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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A member of President Donald Trump’s cabinet on Monday
intensified her ongoing campaign to thwart PG&E’s plans to
eventually tear down a pair of century-old Eel River dams.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced in a social
media post that she and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum had met
earlier in the day with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. CEO Patti
Poppe, along with representatives from the Elsinore Valley
Municipal Water District “to begin constructive negotiations on
the future of the Potter Valley Project.” The administration’s
“hope is clear,” she stated: to “keep the Scott and Cape Horn
Dams in place and working for the communities they serve.”
That goal stands in direct opposition to PG&E’s
long-held plan to decommission the century-old dams,
part of Potter Valley hydroelectric project that no longer made
financial sense, the utility concluded in 2019.
Sacramento County leaders have declared a local emergency over
the growing threat of golden mussels, an invasive species from
Asia that experts warn could harm waterways,
ecosystems, and infrastructure if it continues
spreading. California water managers have been working
to contain the invasive species, which reproduces rapidly and
has already spread from the Delta to Stockton.
… Sacramento County leaders declared the emergency on
Tuesday, citing fears that the mussels could harm the natural
ecosystem by affecting the food fish feed on and clogging
critical water infrastructure like water pipes and pumps.
… The department is urging anyone who boats, owns jet
skis, or kayaks to clean, dry, and drain their vessels to
prevent the spread of the mussels.
The developer of a proposed 330-megawatt data center near the
City of Imperial has filed a sweeping lawsuit against the
Imperial Irrigation District (IID), alleging the district
unlawfully denied its request for water service and
discriminates against industrial water users. Imperial Valley
Computer Manufacturing, LLC … is developing a data center
project on a 75-acre site at Aten and Clark roads in
unincorporated Imperial County.The lawsuit challengesIID’s May
1 denial of the company’s request for approximately 880
acre-feet of water annually for industrial cooling
purposes. The developer contends the water demand is
comparable to that of a typical 160-acre farm and represents a
small fraction of IID’s annual Colorado River
allocation. IID denied the application on grounds that the
project site lies within the City of Imperial’s sphere of
influence and is near municipal water infrastructure
Dead juvenile Chinook salmon have been found on sections of the
lower Klamath River and near the Oregon-California border.
Scientists believe the deaths are caused by parasites
that are proliferating because of the low winter snowpack and
warm spring temperatures. “We’re seeing dead and dying
fish,” Sascha Hallett, a fish parasitologist and associate
professor at Oregon State University’s Department of
Microbiology, said. … Hallett said studies indicate the
die-offs are being caused by a parasite, Ceratonova shasta. She
said OSU researchers, in cooperation with state and federal
agencies, tribes, and other agencies, believe the low winter
snowpack and warmer than average spring temperatures
accelerated the proliferation of the parasites, which thrive in
warm, slow-moving water and attack the intestinal lining of
young salmon.
A new Colorado law requires water users that buy water tied to
farms in the Arkansas Valley to revegetate land before using
water elsewhere. For decades, cities along the Front
Range have expanded municipal water supplies by acquiring water
rights historically used for agriculture. In the Arkansas
Valley, more than 100,000 acres of irrigated farmland have been
permanently dried up, often to supply water to cities such as
Pueblo, Colorado Springs and Aurora.
… Revegetation involves restoring native plant
cover to the land to reduce erosion, maintain soil moisture and
manage noxious weeds. … Aurora Water would not
like to see the law expand to other parts of Colorado. “We
would have concerns with any future expansion of this type of
legislation into other regions of the state as it could
unintentionally harm existing dry land farming operations,”
[Spokesperson Shonnie] Cline said.
Despite May bringing near normal precipitation and temperatures
to the state, June has gotten off to a hot and dry start,
spiraling Colorado into drought conditions. Understanding
more about Colorado’s hydrology is critical to understanding
how the drought developed — and got bad enough that the state
declared it an emergency on June 4 — and why not even a “super
El Nino” can revive conditions this summer. Colorado’s
mountains give rise to four major U.S. rivers — the Arkansas,
Colorado, South Platte and Rio Grande — earning it the title of
“the headwaters state.” … The Colorado River alone has
12 major transmountain diversions that carry water east.
…Greg Fisher, Denver Water’s head of demand planning and
efficiency, said it serves about a quarter of the state’s
population using less than 2% of the state’s water. “We can’t
get through droughts without our customers saving water,” …
Fisher said.
Other drought and water conservation news around the West:
A ribbon-cutting ceremony for a newly built recharge basin in
Fresno is scheduled for Thursday, June 18, at 9 a.m. The Fresno
Irrigation District completed construction of the Carter Bybee
Groundwater Recharge Basin, a 35-acre basin that will sink an
average of 840 acre-feet of water annually. The basin is in the
North Kings Groundwater Sustainability Agency (GSA).
