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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In a neighborhood flanked by grapevines and orange groves on
the east side of the San Joaquin Valley, people cannot drink
the water from their faucets because it’s contaminated.
Residents in the area north of Porterville, many of them
farmworkers, have been discussing a solution, which they expect
will require running pipes to connect to the nearby city
system. But the clean water program that has been one of Gov.
Gavin Newsom’s major initiatives, bringing solutions like
these, is significantly cut in his latest proposed budget.
… Newsom’s latest proposed budget estimates that the
state’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund will provide
about half of what it provided last year for the Safe and
Affordable Drinking Water Fund — $68 million compared
with $130 million.
For the second time in two months, a Superior Court judge has
blocked separate efforts by the Arizona Department of Water
Resources to limit groundwater pumping in the rapidly
growing Phoenix area. On Tuesday, Judge Scott Blaney
of Maricopa County tossed out a rule that established an ADWR
program allowing cities and other water providers to approve
new development in areas the state believes are short of
groundwater if they replace 25% of the groundwater they use
with an alternative water supply. This follows Blaney’s April
ruling that overturned ADWR’s 2023 decision to stop allowing
new homes to be built in much of the Phoenix area that rely on
groundwater. In both cases, Blaney ruled that the state
agency exceeded its legal authority, as spelled out in the 1980
Groundwater Management Act and subsequent regulations.
President Donald Trump is poised to nominate a Western
water and agriculture expert with deep ties to California’s
Central Valley farm industry to lead the Bureau of
Reclamation. The administration intends to nominate Aubrey
Bettencourt to the post overseeing the Interior Department’s
Western water programs, a White House official confirmed. It’s
a move that sidesteps the seven-state brawl over the
drought-withered Colorado River that has given the Trump
administration a litany of political headaches and led to the
withdrawal of the administration’s first nominee for
Reclamation, a long-time Arizona water hand who had drawn
opposition from powerful Republican officials in Utah and
Wyoming.
The Socorro County Board of Commissioners unanimously adopted a
yearlong moratorium on data centers and related infrastructure
projects Tuesday evening after residents for months opposed a
Canadian tech CEO’s proposal to build a data center and solar
array on 10,000 acres of nearby land. … [Green Data CEO
Jason] Bak proposed a massive solar array to power the
data center and said it would rely on technology called
atmospheric water generation to pull moisture out of the air
and convert it into usable water, rather than draining local
aquifers. … In the months since Bak first
unveiled his proposal, residents have packed the room at City
Council and New Mexico Tech town hall meetings to oppose the
project, often contending that the solar array could harm the
surrounding desert environment and that the water technology
was not a proven solution.
It’s late May at Lee’s Ferry, the starting point for rafting
trips down the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. … There’s
the smell of spray-on sunscreen, the buzz of excited crowds,
and — beyond that — the extrasensory vibrations of a tinge of
collective anxiety. Anxiety, because the water level in the
river is on the lower side of normal for this time of
year. Because a historically dry winter in terms of
snowpack in some parts of the West means less water in Lake
Powell, and less water released into the Colorado River
by Glen Canyon Dam. Because, aside from the millions
of people who rely on the river system for water and
hydropower, there’s an entire river rafting economy in the
Grand Canyon that does not know what to expect going forward.
Every summer a line of volunteers in masks and wetsuits floats
down the South Fork Eel, shoulder to shoulder across the
current, counting the one fish almost everyone on the river
wants gone. They are counting Sacramento pikeminnow, and this
is the 11th year they’ve done it. The Eel River Recovery
Project runs the dive every summer. … The pikeminnow is the
most reviled animal in the Eel. Someone dumped it into Lake
Pillsbury in 1979 — a bait-bucket introduction, illegal — and
by 1986, it had spread through the whole basin, its numbers
climbing into the millions. A torpedo of a fish, it eats
juvenile salmon and steelhead on a river fighting to bring
those runs back. … Here is the part that complicates the
hatred: the Sacramento pikeminnow is not an invader. It’s a
California native.
For decades, the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center
has been tracking the clarity of Lake Tahoe with a white disc
known as a Secchi disk, lowered into the depths of “Big Blue.”
For nearly 60 years, their findings have been released annually
in the Lake Tahoe Clarity Report. The most recent report, which
contains the data from 2025, was released on Tuesday. The 2025
report shows that the annual average clarity remains at a
plateau, neither significantly improving nor declining compared
to previous years. The annual average was 69.2 feet in 2025.
