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 U.S. Department of the Interior is looking to overturn the
Bureau of Land Management’s Public Lands Rule in a move that
has environmental groups decrying it as a way to favor
extractive industries. … [The Federal Land Policy
and Management Act] tasked the bureau with managing the
following “principal or major” uses: recreation, range, timber,
minerals, watershed, wildlife, and fish and natural scenic,
scientific, and historical values. … In adding conservation
explicitly as a use, the Bureau’s Public Lands Rule also
formalized regulatory tools and frameworks for restoring
degraded public lands and water.
Keep Tahoe Blue, The Tyre Collective, and Desert Research
Institute (DRI) announced a groundbreaking collaboration with
the Emerald Bay Shuttle and its operator, Downtowner, that
brings together science, technology, and alternative
transportation to protect Lake Tahoe’s world-renowned water
clarity. … The pilot program employs The Tyre
Collective’s proprietary technology — discrete, compact devices
affixed to a vehicle’s undercarriage — to capture harmful tire
wear particles directly at the wheel.
The Trump administration’s top official in EPA’s land office is
focused on expediting Superfund hazardous waste remediation, in
part by loosening cleanup standards. “We need to make decisions
faster and move forward faster,” said Steven Cook, principal
deputy assistant administrator for the agency’s Office of Land
and Emergency Management, during an American Bar Association
conference Thursday. That involves state leaders,
retraining project managers and rethinking acceptable cleanup
levels for dangerous chemicals at Superfund sites, Cook said.
… [Cristina] La’s master’s research was part of a
collaborative project focused on the Sacramento Deep Water Ship
Channel, one of the few remaining habitats for delta
smelt and longfin smelt. … The results were
striking: contaminants such as DDE, phenanthrene, fluoranthene,
pyrene and chrysene turned up in every sample, with the highest
concentrations in suspended solids. … The research team’s
findings suggest that fish like the delta smelt face their
greatest exposure in the water column — the vertical section of
water where they swim and feed — particularly when ship traffic
or storms stir up bottom sediments and release contaminated
particles into the water.
The Healthy Desert, Healthy You Summit wrapped up its first day
in Rancho Mirage with a spotlight on one of the Coachella
Valley’s most pressing issues — the future of the Salton Sea.
The daylong event featured panels on air quality, water
quality, and infrastructure, drawing strong attendance from
residents and community leaders concerned about the region’s
environmental health. The final panel, moderated by NBC
Palm Springs Olivia Sandusky, focused on the health impacts of
the Salton Sea, where shrinking waters have created dust
pollution and ecological challenges.
Construction and revegetation at Ackerson Meadow are complete,
and now it’s time to let nature do the work it does best! This
marks a huge milestone in the movement towards headwaters
restoration in California’s Sierra Nevada, with the Ackerson
restoration standing as the largest full-fill meadow
restoration in the Sierra Nevada and the largest wetland
restoration in Yosemite National Park’s 135 years.
… 150,000 cubic yards of soil and 434,000 wetland
container plants later, water is flowing across the entirety of
this fully restored meadow.
Gov. Gavin Newsom and some of California’s major water agencies
hit a setback this week when a proposal to fast-track plans for
a 45-mile water tunnel beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin River
Delta died in the state Legislature. … Delta lawmakers
said they were pleased that the governor’s proposal failed to
move forward in the final days of the legislative session.
… Newsom and supporters of the project say the tunnel is
essential to modernize the state’s water system for more severe
droughts and deluges with climate change.
Wyoming’s top scientists and water policy advisors laid out
their case for why the state should continue its cloud seeding
program to lawmakers recently. But language to ban the practice
was moved forward. For a couple decades, the state has helped
pioneer the technology that puts a little more water on a
drought stricken landscape. Whether it continues is largely
based on whether lawmakers believe Wyoming’s own research that
the program works and is relatively safe or growing conspiracy
concerns. … [T]o be a friendly [Colorado
River] negotiator, the state needs to show it’s using
all the “tools in the toolbox” to conserve – or create – more
water, which includes cloud seeding.
… The valley that was once a refuge for people fleeing the
Dust Bowl is facing its own reckoning with dust and water
scarcity. … Now, California lawmakers are wading in,
with a bill that aims to clear away a financial hurdle for
energy developers and landowners eager to plant solar farms
with battery storage on fallowed fields. … Authored by
Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, a Democrat from Oakland, the bill
tackles the Williamson Act. … Wicks’ bill would allow
farmers and ranchers to suspend their Williamson Act contracts
if they plant solar and storage on water-stressed farmland.
Property taxes would go back up, but they would avoid the
cancellation fees.
The California Legislature unanimously approved a bill to
address PFAS pollution and California’s water supply on
Wednesday, which was introduced by Senator Jerry McNerney.
… McNerney stated that the new bill will establish a
state fund called the PFAS Mitigation Fund to provide financial
support to local agencies and cities for cleaning toxic PFAS
from California’s water. McNerney released a report that
showed how PFAS have been found in waterways serving at least
25.4 million Californians.
