A collection of top water news from around California and the West compiled each weekday. Send any comments or article submissions to Foundation Writer Matt Jenkins.
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A bill that exemplifies the lack of water for farming in
California just passed the state Legislature. It makes
it easier for farmers to convert their fields to solar
panels. Decades ago, state lawmakers were concerned
about too many farms being turned into new subdivisions. So in
1965, the state started giving tax breaks to growers who agreed
to keep their land in farming. But now farmers who want to
switch to solar are finding the strict rules are like expensive
locks on their property, with high fees to get out of the
agreements. The bill adopted Monday night targets areas
where growers are now limited in how much groundwater they can
pump and are being forced to leave some of their land
dry and unplanted.
As El Niño continues to strengthen, data is increasingly points
to a clear pattern this upcoming snow season: a wet winter for
California, and a warm winter for the Pacific Northwest. …
With models projecting an inch or three or extra snowfall for
the first month of 2027, a below-average snow year is looking
increasingly unlikely. … There are, of course, a few
caveats. First, this is only modeled snowfall, not
standing snowpack. Warmer temperatures
brought on by El Niño’s extra heat could work to melt
additional snowfall even at higher elevations. Indeed,
both the climate prediction center’s new seasonal outlook and
our suite of climate models point to
warmer-than-average temperatures across Northern
California this winter.
California lawmakers will spend up to $125 million in state
funds to help buy and turn Golden Gate Fields, the 161-acre
former horse racing track along the East Bay shoreline, into a
public park — a priority of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s. The
funding will come from Proposition 4, the
voter-approved $10 billion bond for climate projects such as
drinking water, wildfire prevention and land
conservation, despite concerns from environmental
advocates and lawmakers that diverting the money would
drain limited resources from those other priorities.
… Newsom’s proposal is now included in Assembly
Bill/Senate Bill 113, which lawmakers are poised to
adopt by Tuesday.
One of the most striking signs of the low snowpack and
drought that has plagued Colorado this year can be
found by driving by Green Mountain Reservoir in Grand County.
The reservoir, first filled in the 1940s, sits at its lowest
level since the 1960s, when it was drained for maintenance
work. Low snowpack is driving this summer’s low levels. The
reservoir has dropped so far that people can cross it on foot
without getting their feet wet. But that’s proving to be a bit
of an advantage, as Northern Water is using that low
level to make critical repairs to the reservoir that will save
both time and money. Notably, the spillway apron for
the dam is 80 years old and in need of repair.
Water use for data centers across New Mexico could soar in the
coming years, an analyst told state lawmakers Monday.
Currently, data centers in the state use just more than
500 million gallons of water annually, accounting for
one-half of 1% of the state’s total water use, Houston Advanced
Research Center Vice President of Water and Community
Resilience Margaret Cook told legislators on the interim Water
and Natural Resources Committee. If every data center planned
for the state was up and running, that figure would
jump to 23.6 billion gallons per year, she said. The
lion’s share of that water would go toward “indirect
use,” such as cooling the power plants that fuel the data
centers, Cook said. A lack of transparency from data
center developers makes it difficult to accurately predict
future water use numbers, she added.
Last weekend, monsoon rains sent a flash flood rushing through
the Grand Canyon. The massive surge of roiling brown water
carried trees, rocks and debris into the Colorado River,
leaving at least two people dead and damaging bridges and
plumbing. … Floods happen throughout the canyon fairly
often. It stretches across 277 miles and includes many side
canyons, which spider out from the main channel of the Colorado
River. The amount of rain that caused the recent flood, Crossey
said, probably wasn’t particularly extraordinary. The place
where those rains fell, though, is what makes Saturday’s
flooding so unique. The heavy monsoon rains fell on the burn
scar left behind by the 2025 Dragon Bravo Fire, which scorched
nearly 150,000 acres.
The San Diego County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to
launch a new phase of the county’s fight against Tijuana River
pollution, approving funding to plan a new treatment
system to capture sewage from the river itself and to
advance a permanent fix at a toxic air pollution hot spot in
South County. … The capture and cleanup measure directs the
county’s chief administrative officer to begin an 18-month
project development and engineering analysis, funded by $1.8
million from the county’s Unlocked Reserves Framework,
according to a county staff report. … A separate measure
allocates $4 million to advance design, environmental review
and permitting for a permanent box culvert
project at Saturn Boulevard, where hydrogen sulfide
levels have reached 16 times the state air quality
standard.
