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.
Colorado lawmakers abandoned a last-minute effort Monday to
pass environmental regulations for data center development in
the state. … The bill, also sponsored by Rep. Kyle
Brown, D-Louisville, would have required data center companies
to pay the full cost for the power needed to run their
facilities. It also would have ensured that data centers don’t
blow the state’s greenhouse gas emission reductions targets,
intended to stave off the worst effects of climate
change. Data center companies would have had to compete
for two available 15-year sales and use tax exemptions per
year, on criteria like clean energy and participation in grid
resiliency programs. They would have also been judged on the
quality of jobs created, community benefits and investments and
water efficiency.
Environmentalists and a salmon fishing group unsuccessfully
lobbied a California Senate committee to reject Gov. Gavin
Newsom’s reappointment of a veteran State Water Resources
Control Board member last week, as tensions over the board’s
upcoming vote on a controversial update to water policy for the
Sacramento and San Joaquin watersheds spilled into the
gubernatorial appointment process. Gov. Gavin Newsom nominated
Dorene D’Adamo to her fourth term on the board earlier this
year, ahead of an expected September vote on the Bay-Delta
Plan. … D’Adamo has been a voice on the board for
powerful interests such as the agricultural industry and urban
water districts interests, her opponents charged at a May 6
hearing of the Senate Rules Committee.
The debate over Sacramento’s water has been going on for
decades. From farming to urban uses, it’s a natural resource
that is in high demand, especially during droughts. On Monday
night, a celebration was held to announce that a new signed
agreement in place to make sure there’s enough water in the
future. Ashlee Casey with the Sacramento Water Forum said that
opposing groups including environmentalists, developers,
farmers and cities have all reached an agreement on how to best
use water that’s released from Folsom Dam and flows
down the American River. … Water usage is
outlined in a 334-page document that will guide the region over
the next 25 years.
Spring is a critical time for the Colorado River Basin
watershed, when snowmelt flows into major reservoirs. But after
a hot and dry winter, the state of spring runoff is grim,
especially at Lake Powell, where forecasters are
predicting the lowest water flows ever recorded. The
Colorado River Basin Forecast Center expects 800,000 acre feet
of water to flow into Lake Powell in the period between April
and July this year. That’s just 13% of the 30-year
average, between 1991 and 2020. What’s more,
about half of that water has already showed up to Lake Powell,
thanks to a record-breaking warmup in March that triggered an
early runoff, said Cody Moser, senior hydrologist at the
Colorado River Basin Forecast Center, in a webinar on
Thursday.
… [A] coalition of counties, ranchers, and water
advocates in Utah and Nevada is appealing federal
approval of a groundwater pipeline project in southern Utah.
The group is challenging the Bureau of Land Management’s March
2 approval of the Pine Valley Water Supply Project — a proposed
66-mile pipeline in the high desert near the Nevada border. A
timeline for construction has not been finalized. The project
is designed to move groundwater to the Cedar City area, where
officials say population growth and development are increasing
demand. Opponents argue the federal review fell short, saying
the agency relied on flawed science and failed to fully
consider impacts on aquifers, rural water supplies, and
groundwater-dependent ecosystems.
California growers are taking an increasing amount of
agricultural land out of production every year because of lack
of available irrigation water to grow those crops. And there is
likely little argument that laws and regulations play an
outsized role in that equation. Statewide, the debate revolves
around where the fault lies and what solutions can assure the
largest and most productive agricultural region in the United
States, and probably the world, remains in that lofty position.
… [California Farm Water Coalition Executive Director
Michelle] Paul said that as SGMA regulations are being written
and implemented, growers have to manage their own acreage
knowing they will have less water in the future.
The interior department is canceling a rule that put
conservation on equal footing with development, as Donald
Trump’s administration eases restrictions on industries and
seeks to boost drilling, logging, mining and grazing on
taxpayer-owned land. The 2024 rule adopted under Joe Biden
was meant to refocus the interior department’s Bureau of Land
Management, which oversees about 10% of land in the US. It
allowed public property to be leased for restoration.