That is 7 feet clearer than last year’s average of 62.3 feet,
but not statistically different from recent years, mostly due
to a continuing trend of relatively low clarity during summer.
There’s a new [Colo.] state law aimed at reducing soil erosion
caused by the transfer of water rights out of the Arkansas
River Basin. Once effective next year, it will require
revegetating the land with native plants before water can be
used elsewhere. Municipalities and developers often purchase
and move irrigation water away from agricultural areas, often
known as “buy and dry.” … During the hearings for the
bill, [Colo. state Sen. Cleave] Simpson said there’s an
unintended consequence. “If you make it incrementally just a
little bit harder in Division Two (the Arkansas River Basin) to
transfer water rights from ag to municipal, guess where they go
to look for other transfers: the Rio Grande Basin, the
Colorado River Basin, and the South Platte
where maybe the barriers and the obstacles are a little less
intrinsic and cumbersome.”
Monsoon season is Arizona’s stormiest time of year. Each June
into early July, our predominant winds shift out of the south
as high pressure builds near the Four Corners. That shift in
the winds brings in moisture, which rises to form towering
thunderstorms in the heat of the day. The monsoon season
officially begins on June 15 and runs until September 30.
During that time, thunderstorms often form in the heat of the
day, bringing heavy rain, lightning, damaging winds, dust
storms, and flooding. Not all monsoons are the same,
though. Some years, our monsoon season is hot and dry, while
other years are not as hot and very rainy. … The NOAA
Climate Prediction Center has odds favoring a
wetter-than-normal monsoon across Arizona this year.
The Environmental Protection Agency recently announced efforts
to roll back limits on certain PFAS, or forever chemicals, in
drinking water. That’s one of the topics of discussion among
researchers and community advocates this week at the National
PFAS Conference at the University of Arizona. … Many
attendees shared concerns that federal and state regulators
aren’t doing enough to address PFAS contamination in the
environment. … The use of firefighting foams at Davis
Monthan Air Force Base has led to groundwater contamination in
Tucson. PFAS chemicals have also been detected in public water
systems statewide. Participants from across the country shared
similar stories from their own communities. In the last year,
the EPA cut its Office of Research and Development and has
proposed limiting federal protections for drinking water.
The White House has made its pick to lead the federal agency
that manages water and dams in the American West, a Trump
administration official confirmed Monday. If confirmed by
Congress, Aubrey Bettencourt, a third-generation
California farmer in the Central Valley, will lead the
Bureau of Reclamation during a historic time of interstate
conflict and record drought along the Colorado River. …
During the first Trump administration from 2017 to 2021, she
was deputy assistant secretary of water and science at the
Interior Department, the parent agency of the Bureau of
Reclamation. … Most recently, Bettencourt served as
chief of the Natural Resources Conservation Service, the
private lands conservation agency leg of the Agriculture
Department, until she stepped down in May.
Arizona is desperate for water. So much so that its taxpayers
are willing to invest in treating Tijuana’s sewage so it’s
drinkable. How would that help Arizona? The state
would ask Mexico for some of its Colorado River water in
exchange. That’s a plan proposed by EPCOR, a
private Canadian water utility. The Arizona state legislature
granted $1 billion to the Water Infrastructure Finance
Authority of Arizona, or WIFA, to jumpstart projects that could
make new water, like the one proposed in the Tijuana River
Valley. Under the proposal, Arizona could help build a
wastewater-to-drinking water facility (like the one San Diego
is building called Pure Water) at the federally-owned South Bay
International Wastewater Treatment Plant or the city-owned
South Bay Water Reclamation Plant.
The Trump administration is “keenly aware” of Americans’
concerns about water and artificial intelligence data centers
and wants the industry to embrace technologies like
reusing treated wastewater, according to a senior EPA
official. But Jess Kramer, who leads EPA’s water office, also
defended the administration’s pledge to help make the U.S. “the
AI capital of the world,” arguing that the technology is
already driving conversations at the agency. “Being the AI
capital of the world, utilizing that as a tool, and utilizing
[it] to the best of its ability, I think that’s a great goal,”
Kramer said in an interview last week. “I don’t think there’s
anything short-sighted about that. I think it has driven a lot
of conversations.”