The spit fishery at the mouth of the Klamath River will close
to angling at 11:59 p.m. Wednesday, after anglers reached the
area’s adult fall‑run Chinook salmon quota, according to the
California Department of Fish and Wildlife. The closure applies
only to the spit area, defined as the zone within 100 yards of
the channel through the sand spit at the river mouth,
downstream of the Highway 101 bridge near Klamath. Recreational
fishing in that section will remain closed for the rest of the
2026 season. … As of last Friday, roughly 26% of the quota
for the stretch from the mouth to Weitchpec had been met.
… This year marks the first salmon season in three years
in which anglers can harvest adult Chinook on local rivers.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is providing
$11.75 million in grants to 10 midsize and large drinking water
systems to strengthen resilience against cybersecurity threats
and extreme weather events. The funding, awarded through EPA’s
Midsize and Large Drinking Water System Infrastructure
Resilience and Sustainability Grant Program, will support
projects addressing hazards including cyberattacks, hurricanes,
wildfires, drought and flooding. Among the largest awards are
$2.375 million each to Bloomington, Indiana, and San Diego,
California. Bloomington will use its funding for facility
upgrades, backup generators and SCADA improvements, while San
Diego will replace programmable logic controllers (PLCs) to
address natural hazard and cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
Two challengers hoping to win seats this November on the Kern
County Water Agency board of directors were both moved to run
because of the Kern River. “The more I started hearing about
different topics, the constraints on the flows of the river, I
thought this doesn’t make sense. Why can’t we find a better
way? That’s what drove me here,” said Daneya Williams, a
Kernville resident and manager of Whitewater Voyages. She is
vying for the Division 2 seat, which covers a huge swath of
eastern Kern County, held by incumbent Laura Cattani, a
longtime local rancher. Cattani, who has served on the board
since 2021, responded to SJV Water’s interview requests that
her schedule did not allow for an interview in time for this
story. The other challenger, who’s vying for incumbent Tammy
Johnson’s Division 4 seat, is Mary Parada, a Spanish professor
at California State University, Bakersfield.
Tucson Water has opened a new PFAS treatment facility aimed at
helping the south side, where residents have dealt with
contaminated water for generations. In 1981, the industrial
solvent TCE was found in south Tucson’s aquifer and the city’s
groundwater. Cleanup efforts began immediately, and the
contaminant has been removed from the water for years.
… While TCE is gone, Tucson Water said it now faces
another contaminant. “Now we know that we have PFAS from the
airport area coming into our well field,” said John Kmiec of
Tucson Water. The new treatment facility expands the 2014
Tucson Airport Remediation Project and will work to clean water
from the chemicals known as PFAS, or “forever chemicals.”
The author, farmer, and environmental activist Wendell Berry,
who died on Monday, was a preeminent voice for the land,
writing in prose and poetry about agrarian themes, extolling
living with the rhythms of nature, and railing against the
consolidation and corporatization of American agriculture. …
Mas Masumoto, [San Joaquin
Valley] organic peach and nectarine farmer and the
author of nine books: I consumed the words of Wendell
Berry as I forged a life on our family farm. He opened a door
to realize that our peaches only grew with a community of
people around us. … Wendell Berry helped me connect my farm
with the world: farming was more than just dirt and sweat, it
must include the social and political worlds that feed us.
Berry wrote “Eating is an agricultural act” which inspired many
to foster the belief: “Eating is a political act.”
… [C]entral Arizona cities are charting a course through a
future with less Colorado River water. Water managers across
the Phoenix metro say they have robust backup plans in
place to keep taps flowing, thanks to years of
preparation and huge construction projects. Those upgrades,
though, come with a big price tag, and will
carry the area into a future that is still rife with
uncertainty. … The very fact that Phoenix and its
neighbors can receive water from the Colorado River is a feat
of engineering. The canal system that carries it from western
Arizona is a gravity-defying product of 1960s optimism and more
than $4 billion in building costs. Soon, with less water in
that canal, it will take more feats of engineering to survive.
The steep costs of those projects will likely be passed along
to residents.
California Senate Republicans are urging Governor Gavin Newsom
to veto legislation concerning how water districts
calculate tiered water rates, saying the measure could
affect the application of Proposition 218.