… Bobby McEnaney with the Natural Resources Defense
Council said repealing the rule “means less protection for the
clean drinking water, less protection for
endangered wildlife that depend on healthy habitat, and less
accountability when corporations leave these landscapes damaged
and degraded.”
Evolution works over millennia. Climate change is moving far
faster. That mismatch is killing some of the planet’s most
vital ecosystems, including California’s towering redwoods and
the seagrass meadows along its coast, both of which store vast
amounts of carbon and support complex webs of life. Marine heat
waves, record wildfires and coastal development are pushing
these systems beyond their limits as climate change, driven by
emissions of fuels such as oil and gas, accelerates. An
estimated 1 million species face extinction, many within
decades, largely due to human activities such as habitat
destruction, pollution and overuse of natural resources,
according to a 2019 report by a United Nations-affiliated
intergovernmental scientific body.
A bill to accelerate flood protection projects along the Pajaro
River made further traction as the California Senate passed
legislation to expand contracting tools available to the Pajaro
Regional Flood Management Agency Thursday. Senate Bill 1055 —
authored by Sen. John Laird, D-Santa Cruz — aims to authorize
the agency to utilize additional methods to expedite
construction, including job order contracting, design, build,
best value and construction manager/general contractor
contracting. It also seeks to expand the number of contracting
tools available to the agency from three to seven, help reduce
project costs, accelerate construction timelines and improve
project delivery for levee maintenance and flood control
improvements.
Two Nevada agencies are in court over a water rights decision
that could have major implications for a state-run fish
hatchery in rural Lyon County during times of drought. The
Nevada Department of Wildlife has maintained a permit to pump
861.5 acre-feet of groundwater for its Mason Valley Fish
Hatchery for decades, representing one of 13 permits that
contributes about 15 percent of the facility’s water supply.
The hatchery is north of Yerington, about 60 miles southeast of
Carson City. Now, after its water rights permit was canceled
and later reinstated by the state engineer’s office due to a
lapse in paperwork, the wildlife department worries for its
ability to produce tens of thousands of trout each year to
stock bodies of water in western Nevada.
… The Fresno City Council on Thursday authorized an
application for $5.1 million in state climate-bond money toward
a long-planned extension of the Lewis S. Eaton Trail into the
River West area along the San Joaquin River. The grant — a
fraction of the project’s roughly $23 million construction
estimate — now goes to the San Joaquin River Conservancy’s
board, which votes Wednesday on whether to award it.
… Beyond the Highway 41 underpass lies a 358-acre
stretch of public land along the San Joaquin River — a riverine
patchwork of grassland, ponds, riparian woodland, legacy
gravel-mining pits and fenced stormwater basins. … River West
would extend the existing Eaton Trail roughly 2.4 miles to
Spano Park — giving Fresno residents much-needed access to all
that beauty.
The city of Mountain View is moving closer to restoring clean
water to nearly two dozen households that have been without the
resource since late April. The “super-chlorination” of a
pipe serving 21 households on Drucilla Drive and Carla Court
has been completed, the city said in an update Monday
afternoon, adding that tests indicated it has been “properly
disinfected,” with no coliform bacteria present. … The
disruption started April 24, when a cement slurry mix came into
contact with a water main during an upgrade and replacement
project near the intersection of Bonita Avenue and Cuesta
Drive. The city initially shut off service to some 67
households.
… After more than a year of deadlock in talks between the
seven states that share its water, the Lower Basin states of
Arizona, California and Nevada have proposed major cutbacks to
their take on the [Colorado] river. Those cuts, along with
other tweaks to the management of major reservoirs across the
West, would last through 2028, buying time for states to get
back to the negotiating table and work on a longer-term plan.
The plan is not formal yet, and would need sign-off from the
federal government before going into effect. … So what are
the details of the proposal, and what happens next? KJZZ spoke
with experts around the region to break it down.
