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 Trump administration announced Tuesday it will spend $540
million on water infrastructure projects in California, much of
it to repair aging and sinking canals in the Central Valley.
The largest share, $235 million, will be used to rehabilitate
the Delta-Mendota Canal, which carries water
to farmlands. An additional $200 million will help continue
repairs on the Friant-Kern Canal, another
major conduit for water in the valley. … The Interior
Department said it also will spend $40 million to begin a plan
to raise the height of Shasta Dam — a proposal
that growers and water agencies have supported. … The
plan to raise the dam and expand the reservoir is strongly
opposed by tribes, fishing advocates and environmental groups.
A mixed coalition of 60 Northern and Southern California
interests, as well as environmentalists, are backing
legislation they consider critical to protecting the state’s
water supply. Solano County also has sent a letter of support
for Senate Bill 872, which goes before the Senate Environmental
Quality Committee today (March 18). … The
environmental group, Restore the Delta, agrees, noting the bill
by Sen. Jerry McNerney, D-Pleasanton, addresses two “major
threats” to California’s water supply: aginglevees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River
Delta and sinkingcanals in
the State Water Project. …The
legislation calls for $300 million annually
from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund over 20 years.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis says concerns over record warmth and
the low snow pack prompted his decision to activate the state’s
Drought Task Force on Tuesday. The task force will study
drought conditions statewide and report on their effects
on farmers, cities, and other areas. … Activating
the Drought Task Force is phase two of the state’s Drought
Response Plan. They’ll monitor snowpack, precipitation,
temperature, streamflow, soil moisture and reservoir storage.
If conditions worsen, the state will move into phase three. The
governor will declare an official drought, and water
restrictions could be implemented.
To save California’s celebrated yet very parched Mono
Lake, the city of Los Angeles needs to stop taking water from
the basin, or at least sharply curtail its draws. That’s the
takeaway from a new, state-commissioned report on how to revive
the depleted saltwater body, widely known for its extraordinary
tufa towers and curious alkali shores. But that’s not the
only takeaway. Even if Los Angeles is to halt pumping from the
remote eastern Sierra watershed — and the city has no intention
of doing so — the report says Mono Lake will still struggle to
rise to healthy heights, due to the drying effects of climate
change.
Gov. Katie Hobbs delivered a keynote address in Washington,
D.C., on Tuesday at a U.S. Chamber of Commerce event ahead of a
new federal infrastructure bill. At the Keep America Moving:
Transportation, Infrastructure, and America’s Future event,
Hobbs used her speech to emphasize Arizona’s importance in
infrastructure advancements, the need for Colorado River water
solutions and international trade agreements. “Let me be
very clear, this administration’s goals rely on Arizona
receiving our fair share of Colorado River water,” she said.
“It relies on Arizona-made missiles, Arizona-made
semiconductors and Arizona-grown agriculture.”
California farms are drastically undercounting the amount of
manure they accumulate each year, which could adversely affect
the state’s water supply. The undercount
could be more than 200 times what recent farm reports
show — likely as much as 44,000 tons of unrecorded
manure — a new study from Stanford University’s Environmental
and Natural Resources Law & Policy Program
found. … The regional boards are required to
monitor farms’ annual reports detailing manure and wastewater
to prevent adverse effects and ensure water quality, but the
study found that many of the regulations aren’t adequately
enforced.
California unveiled a plan Tuesday to bring at least 7.5
million acres of land and coastal waters under the care of
Indigenous tribes. … The new policy, set by the
California Natural Resources Agency, aims to start healing the
harm caused by the state’s actions to bar tribes from their
homelands and criminalize their cultural and land management
practices. These actions not only harmed Native communities,
whose cultures and ways of life are intimately tied to the
plants, animals and landscape of their homelands, but also
caused well-documented harm to ecosystems through the loss of
biodiversity, takeover of invasive species, degradation
of water quality and increase in wildfire risk.
The Sacramento City Council on Tuesday voted to advance a major
water-management plan for the Lower American River, marking
another green light the region’s key water supply partnership
needs before the agreement is fully approved. Tuesday’s
decision made Sacramento City Council the 21st member to give
the agreement a thumbs up, with about 10 more boards and
councils still to go for the powerful partnership, or the Water
Forum. … The pact was designed to last through 2030 and
updated then. But it soon ran up against the direct impacts of
climate change, prompting the members to accelerate the
timeline and push to adopt an updated plan years earlier than
originally planned.
As invasive mussel species continue to spread across the state,
both local and national agencies, such as the US Bureau of
Reclamation (BOR), are exploring every avenue to stop them.
Now, they’re offering up some serious money for the right idea
to help stop the spread of these shellfish. The three-phase
‘Halt the Hitchhiker’ program is offering up $200,000 for the
winning proposal, with cash prizes offered at each phase for
winning ideas. The push stems from continued concern about
invasive shellfish such as the Quagga, Zebra and more recent
Golden Mussels.
For more than two decades, the Colorado-born photographer Pete
McBride has documented the overwhelming beauty and the
gathering threats to the Colorado River. Now with the lowest
snowpack on record in his home state and the basin’s reservoirs
approaching historic lows, McBride is stepping out from behind
the camera to write a book detailing a lifelong love affair
with his “backyard river.” Part memoir and part travelogue from
his National Geographic and other magazine assignments, Witness
to Water is a cry from McBride’s heart about a river ecosystem
being strained to the breaking point.
