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.
The Trump administration is making good on a promise to send
more water to California farmers in the state’s crop-rich
Central Valley. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation on Thursday
announced a new plan for operating the Central Valley Project.
… It follows an executive order President Donald Trump signed
in January calling for more water to flow to farmers, arguing
the state was wasting the precious resource in the name of
protecting endangered fish species. U.S. Secretary of the
Interior Doug Burgum said the plan will help the federal
government “strengthen California’s water resilience.” It takes
effect Friday.
Californians can be excused for being confused about the
weather forecast. Scientists in October said La Niña had
arrived, which many associate with dry conditions, particularly
in the Southland. But we have instead experienced a very wet
season — at least so far — with rain bringing much-needed
moisture to the brush, likely putting an end to the autumn fire
season, and helping to keep the state’s reservoirs in good
shape. … But La Niña “doesn’t always mean
drought,” said meteorologist Jan Null, an adjunct
professor at San Jose State University. In fact, out of the
seven La Niñas seen over the last 15 years, three were whoppers
when it came to rain. … A healthy snowpack is
key to California’s annual water supply.
Other weather and water supply news around the West:
Democratic state Sen. Steve Padilla is calling for public
review of a massive data center designed to power generative
artificial intelligence technology that has been proposed in
the heart of the Imperial Valley. … In a letter to
the Imperial County Board of Supervisors this week, Padilla,
whose district includes Imperial County and South San Diego
County, said the public deserved “a complete picture of the
water usage and energy demands” of the nearly 1million square
foot data center project. … The data center would
require 750,000 gallons of water per day for facility
operations. … The concerns over the Imperial Valley data
center come amid a growing fight over the growth of data
centers and how lawmakers should regulate them — in California
and elsewhere.
… The Colorado River and its reservoirs are not sufficient to
meet the regional demand for water, so
groundwater has been extracted from the
aquifers. … In a recent study published in Geophysical
Research Letters, a research team used gravity data from NASA’s
Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment and GRACE
Follow-On to determine how much water has been withdrawn from
Colorado River Basin aquifers since 2002. … The results
indicate that the reservoirs and the aquifers have lost a
combined 52 cubic kilometers of water since 2002. The reduction
of groundwater was 65% of that total, about 34 cubic
kilometers.
A rapidly growing infestation of invasive golden mussels is
raising concerns among engineers, boaters, and water agencies
as the species spreads through the Sacramento–San Joaquin
Delta. … So far, crews have resorted to scraping pipes
by hand or using pressure-washing equipment. Some agencies are
testing ultrasonic or electronic systems that discourage marine
growth, but there is no proven long-term solution.
… Local boaters and maritime experts are raising the
alarm over the rapid spread of golden mussels in the
Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, warning of rising maintenance
costs and potential risks to water infrastructure.
A settlement between a desert mining company and groundwater
authority in eastern Kern County will erase $24 million in past
groundwater fees by allowing the company to use other sources,
including 2,000 acre feet of reclaimed water. In exchange
Searles Valley Minerals agreed to drop its lawsuits against the
Indian Wells Valley Groundwater Authority and not oppose its
planned pipeline project to import water from the Antelope
Valley, according to recent press releases. Searles will,
however, continue to “actively participate” in a larger legal
action, known as an “adjudication,” in which a judge will
ultimately determine how much water can be pumped from the
Indian Wells Valley basin and who has rights to that water.
Drinking water for at least one of every seven Americans –
about 49.5 million people – contains unsafe levels of “forever
chemicals,” according to new test results the Environmental
Protection Agency published in November. … USA TODAY’s
analysis of the records shows water utilities in
Anaheim and San Jose, California, and
Brownsville, Texas, have now joined the 944 systems scattered
across the country that have recently failed to meet the new
EPA standards. … The count of municipalities not meeting
these two limits is likely to grow as the EPA wraps up a
three-year initiative that required all public utilities
serving at least a few thousand customers to check for forever
chemicals in their drinking water.
The Trump administration’s speedy timeline for enacting a major
Clean Water Act rule has drawn pushback from state regulators,
local governments, utilities and environmentalists, who said
they will be scrambling over the holidays to digest the
proposal. EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers gave the public
45 days to comment on the proposed new “waters of the U.S.”
definition unveiled Nov. 17. … The proposal would
shrink the number of wetlands and streams regulated by
the Clean Water Act. It seeks comment on a range of
technical issues, including how “wet” wetlands and small
streams must be to qualify for the law’s protections.
… Tijuana River pollution dates back to at least the 1930s,
when the U.S. and Mexican governments built the first
cross-border sewage plants. As Tijuana’s population soared with
its booming industry, the city’s waste outstripped its
treatment systems. … After decades of
deterioration, major improvements came online this year. The
South Bay International Wastewater Treatment Plant, which was
barely operable, is now fully functioning and expanded its
capacity from 25 million to 35 million gallons of wastewater
per day. The project was expected to take two years, but was
completed in 100 days, according to the U.S. International
Boundary and Water Commission.
California’s infrastructure earned a C- grade in a new report
that highlights where improvement and resources are needed the
most. … The California Section for the American Society of
Civil Engineers released its 2025 report card for the state on
Wednesday, Dec. 3. … There are some challenges in
delivering drinking water to Californians.