Recognizing “very dry conditions,” the state’s [Wyo.] water
boss Tuesday declared an emergency to allow ranchers to more
easily get water to their stock. State Engineer Brandon Gebhart
gave local water supervisors the authority to move what’s known
as the “point of use” of water that sustains livestock. Four
district supervisors can now authorize the shift in water use
with a simple form instead of requiring more burdensome changes
to permits at state offices in Cheyenne. The emergency
authorization came as the state faces a dire summer, Gebhart
told legislators and members of the Water Development
Commission on Wednesday.
For the first time, golden mussels, an invasive species of
tiny mollusks that can rapidly reproduce and cause
millions of dollars in damage to pipes, drinking water plants,
irrigation systems and dams — sparking growing
concerns across California — have been found in Santa Clara
County. Last month, a juvenile golden mussel was discovered in
the raw water intake area at the Penitencia Water Treatment
plant near Alum Rock Park in San Jose. A few weeks later, in
late April, an adult was found in a raw water strainer at the
Santa Teresa Water Treatment Plant in San Jose’s Almaden area.
… [T]he discovery of the diminutive invaders has alarmed
local officials, who say they must now install equipment
costing hundreds of thousands of dollars at some district
facilities to remove them.
Assurances that a “highly efficient hybrid cooling system” will
keep a proposed AI data center from sucking up all the water in
the already overdrafted Indian Wells Valley fell flat with
residents who’ve bombarded the state with negative comments on
the proposal. The proposed RB Inyokern Data Center being
championed by R&L Capital, Inc. would only use up
to 50 acre feet a year to keep its whirring data halls
cool, according to an application filed with the
California Energy Commission in late April. A “will serve
letter” issued to R&L Capital, Inc. by the Inyokern
Community Services District commits to providing about that
same amount. But desert residents aren’t buying it.
Colorado waved goodbye to winter with a late-season blast, as a
May snowstorm brought more than 2 feet of snow to some areas of
the state. But was the storm enough to keep the snowpack above
the zeroth percentile? The statewide snowpack is at 25% of
median as of May 8, meaning the mountains have
one-quarter of the typical amount of snow-water equivalent
compared to the median for that specific date. Despite
still being on the lower end of snowpack for an average spring
in Colorado, the state is officially out of historically low
levels for the first week of May. … While this is good
news, Colorado is still on track to lose its snowpack earlier
than normal.
… While the impacts on humans, forests and the animals that
live in them are the most observable effects, wildfires also
have devastating impacts on aquatic life, especially fish. Many
of these occur during and shortly after the fire is out, but
others can continue for years, and potentially, decades.
… One of the immediate impacts on fish after a wildfire
comes from the increase in water draining from the burned land
and entering rivers. Without thick forest cover to store and
use rainfall, more water runs off over the soil towards rivers.
In some situations, soil can become water-repellent, as gases
from the burning vegetation enter and condense below the
topsoil, forming a barrier and limiting the amount of rainfall
that can infiltrate.
… The fact that more than 1 million people “in the wealthiest
state and the wealthiest democracy God has ever conceived”
lacked access to clean drinking water inspired him to overhaul
the state’s water infrastructure, [Gov. Gavin] Newsom said
Thursday at an Association of California Water Agencies
conference. Over the next seven years, his administration
fast-tracked projects like the Delta Conveyance tunnel and
spent hundreds of millions to shore up the state’s climate
defenses, like removing dams on the Klamath River to restore
salmon populations, negotiating with Arizona and Nevada to
preserve water from the rapidly shrinking Colorado River, and
restoring the Salton Sea. … The governor’s overview of his
water policy was likely one of his last chances to frame his
state climate record before he leaves office at the end of the
year.
Anglers will once again be able to fish for Chinook salmon in
the Sacramento River this summer, after a three-year closure.
On Wednesday, the California Fish and Game Commission
unanimously passed new fishing regulations. The updated
regulations reverse fishing closures for Chinook salmon as
populations continue to rebound in the central valley. “We’ve
increased hatchery production. We’ve got more investments in
salmon research and habitat restoration projects. We’ve had a
series of good water years,” said Krysten Kellum, information
officer with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.
This year’s salmon season will begin July 16 for most stretches
of the Sacramento River. Anglers will be allowed to keep two
Chinook salmon per day, with a four-fish possession limit.
