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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Leaders of California, Arizona and Nevada are criticizing the
Trump administration’s proposals for water cutbacks along the
Colorado River, urging it to take a different approach and
avoid a court battle. The three downstream states said in
letters to the Interior Department this week that the agency’s
preliminary outline of five options for cuts ignores the
foundational “Law of the River” that has underpinned how seven
western states operate for more than a century. Federal
officials have so far failed to examine whether their options
comply with the 1922 Colorado River Compact, and this is “a
fundamental deficiency that must be corrected,” JB Hamby,
California’s lead negotiator, wrote in a letter to the Trump
administration.
The Ninth Circuit on Tuesday nixed the Environmental Protection
Agency’s recommendation to relax criteria for toxic cadmium
levels in fresh water, compelling the agency to revisit its
guidance under the Clean Water Act. A
three-judge panel — upholding a lower court order vacating the
guidance — found the agency violated the Endangered Species Act
by failing to consult with either the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service or the National Marine Fisheries Service before it
issued new recommendations in 2016. … The panel accepted
the center’s evidence that cadmium exposure at the agency’s
recommended levels are harmful to numerous marine
animals like salmon, sturgeon and sea turtles.
With little snow in the forecast, California’s meager
snowpack — at just 59% of normal for this time of year — could
be in dire trouble. And that’s a big deal for winter
sports enthusiasts who want to bag peaks or hit the slopes in
Lake Tahoe this winter. This winter hasn’t been a dry one, but
it has been a tale of warm storms bringing rain, a few big cold
winter systems dropping multiple feet of snow and then warm
temperatures prematurely melting some of the cold white layer
blanketing the Sierra Nevada. “The full three-month period,
winter 2026, was in fact record warm throughout a majority of
the Sierra Nevada,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with
UC Agriculture and Natural Resources.
Other snowpack and water supply news around the West:
Arizona Water Company became the first water provider in more
than 20 years to receive a 100-year water supply designation in
Pinal County’s Active Management Area, officials announced
today. The company received the designation through Governor
Katie Hobbs’ new Alternative Designation of Assured Water
Supply (ADAWS) program. The ADAWS program aims to conserve
groundwater while enabling housing development. Arizona Water
Company’s designation will provide water supply
protections across its service area and support construction of
more than 80,000 new homes, according to the
governor’s office.
What has SGMA meant for water managers and users across the
state, and how exactly does it change the way groundwater is
managed? Tina Cannon Leahy, who helped draft SGMA as
the former principal consultant for the California Assembly’s
Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee, will address these
questions at our Water
101 Workshop on March 26 and give a
behind-the-scenes look at how the consequential legislation was
passed. Besides SGMA, speakers will address efforts underway by
California Departent of Water
Resources to identify 9 million acre-feet of
additional water supply by 2040 as part of
the recently
announced 2028 California Water Plan update. Space
is running out, so register
now!
The head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is
stepping down to become chief executive of an electric company
in her native Puerto Rico. … [Janisse] Quiñones faced
criticism during the Jan. 7, 2025, Palisades fire, when a key
reservoir was empty as firefighters battled the blaze. Some
said the lack of water in the Santa Ynez Reservoir, which had
been drained as part of repairs to its cover, hampered the
fight against the fire, which destroyed thousands of homes and
left 12 people dead. The DWP pushed back, saying the
repairs were necessary to protect public health and that even
if the reservoir had been full, there still would have been
water pressure issues.
… When the dams were built, Putah Creek’s runs of Chinook
salmon could no longer access the upper reaches of the creek,
cutting them off from their traditional spawning grounds. …
By the late ’80s and ’90s, so much water was being diverted
that the creek below the diversion dam on Lake Solano almost
totally dried up during drought years. In response, the
council, UC Davis and the city of Davis sued the Solano County
Water Agency and, nearly a decade later, the Putah Creek Accord
was signed. Among other things, the agreement regulated how
much water the SCWA needed to release to sustain fish
populations. … Year by year, the fish repopulated the
creek and grew in size.
A tiny mollusk, native to China and southeast Asia, made its
way to California in 2024. Its potentially disruptive effects
to water systems are now in Kern County. The golden
mussel threatens to disrupt California’s surface water
delivery system, from the Sacramento San Joaquin River Delta
all the way to farms in Kern County. This week the Water
Association of Kern County is holding its annual Water Summit
and that tiny mollusk is becoming a bigger focus at this year’s
event. The golden mollusk, by all accounts, is a prodigious
progenitor colonizing beneath the water’s surface and anchoring
itself to just about anything it can latch on to.
When people find out I’m a journalist who covers AI, they often
ask about the drastic energy consumption of AI data centers.
Are these centers using up all of our drinking water?
… Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, recently faced
criticism after calling some of these concerns, particularly
those around water, “totally fake.” … OpenAI said in a
January announcement that it is “prioritizing closed-loop or
low-water cooling systems” to minimize water use. This does
lend credence to Altman’s recent claims that OpenAI’s water use
is not as high as the 17 gallons per query estimate, but we
don’t yet have exact figures for OpenAI’s 2025 water use.
Eight years ago, a milestone law for climate adaptation took
effect to ensure California could maintain adequate water
supplies for generations to come. The Sustainable
Groundwater Management Act, or SGMA, created a 25-year
roadmap by which local agencies would begin modeling, implement
sustainability plans and enforce compliance. While still early
in the overall timeline, 2026 marks a significant decision year
as the Salinas Valley Groundwater Sustainability Agency brings
together feasibility studies, modeling and economic analysis to
formulate a set of projects and management actions to carry
forward.