… The $6 million project was funded through the
Department of Water Resources’ (DWR) Sustainable Groundwater
Management Act (SGMA) funds, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s
drought program and the district’s land assessments. The basin
is expected to aid the district and the GSA by increasing water
supply and improving groundwater quality in the region as part
of SGMA, which mandates local entities bring aquifers into
balance by 2040.
A few miles down the Sacramento River from the small town of
Rio Vista lies a 6.5-mile stretch of undeveloped riverbank that
California Forever calls “the perfect location” for the
nation’s largest shipyard. … Yet even while California
Forever has pushed to skip new environmental reviews, it has
offered few or shifting details on what the infrastructure will
be and how it might impact the Delta’s delicate biodiversity,
Bay Nature has found. … While ecologists and advocates say
the shipyard site itself has minimal ecological value, it lies
less than two miles from the restored Montezuma Wetlands, as
well as Suisun Marsh, one of the largest remaining intact
marshes on the West Coast. “Placing industry next to one of the
last wildest areas in the San Francisco area, hands down, it’s
just a bad idea,” says John Durand, an ecologist at UC Davis
who has surveyed the river’s biodiversity for years. But what
kind of bad idea, Durand notes, “all depends on the
details.”
The Arizona Corporation Commission recently approved
significant rate increases for two small rural water systems in
Gila County, near Payson. The proceedings for Jake’s Corner
Water System and Tonto Creek Water Company are local regulatory
actions, but what they describe is playing out at water
utilities across the country: decades of kept-low rates that
deferred maintenance until the infrastructure failure became
unavoidable. … The Arizona cases illustrate a structural
problem that Pew Charitable Trusts research quantified in May
2026: small and rural water systems, defined as those serving
fewer than 3,300 people, make up 81% of all public water
systems in the U.S. but account for 93% of violations for
noncompliance with federal drinking water standards. Small
systems spend more than double what larger systems pay per
capita to address deferred maintenance.
In May, the Environmental Protection Agency
announced it would delay enforcement deadlines for newly
finalized drinking water limits on two of the most widely
studied PFAS chemicals, PFOA and PFOS, while also proposing to
rescind federal drinking water standards for four additional
PFAS compounds. … While the EPA’s proposed rollback
could affect drinking water standards nationwide, many
California water systems have already been testing for PFAS
contamination for years. … PFAS contamination
remains a broader concern across California. A recent analysis
of state water monitoring data found PFAS compounds in surface
water and sediment samples across 10 California counties.
… Water managers in states that use the Colorado River say
they have plans to make water systems more efficient as
supplies shrink due to drought and climate change. A new
list of potential water infrastructure projects shows the ways
Arizona and its neighbors might adapt to a drier future, and
the massive spending it will take to make them possible. The
list appears to follow an April meeting between Interior
Secretary Doug Burgum and governors from the seven states that
use water from the Colorado River. The secretary requested a
sort of wishlist from those states, and they returned a
wide-ranging collection of more than 80 projects with
ballpark cost estimates that totaled in the tens of billions of
dollars. The list, which was obtained by KJZZ,
outlines more than $25 billion of potential spending in Arizona
alone.
Some property owners above Napa Valley’s 72-square-mile
groundwater subbasin will see a new fee on their property tax
bills in December. As part of the Napa Valley Subbasin
Groundwater Sustainability Plan, Napa County mailed
informational postcards this past week to subbasin property
owners and groundwater users, encouraging them to review
information about the groundwater fee that will range
anywhere from $38 to $129 per acre per year.
… Under California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management
Act — a state law requiring local agencies to sustainably
manage groundwater — the fee will fund water monitoring,
reporting, planning and compliance, but not the actual use of
the groundwater.
Jeff Martin couldn’t sleep the night Gross Dam was scheduled
for completion. … Martin, the program manager for the dam
project, had worked for 12 years on the $600 million effort to
replace the old Gross Dam with one that is 131 feet taller,
tripling the reservoir’s storage. Crews still have some
finishing work remaining, he said, but the major work to raise
the dam is now complete. … But it remains unclear
whether Denver Water will ever be able to fill the reservoir to
its new full capacity as a yearslong court battle
lumbers on between the utility and environmentalists. …
Environmental groups argued in court, and in their filings,
that regulators failed to evaluate how siphoning more water
from the drought-stricken Colorado River would
impact the basin as a whole. And the groups charged that they
failed to weigh other project options that wouldn’t require the
clear-cutting of a half-million trees or risk damage to
wetlands.
In California, a long-abused river has been reborn. For
decades, humans disrupted its course and restricted its flows
to the detriment of its ecosystem, only to lately reverse
direction and restore it to a facsimile of its natural state.
