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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Scientists at the United States Department of Agriculture
(USDA) Southwest Climate Hub and California Climate Hub have
developed a browsable map-based tool that addresses water
scarcity in the U.S. Southwest. The Water Adaptation Techniques
Atlas (WATA) consolidates over 200 case studies on research and
practices that water managers and producers can use to find
location-specific and topical information to make informed
decisions regarding water management. … water scarcity has
become a pressing issue with extremely hot temperatures and
severe prolonged droughts in a region already challenged by its
arid and semi-arid conditions. As reservoir and aquifer levels
drop, information about strategies to adapt to this new reality
is urgently needed. WATA provides information based on research
from USDA’s Agricultural Research Service and other sources
about practices for lessening the gap between water demand and
available supply, with an emphasis on cropping and irrigation
practices across the Southwest, including Arizona, California,
Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah.
It’s around 9:30am on the banks of Penitencia Creek in San
Jose, and Santa Clara Valley Water is here for creek clean-up.
This public agency that provides water to county residents is
charged with keeping water sources clean and preventing
floods. … Valley Water is getting $3 million in federal
funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to ramp up the
cleanups across nine of the county’s creeks, and undo other
ecological damage—like fixing up human-dug caves and stairways
along river banks, or removing rafts of entangled trash that
are clogging salmonid streams. But with no long-term housing
solution for the people living in the camps, trash and damage
tends to reappear rapidly. Most camps are cleaned up on a
monthly or quarterly basis. The whole operation (trash
compactor, laboring crew, police escort, and all) is as
expensive as it looks.
A family of beavers — three adults, one subadult and three
babies, known as “kits” — were released into the South Fork
Tule River watershed on June 12, the California Department of
Fish and Wildlife said. Two other beavers were released into
Miner Creek on June 17. … A decade ago, tribal leaders
called for the animals to be returned, driven by traditional
Indigenous knowledge about beavers’ importance to the ecosystem
— and inspired by the 500-to-1,000-year-old beaver images left
at the Yokuts village site known as Painted Rock. In 2022, Fish
and Wildlife received state funding to start a restoration
program to prepare sites in California for the semiaquatic
animals. Beavers aid the environment by building dams that help
to keep landscapes well-hydrated and more resilient in droughts
and wildfires. That enhanced water retention could also protect
the Tule River Indian Tribe’s drinking water supply — 80% of
which comes from the river’s watershed, the CDFW said.
It’s been two and a half months since the state brought the
hammer down on water managers in Kings County for lacking an
adequate plan to stem overpumping in the region and the
situation is, in a word – chaotic. One groundwater
sustainability agency (GSA) has imploded, leaving the county to
potentially pick up the pieces. Another doesn’t have enough
money in the bank to pay its newly hired manager. One GSA
has repeatedly canceled meetings, others appear to be crafting
their own plans and one is banking on being exempted as a “good
actor,” despite the state’s repeated insistence that there will
be no such exemptions in San Joaquin Valley basins now under
scrutiny. Oh, and the Farm Bureau is suing the state Water
Resources Control Board over its vote April 16 to put the
region, the Tulare Lake subbasin, into probation – the first
step toward a possible state pumping takeover. All this while a
deadline is rapidly approaching July 15 for all Kings County
pumpers to register their wells and begin tracking their
groundwater consumption.
… The budget battle is not over … Legislators are still
working out two bond measures that will ask voters in November
to allow California to borrow even more money for school
facilities and climate change-related programs. Senate
President Pro Tem Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg, on Monday
confirmed lawmakers will seek to extend the deadline for adding
measures to the November ballot from June 27 to July
3. Lawmakers have sliced budget dollars for climate change
and school facilities, an indication they’re hoping to use bond
money to fill those holes. The spending plan agreement includes
hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts to water
storage projects, climate resilience
initiatives and dam safety as well as a handful of
other related reductions. … Sen. Ben Allen, D-Santa Monica,
and Assemblyman Eduardo Garcia, D-Coachella, have climate
bonds, both of which seek more than $15 billion for water
quality and conservation, wildfire prevention, coastal
preservation, clean energy projects and more.
