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.
California’s water resources control board can regulate
groundwater usage by farmers in Kings County, after the state’s
appellate court threw out a preliminary injunction and
overruled a demurer. The pair of rulings means that farmers in
the county will have to start metering and reporting how much
water they draw from the ground, and pay the state fees of $300
per well and $20 per acre-foot of water used. … Dusty
Ference, the executive director of the Kings County Farm
Bureau, a nonprofit advocacy group representing farmers in the
area that sued the state agency, said the group remains
optimistic.
Utah and six other states along the Colorado
River are pushing up against a deadline to figure out
as a group how to manage the river and its reservoirs.
… The Upper Basin states have resisted the idea of
mandatory cuts in dry years, saying they typically use much
less than their yearly allocation. Lower Basin states have
said all seven should share water cuts during dry years under
the new plan, warning if they don’t, downstream states could
face cuts that aren’t feasible for them to absorb.
Misinformation and confusion fueled a recent Wyoming
legislative meeting on how to stop chemtrails, a debunked
conspiracy that claims the government is controlling our health
with airborne chemicals. … Cloud
seeding was also tied up in the Wyoming legislation.
… Wyoming has been doing it for at least two decades, as
it’s considered a “tool in the toolbox” for helping the
drought-stricken Colorado River
system. Last legislative session, lawmakers
banned aerial cloud seeding and defunded the ground operations.
It’s up to Wyoming water groups, municipalities and industry,
as well as other Colorado River states, to foot the bill for
the 2026 season.
At a ceremony Oct. 29 marking the return of 17,030 acres of
Tule River Indian Tribe lands, tribal members talked about the
larger benefit of reclaiming their ancestral ground, including
flood protection. Tribal plans include
restoring the headwaters of Deer Creek high in the Sierra
Nevada, which could provide greater protection for the southern
Tulare County communities of Terra Bella, Earlimart,
Allensworth and Alpaugh on the San Joaquin Valley floor.
… Restoration along Deer Creek will improve
groundwater recharge, protect sensitive
cultural areas and creek crossings.
When it comes to water, honesty matters as much as
infrastructure. On Tuesday, the San Diego City Council narrowly
approved a two-year water rate increase — 14.7 percent next
year and 14.5 percent the following year — rejecting staff’s
push for a four-year plan. The Council’s message was clear:
They want answers and accountability, not finger-pointing. …
Water independence is desirable — but not at any price. San
Diego already enjoys one of the most diversified and reliable
water portfolios in the West, built over decades of investment
by the San Diego County Water Authority. Our region is not
facing an immediate supply cliff that demands a
“build-everything-now” approach. –Written by Jim Madaffer, a member and past chair of the
Water Authority Board of Directors representing the city of San
Diego.
Lessons learned from destructive wildfires in Ventura County
have given avocado growers a fighting chance to save their
orchards when the next big blaze hits. … The losses of
trees and production from fires dating back to the mid-1990s
have Ventura County ranchers—especially those on hillsides in
burn-prone areas—considering establishing reservoirs to hold
water year-round. Brokaw Ranch Co. in Santa Paula keeps
two reservoirs filled. They are gravity-driven and can deliver
water even when the electrical power goes out, ranch manager
Nathan Lurie said. Whether it’s a fire or a heat wave, the
reservoirs give Lurie “ownership and flexibility” on when and
how the water gets used, he added.
Clean Up The Lake (CUTL) has completed its Tahoe Deep Dive
Pilot Project, a six-month effort that explored litter
accumulation and underwater health at depths of 35 to 55 feet
in Lake Tahoe. The research tested new diving methods and
gathered data to guide future large-scale cleanup operations.
Between February and July 2025, CUTL held 14 cleanup days and
29 dives, with 26 volunteers filling 80 positions and
contributing 480 hours both underwater and onshore. Divers
removed 1,933 pounds of debris, totaling 1,042 individual
items, from 6.1 miles of lakebed and 4.75 miles of shoreline in
Placer County.
After the heavy rains earlier this month, when remnants of a
Pacific hurricane flooded much of the city, Maricopa’s
flatlands have been teeming with unexpected life. Among the
most striking visitors: great egrets, the tall, snow-white
wading birds more commonly seen in coastal wetlands than desert
farmland. … When the Gila and Santa Cruz Rivers dried up
under decades of groundwater pumping and diversion, canals and
agricultural basins elsewhere in the state offered replacement
habitat. Over time, egrets followed these human-made water
routes inland. … So, when Maricopa’s washes flood, they act
like temporary extensions of those migration corridors.
This study examined the association between public water system
PFAS detections and serum concentrations among a general
population of Southern California adults. We found that PFAS
detections in public water systems were associated with higher
serum PFAS concentrations. Our findings suggest PFAS
contamination in drinking water may be a significant
contributor to serum PFAS levels, even among communities
without high level contamination from industrial manufacturing.
These results support drinking water monitoring initiatives in
California to understand PFAS contamination and mitigate
exposure.
On September 16, 2026, a fellowship made from the California
Department of Water Resources’ Division of Flood Operations and
GEI environmental consultants embarked on a three-day mission
within Desolation Wilderness to renovate the existing Lake
Lois snow pillow station with a new Hinge Fold Tilt-Pole.
No road access meant the team had to reach the site on-foot.
… This three-day excursion there and back was documented
with photographs. Visit the photo gallery on DWR’s Pixel
account to see all of the stunning images.