Assembly Bill 2180, authored by Assemblymember Shirley Weber,
D-San Diego, was the subject of a letter from Senate
Republicans asking Newsom to reject the bill. The legislation
comes as the California Supreme Court considers a case
involving tiered water rates charged by water
agencies. The case, Dreher v. City of Los Angeles
Department of Water and Power, concerns whether water districts
are complying with legal requirements governing tiered water
rates. Senator Steven Choi, R-Irvine, said Proposition 218,
approved by California voters in 1996, was intended to provide
protections for property owners and ratepayers from certain
government-imposed fees and charges.
As fights about data centers erupt nationwide, California
lawmakers have approved a pair of bills to make data center
developers disclose how much water they really
use. The bills are a new test of whether
California will set limits on an industry that’s becoming a
flashpoint over water, electricity and the environmental
consequences of artificial intelligence. Lawmakers on
Monday cleared Assembly Bill 2469 by Assemblymember Diane
Papan, a Democrat from San Mateo. The bill bars local
governments from approving new or expanded data centers
unless the developer discloses its water plans and
covers the full cost of any new water pipes, treatment or
storage for the facility. … It’s almost
identical to a bill Papan authored last year, which Newsom
vetoed amid pressure from the tech industry.
After decades of pollution and years of beach closures caused
by raw sewage in the Tijuana River, San Diego County
Supervisors are pursuing a local plan to divert the
river and treat it directly. They’re calling for the
county to design a new treatment plant to capture and
clean contaminated water before it enters San Diego
communities, using potential local tax revenue to back
nearly a billion dollars worth of bonds to build it.
… The supervisors called for spending $1.8 million to
design a system to divert and treat the river water. They also
proposed $4 million to immediately fix a sewage hot spot on
Saturn Boulevard, where river pollution becomes aerosolized.
The board will vote on the plan Tuesday.
A deadly flash flood in the Grand Canyon over the weekend was
probably driven by a confluence of climate factors,
including drought, wildfire scarring and warming temperatures
in the Pacific Ocean that can supercharge storms. At
least two people have died, nearly 80 people were rescued and
one remained unaccounted for after a surge of water and debris
swept through the immensely popular tourist destination on
Saturday. … Along with the potential impact from a
previous fire, a severe drought that continues
to affect the Grand Canyon region – and the Colorado
River basin that runs through it – could have
contributed to the disaster. The deluge unleashed torrents of
rain on hardened and sparsely vegetated steep terrain that is
less able to absorb and contain abrupt increases in moisture.
A new study from the Center for Western Weather and Water
Extremes (CW3E) at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC
San Diego finds that improved weather and water forecasts could
help California gain more value from existing reservoirs and
help meet a new water supply target. The study, led by Scripps
economist Tom Corringham and staff researcher Denali Pinto,
estimates that a reservoir operation system co-led by Scripps,
state, federal and local water authorities could save the state
between $100 million and $200 million per year in the form of
added water available to meet agricultural, urban and household
needs. Corringham said that ripple effects ranging from
recreation enhancements to recreation, power generation,
enriched fishery stocks, and improved flood risk management
make that a conservative estimate.
A tropical storm is forming off the coast of Baja California, a
system that national forecasters say has a virtually
nonexistent chance of intensifying into a hurricane. The
National Hurricane Center is predicting a 90% chance of a
tropical storm forming in the Baja California area within the
next 48 hours and within the next seven days. The storm
brewing off the Baja coast is fueled in part by the
very strong El Niño, a natural climate pattern
that is gaining momentum and warming sea surface temperatures
in the Pacific Ocean. Temperatures off the coast of San
Diego are about 8 degrees above the average for this time of
year, according to the Scripps Institution of
Oceanography. Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with UC
Agriculture and Natural Resources, said the warming of the
eastern tropical Pacific Ocean is one consequence of
human-caused climate change.
Three years after Gov. Gavin Newsom proclaimed Imperial
County’s “Lithium Valley” to be a game-changer for
California’s economy and alternative energy transition, little
has changed. The southern end of the Salton Sea contains rich
sources of lithium, a mineral used for electric car batteries,
cellphones and other electronics. … But lithium resources
remain untapped, as plans to mine them falter amid legal
challenges and funding problems. The Hell’s Kitchen project by
Controlled Thermal Resources has been delayed by lawsuits
arguing that the company neglected to address its environmental
impacts. Last month an appeals court sent the environmental
review back to Imperial County to correct deficiencies
regarding water and air quality effects.
