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 Mendocino County Inland Water and Power Commission will
hold a meeting Thursday to discuss water storage options as the
county prepares for PG&E’s plan to shutter the Potter
Valley Project. The meeting will be at 5 p.m. Thursday at the
Mendocino County Administration Center in Ukiah. … The
Inland Water and Power Commission is a joint powers authority
that works to protect the Russian and Eel river watersheds and
ensure Mendocino County’s water sources are safeguarded. The
board is working to find solutions, such as creating water
storage, once the Potter Valley Project is decommissioned.
If the golden mussel invasion that already is
expanding throughout much of California hits the Eastern
Sierra, the damage it will bring will ripple far beyond
recreational fishing, according to state officials. Nick
Buckmaster, an environmental specialist with the California
Department of Fish and Wildlife, told the Inyo County Board of
Supervisors Tuesday that the invasive species is “amazingly”
resilient and that its adaptability makes it effectively
impossible to eradicate.
Salmon in Santa Cruz County live on the edge. Quite literally:
Monterey Bay marks the southern extent of the range for several
salmon species in California, where naturally warmer water,
smaller creeks that run low or dry in summer and fewer cool
places to shelter leave local populations more vulnerable than
their counterparts farther north. Recent years have brought
cautious optimism about a rebound statewide, with scientists
and restoration groups saying salmon here are still “hanging
on,” sustained by decades of monitoring and an expanding web of
restoration efforts.
The Center for Watershed Sciences is excited to share our first
annual report. In our report, you will find a letter from our
new Director, Dr. Karrigan Börk, meet the CWS researchers and
their teams, learn about new science shaping water management,
and explore some of the events we host to bring people together
around water and water issues. Our report also shares
CWS’ finalized 2025 Strategic Plan, which explains our goals
and priorities for the upcoming several years. We also report
on the most read blogs from the California Waterblog of 2025,
highlight major grants supporting CWS, and more.
With the leaders of seven states deadlocked over the Colorado
River’s deepening crisis, negotiations increasingly seem likely
to fail — which could lead the federal government to impose
unilateral cuts and spark lawsuits that would bring a complex
court battle. … In a meeting this week, Arizona
officials seemed to be anticipating failure. They pointed out
that the amount of water flowing into Lake Mead, the nation’s
largest reservoir, could soon fall to a trigger point —
a legal “tripwire” that would allow Arizona to demand
cuts upriver and sue for a violation of the compact.
… The water reaching the Lower Basin will probably fall
below that point later this year or next, which has never
happened.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin convened national and local
elected officials on Thursday at the Coronado Community Center
to discuss progress on the Tijuana River sewage crisis, marking
his second visit to San Diego since April. … Zeldin
presented several key projects in various stages of completion,
with completion dates scheduled for 2026, 2027 and 2028. …
The Tijuana River Gates, a collection pipe project, emerged as
a centerpiece of the discussion. Mexico funded the first phase,
which began construction in September 2025. Zeldin expects
construction to conclude in six months and to remove 5
million gallons of sewage per day once operational.
The American West’s snowpack is valuable for many reasons.
Snowmelt supplies much of the water flowing through the
region’s streams, rivers, irrigation canals and household
faucets—a vital role that has taken on new urgency this winter
as much of the West struggles with scant snow cover.
… But in the economic realm, researchers have attempted
to put a dollar figure on the region’s snow, and the numbers
they’ve generated are huge. “This stuff’s worth trillions,
not billions” of dollars, said snow scientist Matthew Sturm,
lead author of a widely cited 2017 paper in Water Resources
Research that estimated the value of the water embedded in the
West’s snowpack.
Other snowpack and water supply news around the West:
The groundwater in parts of western Kern County is salty and,
generally, considered a bit crummy, longtime farmer Brad
Kroeker admits. But that doesn’t mean it should be abandoned to
wholesale pollution as Kroeker believes will happen if a
“de-designation” recently approved by the Central Valley
Regional Water Quality Control Board gains final approval from
the state Water Resources Control Board. The regional board
voted 5-1 at its Dec. 12, 2025 meeting to “de-designate”
groundwater for municipal and agricultural uses under a
six-square-mile area north of McKittrick. … The
de-designation action was the end result of a lawsuit filed
against the regional board by Valley Water Management Company,
which has operated two large, unlined oilfield produced water
percolation ponds in the area since the 1960s.
California doesn’t have a water scarcity problem. It has a
distribution problem, according to Nícola Ulibarrí. … In a
report commissioned by UC Berkeley’s Possibility Lab, Ulibarrí
argues that California’s existing water infrastructure already
collects enough water to sustain all state residents. The real
crisis, says the UC Irvine associate professor of urban
planning and public policy, is that thousands of Californians
remain disconnected from that abundant supply.
… Thousands of households, particularly in rural areas,
remain unconnected to the state’s large-scale water
infrastructure system. These residents depend on groundwater
wells. … Nearly a million California residents who are
connected to the water system receive water that fails to meet
federal Safe Drinking Water Act standards.
California American Water Co. is asking state regulators to
deny an application to lift a moratorium on new hookups from
Carmel River water that has left the Monterey Peninsula for two
decades without the ability to construct badly needed housing.