Over 85% of water utilities surveyed for the report “indicated
that portions of their pipelines or facilities have exceeded
their design life,” according to the report.
… Additionally, about 103 million gallons of
water statewide were lost annually due to system
leakage based on data reported by urban retail water suppliers
from 2017 to 2020, the report cited.
The 31 national monuments designated since the Clinton
administration, which could be downsized as the Trump
administration pushes to open more public lands to extractive
industries, safeguard clean water for millions of Americans,
according to a new analysis from the Center for American
Progress. … The report found that the water supplies for more
than 13 million Americans are directly provided by watersheds
within or downstream of these national monuments. About 83
percent of the water passing through these public lands has no
other protection besides the monument designations, it found.
The U.S. House Water, Wildlife, and Fisheries Subcommittee held
a hearing on sea lion predation on salmon and the effectiveness
of killing the mammals to slow down the trend. Under the
Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA), sea lions skyrocketed from
a population of roughly 10,000 in the 1950s to 250,000 today.
That spike has been seen as a success story for the MMPA, but
it’s also had a major impact on salmon populations.
… That predation has undermined the federal government’s
attempts to help salmon recover in the Pacific Northwest, which
includes tens of millions of dollars in funding every year.
… Monterey One Water held a ribbon-cutting on Dec. 2 at its
Marina facility for a new food waste receiving and co-digestion
program that will divert up to 51,000 tons of organic food
waste from local landfills annually. … By adding a
food-waste receiving station and upgrades to existing anaerobic
digesters, Monterey One now combines food waste with wastewater
biosolids to significantly increase biogas production.
… The new infrastructure project at Monterey One Water
was made possible by a $4.2 million grant from CalRecycle.
On November 21, 2025, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and
the National Marine Fisheries Service released four proposed
rules revising implementation of the Endangered Species Act.
Two proposed rules issued jointly by USFWS and NMFS relate
to (i) interagency consultation and (ii) listing/delisting of
species and designation of critical habitat. Two additional
proposed rules issued solely by USFWS relate to (iii) critical
habitat exclusions and (iv) threatened species protections.
These alterations to the ESA framework could impact local land
use and economic development priorities, advancement of public
infrastructure, and federal water project
operations.
The federal government is limiting which bodies of water are
eligible for protection under the Clean Water
Act. Now, Colorado is working on its own set of rules
for places that will no longer be federally protected,
following a 2024 bipartisan law. … The Sackett
ruling, along with the new proposal to only protect permanent
rivers and wetlands directly connected to them, poses a problem
for Colorado and other Mountain West states. Because of the
region’s reliance on snowmelt for much of its water supply,
bodies of water are often ephemeral, or intermittent.
… The Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center has a sprawling
landmass greater than the city of Denver. It is home to the
largest data center in the US, built by the company Switch. …
The Truckee River supplies the industrial center with water and
also serves as the primary source of water for Pyramid
Lake. … And as data centers continue to proliferate
in water-stressed areas around the globe, which can offer cheap
land and energy as well as low humidity for easier chip
cooling, one of the central concerns in local communities is
what happens if the water runs dry.
A federal district court in California failed to consider
impacts to other endangered species before
ordering San Luis Obispo County to develop a flow and release
plan for local steelhead trout, a federal appeals court ruled
Wednesday. The injunction blocking the Lopez Dam expansion “may
benefit one protected species at the expense of other protected
species,” and the US District Court for the Central District of
California didn’t consider this factor or the public interest,
the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said.
… The Tribal Council of the Colorado River Indian Tribes
decided to recognize the river as a legal person under tribal
law. It’s the second time a Native tribe has declared legal
personhood for a river in the United States. The Yurok Tribe in
Northern California in 2019 declared the Klamath River a legal
person. I was interested to learn more about why the leaders of
the Colorado River Indian Tribes, or CRIT, wanted to take this
step, and Chairwoman Amelia Flores agreed to talk with
me.
California can still wring water out of its rivers — in theory,
and only if you’re willing to pay an increasingly steep premium
for it. Take Sites Reservoir, which could become the first new
major reservoir in California in decades. It would pull water
from the Sacramento River to fill a valley in the
coast range with enough water for roughly 3 million households,
then distribute it to the local farmers and Southern California
cities that would partly fund its construction. Sites has
serious political weight: it’s on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s
priority list, has growing interest from the Trump
administration and is drawing on tens of millions in state
dollars reallocated from other now-defunct water projects.
… The 2023 judgment of Las Posas v. Fox Canyon appointed Fox
Canyon as the regulatory “watermaster” with ultimate oversight
of the basins and allocations. Voices of dissent quickly
emerged, claiming that the judgment appeared to favor large
landowners. Lana Franklin, Rob Perry and Debra Tash, who own
smaller properties in and near Somis, were left with no water
allocations at all. … Franklin, Perry and Tash joined a
group of farmers who are currently appealing the outcome,
claiming that they never received proper notification through
certified mail, and were never alerted that they needed to join
the comprehensive adjudication in order to maintain their water
allocations.
