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 Chris Bowman.
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For the first time in more than four years, all of Northern
California is free of drought or abnormally dry
conditions, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor data released
on Thursday. California now has its lowest amount of drought
conditions since 2011. “Considering how long they were in some
form of abnormal dryness or drought, it’s pretty significant,”
said Lindsay Johnson, a climatologist with the National Drought
Mitigation Center at the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln. It’s the first time all of Northern
California is free of abnormally dry or drought conditions
since October 2019. Parts of Siskiyou and Modoc counties that
were previously a stronghold of dry conditions are now
classified as normal for the first time since Nov. 19, 2019.
The Kings County Farm Bureau and two of its farmer members have
filed suit against the state Water Resources Control Board,
claiming the board exceeded its jurisdiction when it placed the
Tulare Lake groundwater subbasin on probation April 16. A writ
of mandate was filed May 15 in Kings County Superior Court. A
writ is an order asking a governmental body, in this case the
Water Board, to cease an action. The farm bureau is asking the
board to vacate the resolution, which was passed unanimously.
“The board’s decision to place the (Tulare Lake Subbasin) on
probation violated the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act
and expanded the board’s authority beyond its jurisdiction,” a
Kings County Farm Bureau press release states. The filing
asks for declaratory and injunctive relief, and cites eight
causes of action under the writ that the “probationary
designation is arbitrary, capricious, and lacking in
evidentiary support.”
Gov. Spencer Cox said Thursday he is open to alternatives to
bring more Colorado River water to Southern Utah, including a
suggestion from the Utah Senate president to help California
fund desalination facilities in exchange for part of its water
share. … Earlier in the week, a report by Fox 13 News
and the Colorado River Collaborative journalism
initiative said that Utah Senate President J. Stuart Adams,
R-Layton, has put forward the idea of providing part of
the funds for California to construct desalination facilities
to remove salt and brine from Pacific Ocean water to convert it
to safe drinking water. In exchange, Utah would get a portion
of California’s share of the river’s water.
Time has passed, but tension once ran deep between Oroville and
Cal Water, when the utility company refused the city’s request
to add fluoride to its water supply in 1954. In fact, Oroville
complained to the California Public Utilities Commission in
1955, asking it to order Cal Water to obtain its fluoridation
permit. Its case with the CPUC met a petition with the
California Supreme Court in 1957, but Cal Water ultimately
applied for and received its permit from the state Department
of Health by the end of that year. It was said to be the first
request of its kind in the United States to a state regulatory
body like the CPUC, according to the March 1, 1955 Oroville
Mercury-Register. But that’s all history, now that the Oroville
City Council will consider Tuesday whether to require Cal Water
add fluoride to the domestic water supply in city limits.
Last year was notably wet, raising Mono Lake five feet—and
creating a conundrum. Under rules written three decades ago,
the lake’s rise over the 6,380-foot elevation threshold means
that on April 1, 2024, the maximum limit on water diversions
from Mono Lake increased nearly fourfold. Yet decades of
evidence show that increasing water diversions will erode the
wet year gains, stopping the lake from reaching the mandated
healthy 6,392-foot elevation. This flaw in the water
diversion rules, now obvious after 30 years of implementation,
has real-world results: Mono Lake is a decade late and eight
feet short of achieving the healthy lake requirement. The
California State Water Resources Control Board plans to examine
this problem in a future hearing.
A Western Slope fundraising effort to buy the historic Shoshone
hydroelectric plant water rights is now more than half of the
way toward succeeding thanks to a $2 million contribution by
the City of Glenwood Springs, just downstream of the Glenwood
Canyon facility. Glenwood’s City Council unanimously approved
the funding Thursday. The city’s recreation-based economy
relies in part on reliable Colorado River flows through the
canyon, which the plant’s water rights help assure by virtue of
their seniority.
Today, Rep. Harder called out Sacramento politicians and the
California Department of Water Resources for trying to ship the
Central Valley’s water south while causing “significant and
unavoidable” impacts on Delta communities. In a benefit-cost
analysis released yesterday, the state admits the cost of the
project has grown to over $20 billion and would devastate Delta
communities with $167 million in damages. The project would be
a disaster for Delta communities by destroying farmland and
worsening air quality. “This new analysis acknowledges what
we’ve known all along: the Delta Tunnel is meant to benefit
Beverly Hills and leave Delta communities out to dry,” said
Rep. Harder. “This $20 billion boondoggle project wouldn’t
create a single new gallon of water for anyone. I’m sick and
tired of politicians in Sacramento ignoring our Valley voices
and I will do everything in my power to stop them from stealing
our water.”