Eight illegal cannabis operations in Northern California have
been shut down following a two-month investigation led by the
Nevada County Sheriff’s Office and the state Department of Fish
and Wildlife. … Fish and Wildlife officials arrested one
person on Sept. 26. That person was booked into the Wayne Brown
Correctional Facility in Nevada City on multiple felony
charges, including illegal cannabis cultivation, possession for
sale, and environmental violations related to water pollution
and wildlife protection. … The joint operation focused on
grows suspected of polluting waterways,
illegal dumping and causing water
runoff.
The Merced Irrigation District has issued a Request for
Qualifications (RFQ) for the future recreation management of
MID’s land around Lake Yosemite. … Lake Yosemite and
some surrounding land is owned by MID. The lake serves a vital
role in its irrigation and water management operations.
… The County of Merced entered into an agreement with
MID in 1976 that allowed the County to develop and operate
recreational facilities at the lake. With the upcoming
expiration of the agreement on January 31, 2026, MID will open
recreation management of Lake Yosemite to a potential new
operator – or operators – with the vision of improving and
expanding the current facilities and opportunities.
… A year ago, we argued in Charging Forward that the
clean-energy transition would only be part of a “just
transition” if the communities living at its frontlines were
full partners in shaping it. That principle is being tested
now. … In September 2025, Comité Cívico del Valle
… and Earthworks released The Devil is in the Details, a
powerful report detailing deep community concerns with the
project’s Environmental Impact Report. They argue it
underestimates the risks to water supplies,
ignores air-quality and toxic-waste implications, and fails to
safeguard sacred Indigenous lands around the Salton
Sea. But this is not just a story of opposition.
A new regional coalition, Valle Unido por Beneficios
Comunitarios … is pressing for a Community Benefits Agreement
(CBA) that would guarantee tangible returns to frontline
communities.
California water officials can move ahead with enforcement of
the state’s landmark groundwater regulation after an appellate
court ruled Wednesday that a state crackdown on pumping in
Kings County is likely, in large part, legal. State
regulators had worried that their ability to enforce the 2014
Sustainable Groundwater Management Act had
been eroded when a Superior Court judge last year temporarily
halted state sanctions in a heavily pumped, agricultural
stretch of the San Joaquin Valley. … But in a 41-page
decision, the 5th District Court of Appeal in Fresno reversed
the injunction on the state’s enforcement actions, which were
to remain in effect as the case played out.
Seven states in the Colorado River Basin are days away from a
Nov. 11 deadline to hash out a rough idea of how the water
supply for 40 million people will be managed starting in fall
2026. … The rules that govern how key reservoirs
store and release water supplies expire Dec. 31. They’ll guide
reservoir operations until fall 2026, and federal and state
officials plan to use the winter months to nail down a new set
of replacement rules. But negotiating those new rules raises
questions about everything from when the new agreement will
expire to who has to cut back on water use in the basin’s
driest years.
In the scrub-brush foothills between the long flat fields of
the San Joaquin Valley and the mighty peaks and Sequoia forests
of the Sierra Nevada, state leaders and elders from the Tule
River Indian Tribe gathered Wednesday to mark the return of
17,000 acres of ancestral land to Tule River Indian tribe.
… The Tule River acquisition restores some of the
tribe’s sacred homeland, and will enable a host of conservation
projects, including protecting the Deer Creek
watershed, protecting habitat for California condors
and reintroducing tule elk. The tribe last year worked with
state officials to reintroduce beavers to the south fork of the
Tule River.
After fretting for a day over claims the government is
poisoning citizens by spraying chemicals in the sky, a Wyoming
legislative committee endorsed a bill banning the release of
“atmospheric contaminants” above the state. … Vapor-like
trails that appear behind jets — also known as contrails and
widely understood to be water vapor from engines — are actually
poisonous sprays intentionally released by the Department of
War to change the climate, witnesses said. … Water users
from Wyoming’s portion of the Colorado River
Basin and others representing ag interests
successfully asked that cloud seeding be
exempt from the proposed geoengineering ban.
A new climate report emphasizes that not only was 2024 the
hottest year on record, but it may have also been the warmest
in at least 125,000 years. … The report comes just
a week before the 30th U.N. Climate Change Conference in
Brazil, where world leaders, scientists and organizations will
gather to focus on the implementation of the 2015 Paris climate
agreement and how to limit the global temperature increase to
1.5 degrees Celsius. Exceeding that 1.5-degree increase
… is expected to lead to increasingly frequent and dangerous
weather events like heat waves, droughts, wildfires and
flooding.
The Tijuana River has been in the news lately as pollution
pours into the US from Mexico. To help us understand what’s
happening, we spoke with former PPIC Water Policy Center
advisory council chair Celeste Cantú, who currently sits on the
San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board. … [Celeste
Cantú:] Tijuana is at the end of the drought-prone and
dwindling Colorado River system. All of us will need to thrive
with less water from the Colorado River. I would love for
Tijuana to augment its water supply with indirect or direct
potable reuse, with US support to build a plant for that.
EPA has billions of dollars on hand to stay open through the
government shutdown and is using it to fund a new approach to
this funding lapse: sending some staffers home while many
others stay on to support the president’s priority projects.
… EPA staff and outside observers who engage with them
say that virtually everyone who is working to undo marquee
Biden-era regulations for air pollution, climate change and
water quality is still on the job … while teams at EPA’s
water and air offices continued to work on priority policies
that the agency has promised to deliver at a breakneck pace.
