinta mountain range. But at almost 2.5 miles high, the
massive, 50-million-year-old rock formation hypothetically
shouldn’t have even yielded to the nearby Green River, which
itself began to form less than eight million years ago.
… According to the coauthor of his team’s study
published on February 2nd in the Journal of Geophysical
Research: Earth Surface, the region is “enormously significant”
to the overall landmass. “The merging of the Green and Colorado
Rivers millions of years ago altered the continental divide of
North America,” he [geologist Adam Smith] explained in a
statement.
Attention Western Slope pond owners: Colorado Parks and
Wildlife is on the hunt for hungry, fast-reproducing, invasive
mussels — and that they might be hiding in your pond.
State and federal agencies, plus water districts, are fighting
to track and contain zebra mussels in and around the Colorado
River in Colorado. Officials are hiring new staff, doing
sampling blitzes and catching mussel-bearing motorized boats at
the state’s borders, but the populations of zebra mussels keep
popping up. This year, the state is taking its search beyond
public waters and irrigation systems. Colorado Parks and
Wildlife staff hope to survey as many as possible of the
thousand-plus ponds on private property in the Grand Junction
area during summer 2026.
The salmon recovery effort on Putah Creek was highlighted as an
early example of a Healthy Rivers and Landscapes Program
success story at the recent California State Water
Resources Control Board hearings. The control board is updating
the Bay-Delta Water Quality Control Plan, with Solano
County agencies joining the State Water Contractors and a host
of others in favoring the Healthy Rivers and Landscapes option.
Many upset Adelanto residents demanded a clean water solution
from their elected officials in early December, detailing hair
and skin problems due to the city’s “brown, cloudy,
foul-smelling” water. Less than two months later, Adelanto City
Council has taken action to secure a qualified firm that will
provide home water filtration systems at no cost to residents.
The announcement came at the Jan. 28 Adelanto City Council
meeting, three years after the synthetic chemical
Perfluorooctane Sulfonic Acid (PFOS) was first detected in
Adelanto water.
Wetlands—including marshes, mangroves, swamps, and
floodplains—provide valuable benefits. They serve as habitat
for the fish we eat, protect coastal communities from storms,
and help filter pollution out of our water. But these important
areas are at risk of disappearing due to erosion, land
subsidence, and development. … NOAA’s Office of Habitat
Conservation works with partners to protect and restore these
habitats, so they can provide economic and ecological benefits
that fisheries and communities depend on.
Governors from six of the seven states that rely on the
dwindling Colorado River gathered in Washington on Friday to
try to resolve a two-year impasse over how to share its water.
There was no breakthrough — and whether they made progress was
unclear. Leaders in downstream Arizona and California expressed
optimism after the meeting that a consensus over a plan to
share water appeared “achievable.” But Colorado officials stood
firm in their reluctance to accept mandatory water use cuts — a
major sticking point that could remain in the way of a
compromise.
This month’s lingering dry spell has combined with warm winter
temperatures to take a toll on California’s mountain snow,
raising new questions about the durability of water supplies
this year. State water officials, who conducted the second snow
survey of the season Friday, reported that cumulative snowpack
across the Sierra Nevada, southern Cascades and Trinity
mountains measured 59% of average for the date. …
While snowfall has lagged, the good news is that rain has been
fairly robust. Despite several dry weeks recently, average
rainfall statewide is running about 120% of what it typically
is at this point in the water year.
California is weighing its first major rewrite of Bay-Delta
water rules in decades, considering changes to how much water
must remain in rivers and giving regional water agencies a more
flexible way to comply with those limits. On the second day of
a three-day State Water Resources Control Board hearing on
Thursday, stakeholders fell into three broad camps as they
continued to debate how California should manage the Bay-Delta
in the years ahead. They included state officials backing
adoption of the plan, environmental and tribal groups seeking
stronger protections, and water agencies that welcomed added
flexibility but pushed for major changes to the staff proposal.