Cal Am is saying other water supplies, such as Pure Water
Monterey and its expansion, are not stable enough to lift a
cease-and-desist order regulators placed on pumping a specified
amount of water out of the Carmel River aquifer. … The desist
order was slapped on the Peninsula because Cal Am was pumping
significantly more water than could sustain a steelhead
fishery, a protected species. The order was put in
place following lawsuits filed by the Sierra Club and
others.
The golden mussel, an invasive species that is making its way
across the delta, through waterways and pipes, is now
reaching as far south as Riverside County. … On
top of concerns that farmers won’t be able to pump water during
the dry months, it also poses a flooding threat to urban areas.
… Action is already being taken at the county and state
levels. The San Joaquin County Board of Supervisors created a
local golden mussel committee to help communicate better with
state and affected areas in the county. The state has also
secured $20 million in this year’s budget to combat the spread
and support local prevention efforts. In the meantime, these
small invaders are here to stay.
An Arizona bill would prohibit the use of fluoride in state
public water systems. State Sen. Janae Shamp, R-Surprise,
introduced Senate Bill 1019, which would prevent people
and political subdivisions from adding fluoride or
fluoride-containing compounds to Arizona’s public water system.
The Senate Committee on Government recently advanced SB 1019 to
the floor for a full Senate vote. … If SB 1019 becomes
law, the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality would
enforce it, Shamp told The Center Square. … If Arizona were
to pass SB 1019, it would join Florida and Utah as the only
states that prohibit fluoridation of their water systems.
A controversial data center and power plant development in the
West Valley has cleared a key hurdle with an Arizona
Corporation Commission vote. The commission voted
unanimously Feb. 4 in favor of a Certificate of Environmental
Compatibility for Project Baccara, a first-of-its-kind
arrangement in the state whose developers want to build a
700-megawatt gas-fired power plant to fuel a data center
project just outside Surprise. … Baccara is seeking out
agreements with a neighboring facility to use their
treated wastewater, according to Davies, but
as it stands they have permission to use
groundwater.
The Mendocino County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday discussed
a proposal to remove one of its supervisors from a commission
after she attended an event with the U.S. Secretary of
Agriculture, which one board member said could be a conflict of
interest. The board did not end up taking action against
Supervisor Madeline Cline, who went to a conference last month
headlined by U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, who
has opposed the decommissioning of the Potter Valley
Project. Cline represents District 1, which includes
Potter Valley. On Tuesday, supervisors discussed the
possibility of unseating Cline from the Mendocino County Inland
Water and Power Commission.
Seeking to prevent the California State Water Resources Control
Board from stepping in to regulate groundwater in critically
overdrafted subbasins, local agencies are working to correct
deficiencies in their plans to protect groundwater. With
groundwater sustainability agencies formed and groundwater
sustainability plans evaluated, the state water board has moved
to implement the 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act,
or SGMA. … Under probation, groundwater extractors in
the Tulare Lake subbasin face annual fees of $300 per well and
$20 per acre-foot pumped, plus a late reporting fee of 25%.
SGMA also requires well owners to file annual groundwater
extraction reports.
Last year’s snow deluge in California, which quickly erased a
two decade long megadrought, was essentially a
once-in-a-lifetime rescue from above, a new study found. Don’t
get used to it because with climate change the 2023 California
snow bonanza —a record for snow on the ground on April 1 — will
be less likely in the future, said the study in Monday’s
journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
… UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain, who wasn’t part
of the study but specializes in weather in the U.S. West, said,
“I would not be surprised if 2023 was the coldest, snowiest
winter for the rest of my own lifetime in California.”
Six tribes in the Upper Colorado River Basin, including two in
Colorado, have gained long-awaited access to discussions about
the basin’s water issues — talks that were formerly
limited to states and the federal government. Under an
agreement finalized this month, the tribes will meet every two
months to discuss Colorado River issues with an interstate
water policy commission, the Upper Colorado River Commission,
or UCRC. It’s the first time in the commission’s 76-year
history that tribes have been formally included, and the timing
is key as negotiations about the river’s future intensify.
… Most immediately, the commission wants a key number:
How much water goes unused by tribes and flows down to the
Lower Basin?
A group of Western lawmakers pressed the Biden administration
Monday to ramp up water conservation, especially in national
forests that provide nearly half the region’s surface water.
“Reliable and sustainable water availability is absolutely
critical to any agricultural commodity production in the
American West,” wrote the lawmakers, including Sens.
Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), in a
letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. The 31
members of the Senate and House, all Democrats except for Sen.
Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), credited the administration for
several efforts related to water conservation, including
promoting irrigation efficiency as a climate-smart practice
eligible for certain USDA funding through the Inflation
Reduction Act.
A study led by NASA researchers provides new estimates of how
much water courses through Earth’s rivers, the rates at which
it’s flowing into the ocean, and how much both of those figures
have fluctuated over time—crucial information for understanding
the planet’s water cycle and managing its freshwater supplies.
The results also highlight regions depleted by heavy water use,
including the Colorado River basin in the United States, the
Amazon basin in South America, and the Orange River basin in
southern Africa.
State water management officials must work more closely with
local agencies to properly prepare California for the effects
of climate change, water scientists say. Golden State
officials said in the newly revised California Water
Plan that as the nation’s most populous state, California
is too diverse and complex for a singular approach to manage a
vast water network. On Monday, they recommended expanding the
work to better manage the state’s precious water resources —
including building better partnerships with communities most at
risk during extreme drought and floods and improving critical
infrastructure for water storage, treatment and distribution
among different regions and watersheds.