A new online dashboard shows PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” are
turning up in some drinking water systems across New
Mexico. While PFAS has often been linked to military bases
and airports, officials say it’s also being detected in urban
and rural areas. … The dashboard, released in February,
is part of a federally funded program for small and
disadvantaged communities. Testing for 580 water systems has
been underway for about a year and a half and will continue
through this year. It includes not only cities, but also other
public water systems such as schools and senior centers on
their own wells.
It’s been three years since the Pajaro River levee crumbled and
the river flooded the town of Pajaro, displacing hundreds of
people and causing untold amounts of damage to homes and
businesses. Decades in the making, a project to bolster the
levee in Pajaro and Watsonville is at last expected to begin
construction in earnest this week, but first in Watsonville.
Pajaro residents will have to spend a few more winters with the
current levee, as the portion that breached and was repaired in
2023 may not begin construction until 2029 or 2030.
… The cost of the $599 million project is shared by the
state and federal government.
The Mendocino County Board of Supervisors recently approved
setting aside $500,000 to support the Inland Water and Power
Commission’s efforts to secure water supply for the region in
the wake of pending Potter Valley Project
decommissioning, though one supervisor suggested that most of
the funds might better be spent on roads instead. “When I hear
from constituents across the county, I hear they would like to
see more road work done, so I would be inclined to reduce that
(amount for water to) $50,000, (especially since) we don’t even
know what it is for at this point,” said Fourth District
Supervisor Ted Williams.
With desert cities like Phoenix and Tucson bracing for their
allotments of Colorado River water to be slashed dramatically,
San Diego County’s water agency could for the first time sell
some of its water to other states by drawing on its ample
supplies from the nation’s largest desalination plant.
The San Diego County Water Authority’s board
unanimously approved an initial agreement last week to consider
selling some of its water to Arizona and Nevada, where
cities that depend on the over-tapped Colorado River are
expected to face substantial cuts in water supplies. The
approach would not involve sending desalinated water to other
states, but rather selling some of San Diego County’s allotment
of Colorado River water, which in turn would generate funds to
increase output at the Carlsbad desalination plant.
Recent storms in Colorado’s high country last month did not
dramatically improve what’s still on track to be a record low
snowpack season in the Rockies. … Statewide snowpack was
hovering at about 62% of normal entering March.
… Water managers are already warning of
potential water restrictions in the Colorado River
basin. Denver Water said that as of March 2, the
Colorado River snowpack ranked the second worst since tracking
started decades ago. “It is likely that we will need to
implement additional drought response measures this year,” the
company wrote in a snowpack update this week.
Other snowpack and water supply news around the West:
Though some valley groundwater managers say new state
guidelines “move the goal posts” on subsidence, state
regulators gave fair warning of what was coming. At a September
workshop Deputy Director of the Department of Water Resources
Paul Gosselin told attendees the new guidelines would require
hard commitments and detailed action plans to stop the rapid
sinking that has damaged canals and sunk such large sections of
the San Joaquin Valley, the resulting “bowl” can be seen from
space. … The guidelines, released by the Department of
Water Resources in January, outline how agencies should manage
aquifers to avoid further subsidence.
… Even though Arizona will soon be home to nearly 200 data
centers and chip factories, these facilities have not yet
caused a major bump in the state’s water consumption. The
companies’ precise effects on water supply are hard to discern
due to their own secrecy about their water usage, but the
aggregate picture suggests they have found ways to minimize
their impact, whether through new cooling technologies or by
recycling water on-site. And despite local backlash, water
experts and many local officials appear to have largely made
their peace with the industry’s arrival — and with the Phoenix
region’s emergence as one of the nation’s largest AI
infrastructure clusters. … Arizona is home
to more than 150 data centers, according to an
analysis from the Data Center Map, an industry resource.
Researchers at the University of Nevada, Reno, have received a
$9 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to study an
unlikely candidate for future fuels: cactus pear. The
desert-adapted plant already grows across much of the Mountain
West, including Nevada, Idaho, New Mexico, Wyoming, Colorado,
Utah and Arizona. Scientists say it could help farmers produce
renewable fuels like ethanol and biodiesel while using
significantly less water than traditional biofuel crops like
corn and soybeans. Over the next five years,
researchers will test hundreds of cactus pear varieties at
sites from Arizona to Florida.
Earlier this week, the Delta Stewardship Council’s (Council)
held a hearing on appeals of the Department of Water Resources’
(DWR) Delta Plan consistency certification for the Delta
Conveyance Project (Delta Tunnel). … According to a Yolo
County press release, the certification submitted by DWR is not
supported by substantial evidence that the Delta Tunnel is
consistent with the Delta Reform Act, or the coequal goals of
the Delta Plan: a more reliable statewide water supply and a
healthy and protected Delta ecosystem. Further, it would
forever alter the character of the Delta and harm the “Delta as
a place” with monolithic intakes and years of construction with
massive staging areas.
As Marin County wrestles with coastal flooding, king tides and
federal bureaucracy, two significant flood control projects are
suspended and they won’t be restarted until the county can
figure out how to balance all the interests. … In early
January, Marin County had multiple low-lying area floods.
Though it’s not the first time, Marin is becoming an early
model for what will impact other bay side and seaside
communities as sea level rises, flooding other areas.
… A flood control project to lessen or eliminate
flooding here is now on hold by the county after FEMA, the
Federal Emergency Management Agency, said work here could flood
other locales further downstream.