Colorado’s expert on aquatic invasive species said Wednesday
the state has an “incredible fight ahead” as it works to
contain the spread of zebra mussels in the Colorado River. “I
wish I could tell you the story of zebra mussels has
concluded,” Robert Walters told a crowd of dozens of water
professionals at the Colorado Water Congress in Aurora.
… He said this year’s strategy includes ramping up
testing of hundreds of ponds in the Grand Junction area. “There
is vast network of canals, ditches and washes moving this
water,” he said. “Golf courses, people with ponds in their
backyards. Everyone who is receiving Colorado River water has
the potential to be harboring these highly invasive mussels.”
Residents of the Diablo Grande housing development in
Stanislaus County have four months to pony up $14 million or
the Kern County Water Agency (KCWA) will cut off their water,
according to a KCWA press release issued Wednesday. That’s how
much KCWA says it is owed in back water bills by the Western
Hills Water District, which serves the 600-home Diablo Grande
development in the foothills west of Interstate 5.
… KCWA’s press release blindsided Western Hills, which
has been in negotiations with KCWA to find a solution to the
complex, 25-year-long deal that soured after the 2008 housing
market crash.
… The [Round Valley Indian] tribal nation is confronting the
Trump administration over the [Eel] river’s future and fighting
some of its regional allies to reclaim water rights that have
been overlooked for a century. … The struggle is taking
place as the entity with a dominant stake in the river for
generations, Pacific Gas & Electric Co., seeks to give up in
Lake and Mendocino counties its network of Eel River dams and a
linked hydropower plant. The move has triggered a federal
review that has pitted the tribes, together with environmental
groups in favor of dam removal, against farming interests,
reservoir supporters and the Trump administration, which has
taken a dim view of dam demolition.
A Senate panel will convene Wednesday to hear from a
cybersecurity expert and two water utilities about threats
facing water infrastructure. The Environment and Public Works
Committee hearing will seek to identify strategies to make the
water sector more resilient against cyberattacks, which have
become more common in recent years. The meeting could be an
opportunity for bipartisan consensus, as lawmakers generally
agree on the need to protect water and wastewater
infrastructure against cyberattacks. The issue was a
priority under the Biden administration and remains so under
the Trump administration, which last year established an EPA
water office division that focuses on cyberthreats.
Last week, a district judge in San Francisco, California,
presided over a three-day trial brought by west coast fishers
and conservationists against US tyre companies. The fishers
allege that a chemical additive used in tyres is polluting
rivers and waterways, killing coho salmon and other fish. If
successful, the case could have implications far beyond the
United States. The case was initiated after the apparent
solving of a decades-old mystery: what was causing mass deaths
of endangered coho salmon in the Pacific north-west as they
returned to streams to spawn. The deaths happened after heavy
rain. Before dying, the fish would exhibit unusual behaviour,
swimming in circles, their mouths gaping, as if gasping for
air.
When the Eaton fire raged through neighborhoods in Altadena,
the flames leveled three-quarters of the homes served by the
tiny Las Flores Water Co. It also destroyed the roofs of two
covered reservoirs where the utility stored drinking water. The
company soon restored clean water to those homes left standing.
But the disaster has left it with costly repairs, and a sharp
drop in income since most of its 1,500 customers haven’t yet
rebuilt or reconnected their water. Attempting to avert
financial failure, the private water company’s board now plans
to start charging people a new “fire recovery fee” of about
$3,000 over the next five years, or about $50 a month.
Surging runoff from the high peaks of Rocky Mountain National
Park in 2025 overwhelmed the banks of Beaver Creek, a tributary
near the headwaters of the Colorado River, and flooded two and
a half football fields’ worth of surrounding
meadows. … Visible flooding in 2025 … meant the
surges in Beaver Creek were hitting artificial beaver dams and
lodges built to emulate past environmental conditions and
recreate historic wetlands. The flooding was proof that a
meticulously developed plan to restore Kawuneeche’s crucial
watershed over decades, among multiple government agencies and
nonprofits, paid for by a wide array of funders, is reporting
great progress after just a couple of years.
