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.
Western states are brawling over the future of the Colorado
River — with President Donald Trump looming in the background.
Talks kicking off Tuesday in Las Vegas will help determine
whether the Trump administration has to step in and take the
political heat of deciding how to divide the shrinking river’s
water supplies among powerful industries and more than 40
million people — a fight that includes the swing states of
Arizona and Nevada, politically influential farmers and
ranchers, and burgeoning semiconductor and artificial
intelligence companies. It’s the highest-stakes water
fight the U.S. has seen in more than a century.
After nearly four weeks without rain, Californians are finally
seeing precipitation return to the forecast. The wet pattern
arriving this week comes in pieces, and the Bay Area should see
significant rain from the final storm, while temperatures will
remain cool. … Unfortunately, neither of the first two
storm systems will provide much relief for the
snow-starved Sierra Nevada. Snow levels for
both systems will remain high, hovering near 8,000 feet,
meaning precipitation will fall as rain at most Sierra ski
resorts. Only the highest elevations are likely to see light
snowfall.
Other snowpack and water supply news around the West:
The United States and Mexico have signed a new binational
agreement known as Minute 333, establishing a detailed plan to
address the toxic sewage crisis that has polluted the
Tijuana River Valley and repeatedly closed
beaches in Imperial Beach and Coronado. … Under Minute 333,
Mexico will, by December 2028, build the Tecolote-La Gloria
Wastewater Treatment Plan, which will be able to process 3
million gallons per day. Mexico will also construct a new
sediment basin in Matadero Canyon — near Smuggler’s Gulch along
the border — before the 2026-27 rainy season to capture
polluted runoff. In addition, Mexico will develop a Tijuana
Water Infrastructure Master Plan within six months.
As firefighters battled catastrophic fires in Los Angeles last
January, one question reverberated across the country: Where
was the water? … A team of researchers, led by
Gregory Pierce, director of the UCLA Water Resources Group, set
out to uncover whether the intense focus on water supply meant
that dry hydrants had uniquely hampered the Palisades
firefight, or whether this was a common occurrence. In a
policy brief published Monday, the researchers used media
reports to confirm that when fires burn urban areas, hydrant
flows often sputter out — the result of lost pressure as burnt
homes hemorrhage water and too many hoses simultaneously draw
on a limited supply.
The rusty observation tower at the edge of this wastewater-fed
marsh offers an osprey-eye view of two possible futures for the
parched and overworked Colorado River. To one side, the marsh
spreads across more than 20 square miles of pools and islands
choked with cattails and phragmites. … On the
tower’s other side, boundless flats of sand and cracked mud
spread to the horizon across what was, prior to the river’s
damming a century ago, one of Earth’s great green estuaries.
… The challenges are tremendous all along the Southwest’s
most critical river, one that supplies water to 40 million
people and feeds millions more. But here on the delta and
across the mountains and deserts and wetlands from source to
sea, people who refuse to watch the Colorado die are
prioritizing its care and nursing it back to health.
A Trump administration plan to pump more water to Central
Valley farmlands is facing vehement opposition from Democratic
members of Congress who represent the Sacramento–San Joaquin
River Delta and the Bay Area. A group of seven legislators led
by Rep. John Garamendi (D-Walnut Grove) said pumping more water
will threaten the availability of water for many Californians,
disrupt longstanding state-federal cooperation and put the
Delta’s native fish at risk. … Federal officials
have said the changes, adopted this month following an order by
President Trump earlier this year, represent an effort to
balance the needs of communities, farms and ecosystems.
Two U.S. lawmakers representing Colorado are advancing a bill
in Congress to update the country’s snowpack tracking
technology and more accurately predict water supply. The 2025
Snow Water Supply Forecasting Reauthorization Act is sponsored
by Rep. Jeff Hurd, a Grand Junction Republican, and cosponsored
by Rep. Joe Neguse, a Lafayette Democrat. … Their bill,
which passed the U.S. House on Wednesday and now heads to the
Senate, would renew and update the country’s forecasting system
for snowpack melt. In statements, both lawmakers said the
measure is important for their rural and mountain communities,
which rely on snowpack data for irrigation planning, drought
management and annual water allocation.
Water officials in Pinal County experimented with cloud seeding
technology to boost rainfall over the summer, just months after
bills that would have banned the practice failed to gain
traction at the state legislature. … Joe Singleton, the
authority’s executive director, told lawmakers at a Dec. 11
meeting of the Arizona House Committee on Natural Resources
that the test took place between July 1 and Sept. 30.
… According to the final report on the Pinal County
experiment, the three-month test may have resulted in an
additional 0.47 inches of rainfall and in 134,192 acre feet of
water. … But news of the new cloud seeding project in
Pinal County didn’t sit well with the Republican lawmakers who
represent the area.
On Thursday, Gov. Gavin Newsom touted the “comeback” of coho
salmon after state officials spotted juvenile fish in the
Russian River’s upper basin — the first such sighting in more
than 30 years. As the state celebrated the news, however,
federal fisheries officials announced that they would not
designate Chinook salmon as endangered or threatened under the
Endangered Species Act, prompting disappointment from
conservation groups. The two salmon species face different
challenges and are at different stages of recovery, one salmon
expert said. But climate change is increasingly shaping the
fate of both.
Groundwater agencies in the beleaguered Tulare Lake subbasin in
Kings County have released a region-wide pumping allocation
model – but disagreements continue. The proposed methodology
was discussed at the Dec. 9 El Rico Groundwater Sustainability
Agency (GSA) meeting where representatives from four of the
five GSAs were in attendance. The proposed methodology is based
on historical groundwater use within the subbasin. Using a
coordinated methodology for figuring out how much each GSA can
pump is critical to earning approval from the state Water
Resources Control Board, which has already put the subbasin on
probation. … Still, the GSAs found fault with the
proposed method.