Without their knowledge, they are tracked. There are little
transmitters in their bodies, slipped inside when they were
groggy, unknowing. The tracking goes on 24 hours a day, every
day. Sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months. It is, though,
all for the good. This surveillance is done so fish in the
Mokelumne River – and fishes all over Northern California and
beyond – might survive and thrive. Acoustic tracking, it is
called. At any given time, there are hundreds of fishes
swimming about with tiny implanted transmitters. As they swim,
they ping out signals to an array of 400 receivers throughout
the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and San Francisco Bay. -Written by Rich Hanner, special to the News-Sentinel.
Is bottled water really “natural” if it’s contaminated with
microplastics? A series of lawsuits recently filed against six
bottled water brands claim that it’s deceptive to use labels
like “100 percent mountain spring water” and “natural spring
water” — not because of the water’s provenance, but
because it is likely tainted with tiny plastic fragments.
Reasonable consumers, the suits allege, would read those labels
and assume bottled water to be totally free of contaminants; if
they knew the truth, they might not have bought it.
… Experts aren’t sure it’s a winning legal strategy, but
it’s a creative new approach for consumers hoping to protect
themselves against the ubiquity of microplastics. Research over
the past several years has identified these particles
— fragments of plastic less than 5 millimeters in diameter
— just about everywhere, in nature and in people’s
bodies.
Almost the entire staff of a 43-year-old Bay Area environmental
group has resigned over a dispute about the publication of a
book and management of the nonprofit that runs it. Six out of
seven members of the staff of the Bay Institute, which does
research and advocacy work to protect the San Francisco Bay and
delta, announced their resignation last week to the board of
Bay.org, the umbrella organization that runs the Bay Institute
and also runs the Aquarium of the Bay in San Francisco and
several other entities. According to a May 16, statement
by the group that resigned, which included four senior staff
and two junior staff members, the action was prompted in part
by the decision by Bay.org CEO and President George Jacob to
publish a book authored by the staff before they had a chance
to finalize their own revisions and before it received a peer
review.
William A. Bennett (1955-2024) was a top-notch
scientist/biologist who spent much of his career improving our
understanding of the ecology and management of native and
non-native fishes in the SF Estuary (SFE) especially delta
smelt and striped bass. Those of us who had the good
fortune to work with him knew Bill as an insightful biologist
who worked hard to retain his objectivity on controversial fish
management issues in the SFE.
A coalition of Northwest Colorado governments has come out in
opposition to designating the Dolores Canyon region as a
national monument. The board of the Associated Governments of
Northwest Colorado this week approved a resolution urging
“President Biden, federal agencies and legislative bodies to
consider the adverse impacts such designation would have on
local governance, economy, access, and national security.” The
board’s action came the same week Mesa County commissioners
passed a resolution opposing the monument designation. … [The
AGNC] worries about potential impacts to things such as
farming/ranching and recreational access, and to potential
mining of uranium and lithium in the region that “represents a
critical matter of national security, particularly considering
the current state of global affairs.”
The court-appointed manager of an embattled utility provider in
the Santa Cruz Mountains reported that circumstances aren’t as
dire as they were six months ago, but the system and its
hundreds of customers aren’t out of the woods. “We’re still
standing,” is the simplest way Nicolas Jaber, an attorney with
Serviam by Wright LLP, could put it during a Wednesday town
hall meeting in Boulder Creek for customers of Big Basin Water
Co. Jaber is also a project manager with the Irvine-based law
firm assigned by a Santa Cruz County Superior Court judge last
fall to assume operational control of the water system after it
spent years on the brink of collapse. Only a couple of months
later, a judge assigned even more responsibility to Serviam by
Wright by having it take over Big Basin’s wastewater treatment
plant — serving a subset of customers in the Fallen Leaf
neighborhood — after raw waste was spotted spilling onto open
earth at the facility.
All equestrian operations have been suspended at the Rancho
Mission Viejo Riding Park after its operators did not complete
a project to address water quality issues by a settlement’s
deadline. In 2017, the nonprofit Orange County Coastkeeper sued
San Juan Capistrano and the Ridland Group, which operates the
riding park, alleging Clean Water Act violations from
horse-washing water discharge that contained feces, soap and
urine. As part of a settlement agreement, the city took on
nearly $8 million in necessary improvements to prevent
contaminated water from running off into nearby San Juan Creek.