Scientists feared the Santa Monica Mountains’ last
remaining steelhead trout were dead, smothered by debris
flows unleashed by the Palisades fire. But the endangered fish
surprised them: A team of biologists recently spotted 30 of the
rare trout — and 21 babies — in Topanga Creek. … [T]he
steelhead here are endangered, at both the state and federal
levels. Once, they swam in most streams of the Santa Monicas,
but their numbers plummeted amid overfishing and coastal
development. Increasingly frequent wildfire has further
stressed their habitat. Topanga Creek, a
biodiversity hot spot, is home to their last known population
in the mountains that stretch from the Hollywood Hills
to Point Mugu in Ventura County.
On the evening of June 2, a Southern Humboldt resident looked
at Redwood Creek from the Seely Creek Road crossing and knew
something was wrong. The water was white — not muddy the way it
gets after rain, but opaque, for miles. … What happened next
revealed something bigger than a single spill on a rural creek.
The white water running through Southern Humboldt was connected
to one of the largest infrastructure investments
California has ever made — a $3.25 billion effort to bring
high-speed internet to communities that have gone without it
for years. And at the end of a long chain of
contractors and subcontractors, someone had apparently been
dumping thousands of gallons of drilling waste on private land,
with apparently not enough planning for where it would go.
The period of March through May 2026 ranked as the second
warmest spring in records going back to 1895 for the contiguous
U.S., according to NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental
Information (NCEI). Across the past 131 years, only 2012 had a
warmer spring, said NCEI in its monthly analysis released on
June 8. The nationwide average temperatures for both spring
2012 (56.17 degrees Fahrenheit) and 2026 (55.79°F) are both
more than 1.5°F above any rivals in the 131-year database.
Spring 2026 was the hottest on record for Arizona,
Colorado, Texas, and New Mexico. … The March
heat wave dissolved any hope of a respectable snow season for
large parts of the western United States. … The lack of
remaining Southwest snowpack means runoff will be
limited this summer, only worsening the situation.
After a wildfire, rivers and streams can take years to recover.
Native plants and wildlife are often crowded out by invasive
species in the aftermath. But in Nevada’s Virgin River
watershed, a collaboration between federal agencies and
conservation groups is pointing to early signs of recovery. The
work is unfolding in a remote stretch of desert in southern
Nevada, where the tributary winds through a system that
eventually feeds into the Colorado River, a critical water
source for millions across the Mountain West. … The
habitat supports rare species, including the Southwestern
willow flycatcher, and fish, such as the Virgin River chub. …
[T]he effort is only the first step in a longer restoration
process that includes invasive plant removal and water
management improvements designed to slow runoff and increase
soil absorption.
In a report and fact sheet released last month, we analyzed the
development and current status of Tribal water rights in
California. … Of the 103 federally recognized
Indian reservations in California, only about 20 consistently
host irrigated agriculture, and most of these are relatively
small-scale (less than 100 acres). In an average water year,
about 15,800 acres are irrigated on Tribal reservations (about
0.2% of statewide irrigated acreage), including by non-Tribal
residents. Irrigated acreage tends to decline slightly during
drought years and rebounds during wet and normal water years.
Water demands for this agriculture amount to about
60,000–70,000 acre-feet per year (about 0.2% of total statewide
applied water).
On Tuesday, June 9, a team of Tahoe’s protectors will lead a
training on how to protect the Lake’s blue waters from the
threat of aquatic invasive species as part of California
Invasive Species Action Week. The morning event will take place
at Valhalla Tahoe in South Lake Tahoe, is open to all, and free
to attend. … Golden mussels, an environmentally harmful and
highly invasive species, are spreading rapidly across
California. Just days ago, a boat unknowingly carrying golden
mussels was stopped at one of Tahoe’s boat inspection stations
before it could launch on the Lake. This summer is a critical
time for paddlers, anglers, and beachgoers to be aware of AIS
and to Clean, Drain, and Dry their equipment before entering
the water.
The high-stakes brawl over the drought-stricken
Colorado River comes to Capitol Hill this week. The
Trump administration’s top Western water official is
set to appear before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources
Committee on Wednesday as the Interior Department is
preparing to wrest control of the waterway later this summer.
The department already invoked emergency authorities in April
when it became clear that the river would see the lowest flows
on record this summer, threatening the ability to produce
hydropower and release water out of one of the country’s
largest reservoirs, Lake Powell. … Scott Cameron,
Interior’s acting Bureau of Reclamation commissioner, last week
said the department plans to release a draft plan for operating
the waterway unilaterally in the “mid-to-late summer.”