For the first time in four years, salmon fishing seasons will
open in California for both commercial and recreational use
this spring. … The sport fishing season will open first,
on April 11 in ocean waters south of Pigeon Point, about 30
miles north of Santa Cruz. The commercial season, which has
been closed in the state since 2023 due to low stock numbers,
is set to open in California in mid-May, with a final date and
regulations to be set in mid-April. The recreational fishery
had only limited openings in 2025 following closures in 2023
and 2024 for the same reason. … The goal of the
restrictions is to ensure plenty of adult fish return
to the spawning grounds [in rivers] and hatcheries this
fall, said the CDFW.
Has Colorado’s snowpack peak already come and gone? Maybe – and
if so, it would be the earliest snowpack peak on record with
records dating back to 1987. Those who have been following
along with the state’s snowpack since the start of the season
already know that the winter of 2025-2026 has brought
record-setting dryness to the Centennial State
[location of Colorado River
headwaters]. … On March 8, statewide snowpack
hit a snow-water equivalent of 8.4 inches – and it hasn’t
managed to climb to 8.5 inches since. In fact, as of March 14,
the state was at 8.2 inches, showing a snowpack decline that
hasn’t been seen yet this year.
… [T]he [Colorado] river’s 46 reservoirs, including the
enormous man-made Lake Powell and Lake Mead, now stand more
than two-thirds empty, according to a recent report by the
Colorado River Research Group. … “We are not running out
of water,” said Rhett Larson, professor of water law at Arizona
State University and one of the [Colorado River Water Users
Association] conference’s keynote speakers. “We are running out
of cheap water.” … Amid this ongoing tussle, a
few lonely voices, including a right-wing Arizona state
representative named Alexander Kolodin, have been proposing a
seemingly radical solution: What if we just … gulp … let
the market decide?
California’s Department of Water Resources
has released its most comprehensive groundwater
report to date. The Bulletin 118 Update 2025 covers
groundwater conditions, use, and management across the state
from 2020 to 2024, offering the most detailed assessment yet of
a resource that supplies around 40% of California’s total water
demand in average years. … Structured around four strategic
themes: maximizing groundwater infrastructure for climate
adaptation, accelerating SGMA implementation, strengthening
equity for frontline communities, and improving data and
monitoring tools, the report amounts to a call for California
to move from reactive groundwater management to treating it as
the cornerstone of its long-term water strategy.
The Nevada Department of Conservation and Natural Resources has
selected Joe Cacioppo as Nevada’s next state engineer,
officials announced Thursday. Cacioppo, a licensed civil
engineer, served as the Deputy Administrator at the Nevada
Division of Water Resources for a month before being promoted
as Nevada’s top water regulator following the abrupt departure
of his predecessor in December. … The appointment of Cacioppo
has attracted criticism from several conservation groups who
question his ties to a firm involved in numerous water rights
applications across the state.
U.S. Sen Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) on Monday announced he’d
successfully pressured the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to
release $120 million for ongoing construction of the
Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project, which, when completed,
promises to provide a sustainable water supply to more than
250,000 people in northwest New Mexico. The project to divert
water via a 300-mile pipeline from the [Colorado River
tributary] San Juan River to the Navajo Nation and areas nearby
was finalized in 2010 when the federal Interior Department and
the Nation finalized the latter’s water rights
settlement. Congress has authorized up to approximately
$1.8 billion for the project.
Managing the Salton Sea remains a thorny issue for California.
We spoke with Pacific Institute’s Michael Cohen and UC
Riverside’s William Porter about recent research that might
point toward cost-effective ways to protect public health.
… Michael Cohen: In the past three to four
years, there have been strongly worded news articles saying
that the Salton Sea is a toxic sump that’s killing people.
That’s exaggerating how bad the situation is. … This
report tries to synthesize what other reports are saying about
pollution sources in the region. We wanted to raise the
question of what’s the best use of limited public funds.
The City Council has adopted a resolution led by Councilwoman
Traci Park opposing a federal effort that could weaken
protections for wetlands and small waterways, adding the city’s
voice to a growing fight over environmental safeguards along
California’s coast. Park’s resolution pushes back against a
Trump administration proposal to redefine which waters and
wetlands are protected under the Clean Water Act. Local
officials and environmental advocates have argued the change
would strip federal protections from many wetlands and streams.
Park said those areas play an important role in filtering
pollution, protecting water quality and reducing flooding
during storms.
This time last year, the administration of President Donald
Trump tried to decimate one of the nation’s premier scientific
institutions, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration. … It is heartening that, through
tireless advocacy on Capitol Hill, multiple rallies and
litigation, those who understand how critical this organization
is to our daily lives have succeeded in pushing back on the
attack and persuading Congress to fund NOAA at a steady level.
… As we look to the future, we also have a chance to think
about how the agency should evolve, and consider critically
what works and what does not. – Written by Craig N. McLean, former assistant
administrator and chief scientist of NOAA Research.
Even though golden mussels were only detected in California in
October 2024, they pose a significant and immediate threat to
the state’s waterways. … Unfortunately, many of the common
inspection programs and methods—like boat inspections or
eDNA—can be costly, labor intensive, and slow. While these
methods offer comprehensive results, the rapid spread of golden
mussels requires tools that deliver immediate answers as
boaters enter waterways. Luckily, a new solution is on the
rise: dogs that can smell invasive species. From time on the
treadmill to weekly weigh-ins, golden mussel-sniffing dogs are
treated like star athletes at Mussel Dogs, an Oakdale-based
canine training and environmental consulting business.