On Monday, AB 263 passed the state Legislature. The bill
protects salmon populations in two key tributaries of the
Klamath River watershed by keeping minimum flow requirements in
place until the State Water Board can establish new long-term
flow regulations. The bill is now headed to Governor’s desk for
his signature. … The bill would maintain river flows for
at-risk salmon runs on two critical Klamath River tributaries –
the Scott and Shasta Rivers.
The long, circuitous path of a lawsuit against the federal
government for cutting off water during the crushing 2014
drought to farms and cities that rely on supplies from the
Friant-Kern and Madera canals could lead all the way to the
U.S. Supreme Court. … Contractors who get their
water from the Friant system sued alleging the federal
government breached its contract and that it illegally took
their property rights to the water without just
compensation. In 2016, the case went to the Court of
Federal Claims, which dismissed the Friant districts’ illegal
taking argument. The court ruled that the United States,
not the districts or their landowners, owns the water rights
underlying the federal Central Valley Project project.
Chances have gone up for La Niña conditions developing in the
coming months, according to an update Thursday by the National
Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center. Forecasters say
there’s a 71% chance that La Niña develops this fall, up from
the 53% chance given in the agency’s August
outlook. … The latest Climate Prediction Center
precipitation outlook for November through January matches
what’s expected across the U.S. during a La Niña, with wetter
conditions more likely to the north and drier conditions more
likely to the south.
For more than a century, PG&E’s Potter Valley Project has
funneled water from one Northern California river to another.
Now, the century-old system has become the center of a
political firestorm, cast by the Trump administration as a
battle of “fish over people.” … [Local activist group] Mendo
Matters and other locals will coordinate a town hall, with the
goal to “defeat the efforts by PG & E, Jared Huffman and Gavin
Newsom to take away an integral part of the water to save the
‘fish’ which will severely impact our domestic water, fire
protection, destroy our agriculture and livelihood as well as
possibly bankrupt the County of Mendocino.”
The House Appropriations Committee approved its fiscal 2026
Commerce-Justice-Science spending bill Wednesday, including an
amendment prohibiting the Trump administration from closing
NOAA laboratories and ending university-based cooperatives that
provide fundamental research on extreme weather and climate
disasters. The spending package, which passed 34-28 along party
lines, also includes a manager’s amendment requiring NOAA to
advance research on early prediction and warning systems for
flood disasters in rural areas, provide support for NOAA’s
Hurricane Hunter program and fund coral reef research
institutes on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.
It’s been a long-debated issue in Colorado whether you have the
right to float down the river across private property. Greg
Walcher, Fellow at the Common Sense Institute, said, “There are
states where the entire river, stream, and all of the land
around it belong to the public and to the state.” However, it
is a different situation in Colorado. “In Colorado, the water
belongs to the people. But the land under it belongs to the
adjacent property owner. Now, in many cases, that’s federal
agencies. And so it’s public land but not everywhere,” said
Walcher.
EPA signed off Wednesday on Arizona’s request to oversee all
classes of underground injection wells, including those for
geologic storage of carbon dioxide. EPA Administrator Lee
Zeldin said the decision to grant top permitting authority to
Arizona was grounded in the idea that states know their water
resources best, as well as their business needs. The move comes
roughly four months after EPA proposed issuing the designation.
“I am excited to see the economic growth that will be spurred
by granting Arizona primacy to regulate underground injection
under the Safe Drinking Water Act,” Zeldin said in a news
release.
Newport Beach’s Back Bay is a spot cherished for its hiking
trials, wildlife and even scenic views that lend themselves to
plein air painting. Yet, each year thousands of pounds of trash
make its way into the natural wetlands. Which is why OC Parks
and the Newport Bay Conservancy team up annually for Coastal
Cleanup Day at Upper Newport Bay. The two organizations are
seeking nearly 1,000 volunteers to help remove trash as well as
invasive plant species from the ecological reserve from 9 a.m.
to noon on Saturday, Sept. 20.
Dan Daher rolled out at 5 a.m. from the shaded parking lot
behind the Torres Martinez Tribal Community Hall in Mecca, as
he does every Sunday through Thursday. By day’s end, he’ll have
logged nearly 300 miles in his Kia Niro hybrid, crisscrossing
Southern California highways, dust-caked towns and badly
potholed roads encircling the Salton Sea and the rural Imperial
and east Coachella valleys. He’s driven through a cloud of
tractor smoke on Highway 86 so thick he couldn’t see the road,
and swarms of butterflies that coated his windshield in
Westmoreland.
… According to the University of California Agriculture and
Natural Resources, “landscape irrigation is estimated to
account for about 50 percent of annual residential water
consumption statewide.” In other words, half of California’s
water use is tied up in plants that do not naturally occur
here. Santa Barbara has a solution. Since 2009, the city’s
Sustainable Lawn Replacement Rebate has encouraged residents to
swap grass for drought-tolerant landscaping. More than 1,600
customers have participated. This spring, the city expanded the
program to include a new incentive: rain gardens.