And salmon, the bellwethers of aquatic health, have responded,
returning much faster and in greater abundance than anyone
anticipated. This description applies not to the Klamath River
— or not only to the Klamath, recently liberated from
its four lower dams — but rather to the far less-celebrated
Putah Creek. … Along its 85-mile course, it is imprisoned
behind dams, siphoned off by ditches, squeezed between
artificially straightened and hardened banks. Although
it lacked salmon for decades, in 2025 more than 2,000
chinook returned to spawn — an improbable triumph
that reflects both human-led restoration and the resilience of
the fish themselves.
With summer fast approaching, we are gearing up to host K-12
educator workshops to help bring lessons on water into the
classroom. During our Water Institutes for Educators featuring
Project WET, you
will get to explore wetlands, paddle rivers and learn about
your local watershed with experts in their fields. Institutes
will be hosted in Butte, Solano, Sacramento and Los
Angeles counties this summer. All participants will
receive a stipend. See available workshops and how to
register. Plus, we just published an update to our
Layperson’s
Guide to California Water, among the many
easy-to-understand guides that cover an array of topics such as
water rights, the Colorado River, groundwater and California’s
two major water supply projects – the State Water Project and
the federal Central Valley Project. You can find them here.
A new study out of the University of Arizona measures the
scale and economic output of tribal agriculture in Arizona
— and it’s big. University of Arizona professor and Hopi
dry farmer Michael Kotutwa Johnson co-authored the study. It
found American Indians operate 62% of farms in the state and
manage more than 80% of the state’s total agricultural land —
to the tune of 20 million acres. But, as Kotutwa Johnson told
The Show, it’s a seriously under-researched area. …
[Johnson:] I don’t think people really understand the
agricultural imprint and footprint that we have here in Arizona
and have since almost like to say time immemorial. We’ve got
canal infrastructure that was basically built upon existing
Hohokam agriculture that was done before the state was even
founded and the country was founded.
California Water Service’s billing systems for customers in
Bakersfield, Visalia and Chico were not breached through a
cyber attack by an Iranian-linked group, according to the
corporate spokesperson. … [A]n Iranian-linked hacker group
called Handala claimed on Thursday to have breached several
water systems in California, specifically in Bakersfield,
Visalia and Chico. The group showed screenshots of what it said
were residents’ bills from CalWater and claimed to have five
gigabytes of data from the alleged breach on its website.
… The alleged hack was in retaliation for U.S. strikes
that may have damaged two water storage facilities in southern
Iran near the strait of Hormuz. [Spokesperson Yvonne] Kingman
said Friday that CalWater’s production and distribution systems
were not breached and updated SJV Water Monday that the billing
system was secure as well.
Clean, drain, dry and tag: State and county officials are
relying on boaters to prevent the spread of an invasive golden
mussel that has infested much of the San Francisco estuary. On
Monday, new rules that aim to curb the spread of the species go
into effect for all reservoirs open to recreational boating
within Santa Clara County. The first North American detection
of golden mussel was in California in 2024, according to the
state Department of Fish and Wildlife. … Lawmakers and
water managers have responded with a variety of measures.
Several reservoirs, including Lake Tahoe and Lake Berryessa,
maintain strict boat inspection programs aimed at preventing
new infestations. Federal lawmakers are also seeking a broader
response.
… [W]hile the majority of Utah’s water goes to agriculture,
the share going to residential watering has been increasing
over the decades. … That growth makes sense — as Utah
adds more people and houses, of course residential water use
increases too. But obviously, a limited supply of water
remains, so if Utah let residential water use grow
indefinitely, we’d find ourselves in trouble in the decades to
come. … For current residents, you want to incentivize
them to remove their lawns for much more water-wise
landscaping. For future residents, you want to make the
landscaping that surrounds homes in new developments as
water-efficient as possible. … Naturally, you could just
enact laws that do both of those things separately. But in an
interesting piece of strategy, the Utah Legislature and the
Division of Water Resources (DWR) have tied those two ideas
together. –Written by Salt Lake Tribune data columnist Andy
Larsen.
Members of San Diego’s congressional delegation Monday called
on the U.S. Small Business Administration to continue to
support small businesses impacted by Tijuana River Valley
pollution. Reps. Juan Vargas, Scott Peters, Sara Jacobs, all
D-San Diego, and Rep. Mike Levin, D-San Juan Capistrano, also
asked for additional information from SBA Administrator Kelly
Loeffler on what steps the SBA has already taken. “As South San
Diego County’s beaches continue to be impacted by untreated
wastewater, sediment and trash from the Tijuana River, South
Bay businesses have suffered economically,” the lawmakers wrote
in a joint letter. “While we continue to work with our Mexican
counterparts to address the causes of the pollution, it’s
important that we also take steps to support local small
businesses impacted by the pollution and the consumers who rely
on them.”