During Arvin-Edison Water District’s winter maintenance workers
confirmed detection of golden mussels in their
systems. The golden mussel is an invasive species from
China that was first detected in California in October 2024. It
has been spreading throughout the state with more and more
locations reporting findings of the invasive species. The small
mussels form massive colonies, clogging infrastructure. The
district has been power washing, which hasn’t been successful,
and manual scraping, which is effective, but time
consuming. Samuel Blue, resource manager for the district,
said chemical treatments would have to be done for a long
period of time, between 12 to 30 days.
… As local and national opposition to data centers
has grown, so, too, have concerns about their environmental
impacts. Earlier this week, more than 230 green
groups sent a letter to Congress, warning that AI and
data centers are “threatening Americans’ economic,
environmental, climate and water security.” … But as the
number of data centers continues to grow across the country —
and as President Donald Trump’s administration rolls back
environmental protections to encourage more development — it’s
worth understanding what, exactly, data centers are using water
for, and how popular estimates are produced. And it’s worth
having a bigger conversation about how and why we’re choosing
to use water to cool data centers in the first place.
The State Water Resources Control Board has added a new chapter
and made other language updates to its draft Bay-Delta
Plan. … ”The release of these documents puts us on
track for updates to the Bay-Delta Plan to come before the
State Water Board for adoption in 2026,” E. Joaquin Esquivel,
chairman of the board, said in a statement. … In July 2025,
staff proposed updates to the plan that would allow water right
holders in the Sacramento/Delta to comply with water quality
requirements by either leaving a percentage of unimpaired flow
instream … or implementing a combination of flow and
habitat restoration commitments as a party to the [Healthy
Rivers and Landscapes] program. … The July 2025 proposal
also incorporated tribal beneficial uses and a formal
designation of tribal tradition and culture beneficial uses in
the Bay-Delta watershed.
For three days [this] week, water leaders from across the
Colorado River Basin will gather in Las Vegas to talk about
water and the looming failure of the seven basin states to work
out differences on a plan to manage the river through drought.
Tribal leaders and water protectors will arrive with their own
goals and a clear message for delegates to the Colorado River
Water Users Association conference. They’re worried about not
being at the negotiating table despite holding about 20% of the
Colorado’s senior water rights. They want to see a more
holistic approach to river management as the Southwest’s
long-term drought threatens to permanently impact the
Colorado’s flow.
Snow season is off to a rough start for Utah and its neighbors.
Most of the West is in a snow drought, with so little white
stuff covering the ground that the region hit a 25-year low. If
the trend continues, it could be a recipe for disaster for the
Colorado River and its reservoirs. That
includes the nation’s two largest, Lake Powell
and Lake Mead, which prop up a system that
provides water to communities on the Wasatch Front and tens of
millions of other Americans across the West. A new report from
more than a dozen Colorado River experts projects that even
near-average snowpack this winter could send the two reservoirs
to record lows in 2026.
Other snowpack and water supply news around the West:
After years of water shortfalls that have cost Texas farmers
about $1 billion annually, Mexico agreed late Friday to begin
immediate deliveries of water to the United States, averting a
5% tariff threatened by President Donald Trump. In a statement
late Friday, USDA announced Mexico has agreed to release
202,000-acre-feet of water – 65.8 billion gallons — to the
United States with deliveries expected to begin this week.
… Under the 1944 Water Treaty, Mexico is obligated to
deliver 1.75 million acre-feet over five years to the United
States from the Rio Grande River. The United States in turn
delivers 1.5 million acre-feet of water to Mexico from the
Colorado River.
The rapid growth and impact of massive data centers, especially
for AI and cryptocurrency companies, this year has had big
economic benefits, especially for construction and design firms
and their workers. … But there’s increasing
blowback to that rapid expansion, with more individual
communities opting against new data center projects because of
their gargantuan need for electricity and
water, which is driving utility rates for residential
customers higher. That blowback is getting more coordinated as
a coalition of more than 230 environmental, tribal and
community groups is calling for a national moratorium on such
construction.
The Pacific Ocean remains officially locked in a La Niña phase,
but the mechanisms keeping it there are beginning to sputter.
On Thursday, the Climate Prediction Center left a La Niña
advisory in place, confirming that cool sea surface
temperatures continue in the equatorial Pacific. But it
won’t last much longer. The agency expects the La Niña phase to
fade by February. … After February, the agency expects a
neutral phase, where neither El Niño phase or La Niña
conditions exist. But mounting evidence suggests that the
neutral phase won’t last long and the Pacific could snap back
to an El Niño phase as early as next summer.
Representatives Jim Costa (CA-21) and Adam Gray (CA-13)
introduced their End California Water Crisis Package (last
week), a suite of bills that would authorize additional
California water storage projects, ease permitting
restrictions, and create enforceable timelines for
environmental review processes. The bills aim to expand
California’s water storage capacity by providing funding and
technical support to both develop and maintain water
infrastructure projects. … The End California Water Crisis
Package includes three bills to stabilize water access in the
Central Valley.
The water that flows down irrigation canals to some of the
West’s biggest expanses of farmland comes courtesy of the
federal government for a very low price — even, in some cases,
for free. In a new study, researchers analyzed wholesale prices
charged by the federal government in California,
Arizona and Nevada, and found that large agricultural
water agencies pay only a fraction of what cities pay, if
anything at all. … Farmers in California’s Imperial
Valley receive the largest share of Colorado River water.
… Tina Shields, IID’s water department manager, said the
district opposes any surcharge on water. Comparing
agricultural and urban water costs, as the researchers did, she
said, “is like comparing a grape to a watermelon.”