But the Ridland Group, which runs equestrian events and
operations at the riding park, did not put in a storm drain
before the settlement’s April 15 deadline, according to San
Juan Capistrano officials.
Jade Stevens stands at the edge of a snowy cliff and takes in
the jaw-dropping panorama of the Sierra. Peaks reaching more
than a mile high form the backdrop to Bear Valley, a
kaleidoscope of green pastures mixed with ponderosa pines,
firs, cedars and oak trees. Stevens, 34, is well aware that
some of her fellow Black Americans can’t picture themselves in
places like this. Camping, hiking, mountain biking, snow
sports, venturing to locales with wild animals in their names —
those are things white people do. As co-founder of the 40 Acre
Conservation League, California’s first Black-led land
conservancy, she’s determined to change that perception. Darryl
Lucien snowshoes near Lake Putt. The nonprofit recently secured
$3 million in funding from the state Wildlife Conservation
Board and the nonprofit Sierra Nevada Conservancy to purchase
650 acres of a former logging forest north of Lake Tahoe.
The trial dates for two related lawsuits filed against the city
of Newport Beach accusing it of negligence in the maintenance
of a water main that burst and flooded a local home twice has
been set for this fall, according to attorney Jesse Creed. Amy
and Marshall Senk have owned their home on Evening Canyon Road
in Corona del Mar since 2002 and, after remodeling it, began
living there in August 2006. In October 2020, a water main
owned and operated by the city failed and burst, which led to
“catastrophic” flooding of the property with 500,000 gallons of
water, according to a complaint filed in Orange County Superior
Court in April 2023 by the Senks’ attorneys from
Panish|Shea|Ravipudi LLP. The damage left in the wake of the
failure made the house uninhabitable.
California’s contentious and long-debated plan to replumb the
Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and pump more water south finally
has a price tag: about $20 billion. The new estimate for
the Delta tunnel project — which would transform the massive
water system that sends Northern California water south to
farms and cities — is $4 billion higher than a 2020 estimate,
largely because of inflation. Included is almost $1.2 billion
to offset local harms and environmental damage, such as impacts
on salmon and rare fish that state officials have called
“potentially significant.” The goal of the project is to
collect and deliver more water to two-thirds of California’s
population and 750,000 acres of farmland during
wet periods … But environmental groups and many
Delta residents have long warned that the tunnel could put the
imperiled Delta ecosystem at even greater risk, sapping
freshwater flows needed for fish, farms and communities in the
region.
Policymakers say they’re getting closer to an agreement between
seven Western states on how to manage the Colorado River in the
future. But details from those closed-door negotiations have
been limited. Utah’s top water negotiator said states have met
“three or four times” since they split into two factions and
put out competing proposals back in March. Gene Shawcroft
didn’t give specifics but said they’re making progress on a
strategy to share water after 2026, when the current river
management plan expires. “I think the commitment level to stay
together on a seven state proposal is significantly higher now
than it was a few weeks ago,” he said. It does not appear
likely that Shawcroft and his allies are willing to back off
from a proposal to send less water downstream to California,
Arizona and Nevada each year.
Land subsidence remains the biggest issue in the new state
regulation of groundwater. The state Water Board reports that
subsidence measured as much as 7 feet just east of Corcoran
between June 2015 and January 2024. Groundwater pumping west of
Highway 99 has caused the land to sink at least 4 to 5 feet
according to a DWR database. The worry here is the collapse of
water delivering infrastructure. Tulare Lake farmers have been
asked to install metering on their pumps 90 days after the
decision to put the GSA on probation which was made April 16.
That means by mid-July pumpers must install metering as well as
begin reporting how much water they are extracting.
A water dispute between the United States and Mexico that goes
back decades is turning increasingly urgent in Texas
communities that rely on the Rio Grande. Their leaders are now
demanding the Mexican government either share water or face
cuts in U.S. aid. Sign up for the Climate Coach newsletter and
get advice for life on our changing planet, in your inbox every
Tuesday. In a deepening diplomatic conflict, Mexico is behind
in obligations under an 80-year-old treaty that governs
cross-border flows of the drought-stricken Colorado River. It
has for decades resisted water deliveries to the United States
from its reservoirs in the Rio Grande basin as it faces its own
drought pressures on thirsty and valuable crops bound for sale
across the border. -Written by Scott Dance, reporter for The
Washington Post covering extreme weather news.