Related political and water infrastructure stories:
Stephen Roe Lewis grew up seeing stacks of legal briefs at the
dinner table — often, about his tribe’s water. His father, the
late Rodney Lewis, was general counsel for the Gila River
Indian Community and fought for the tribe’s rights to water in
the Southwest, eventually securing in 2004 the largest Native
American water settlement in U.S. history. Years later, Stephen
would become governor of the tribe, whose reservation is about
a half-hour south of downtown Phoenix. Amid his tenure, he’s
been pivotal in navigating a water crisis across the
seven-state Colorado River basin caused by existential drought
made worse by climate change and decades of Western states
overdrawing from the river. Lewis, 56, has leveraged the Gila
River tribe’s water abundance to help Arizona, making his tribe
a power player in the parched region. His fingerprints are on
many recent, high-stakes decisions made in the West about the
future of the river that supports 40 million people, and the
tribe’s influence is only growing.
With California experiencing extreme swings between severe
drought to torrential rain, the Department of Water Resources
(DWR) wanted to see if the State Water Project’s largest
reservoir, Lake Oroville, had shrunk (or lost storage capacity)
due to weather swings and almost six decades of service. DWR
utilized the latest terrain-mapping technology to determine if
there have been any changes in the lake’s volume to optimize
how the reservoir is operated and ensure accuracy in estimating
California’s water supply availability. … Starting with
an airplane-mounted LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) laser
system, DWR took advantage of the lake’s historically low water
levels in 2021 to first map portions of the basin that would
typically be under water during normal years. Then a boat
outfitted with multibeam-sonar bathymetry instruments spent
weeks in 2022 sending sonar pulses into the depths of Lake
Oroville to map its underwater surface terrain. What resulted
were highly detailed 3D topographic terrain models of the
bottom of the lake, which DWR engineers used to calculate a new
storage capacity of 3,424,753 acre-feet, approximately 3
percent less than previously estimated.
Thursday [June 27] is doomsday for water prices in San Diego.
That’s when the region’s water importer – the San Diego County
Water Authority – debates whether to boost its prices a
whopping 18 percent come Jan. 1. The price increase is massive
compared to previous rate increases, and the Water Authority’s
biggest customer, the city of San Diego, is pretty ticked off.
… San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria directed his powerful
contingent of 10 water board members to fight the increase. We
won’t know how hard they’ll fight until the full 33-member
board meets Thursday afternoon to vote on it. Gloria’s
administration is building a water recycling project, which
costs billions of dollars. Once its built, in 2035, San Diego
won’t buy as much water from the Water Authority. But for now,
San Diegans are saddled with the cost of building water
recycling and purchasing expensive water from outside city
boundaries.
… The role of inland saline lakes like the Salton Sea in
providing biofilm to migrating birds is a new and intriguing
line of inquiry and emphasizes the already dire need to
conserve the limited number of stopover habitats suitable for
shorebirds. Saline lakes across the interior western U.S. are
at risk of ecological collapse as fresh water is diverted away
and salinity rises to unhealthy levels. This puts millions of
birds already devastated by habitat loss at further risk and
exposes human residents to toxic sediments as shorelines recede
and form large dust clouds. Maintaining the ecological function
of these lakes is essential to both public health and the
recovery of migratory bird populations in the western United
States.
The U.S. and Mexico are experiencing another border dispute,
and this one is about water. The conflict stems from an
80-year-old treaty where the countries agreed to share water
from the Colorado River and the Rio Grande. However, because
water is in more demand but scarcer than ever, sharing has not
been going to plan. The U.S. and Mexico signed a treaty in
1944 stipulating that Mexico send 1.75 million acre-feet of
water to the U.S. every five years from the Rio Grande, and the
U.S. send 1.5 million acre-feet of water to Mexico from
the Colorado River each year. But water levels are
lower than ever, and Mexico has “sent only about 30% of its
expected deliveries, the lowest amount at this point of any
four- or five-year cycles since 1992,”
said Reuters. … The effects are far-reaching. …
Texas, in particular, is home to sugar and citrus farms
struggling from a lack of water. On the other hand, farmers in
Mexico are protesting sending water to the U.S., as they are
also suffering from scarcity.
Wildfires are on the rise. The smoke they bring darkens the sky
and deposits ash. Ocean research has provided clues about how
smoke affects marine ecosystems, but little is known about how
it affects freshwater ecosystems like lakes. A new study
published in Communications Earth and Environment shows that in
some California lakes, smoke can alter physical and biological
processes that are key to systems such as nutrient cycling,
rates of carbon sequestration, and food web structure. Both the
number of smoky days and the extent of smoke coverage have
climbed in recent decades, said Adrianne Smits, an
environmental scientist at the University of California, Davis,
and coauthor of the new study. “Smoke cover in California is
really no longer an ephemeral event,” she said, but “could be
thought of more as a seasonal phenomenon.”
It wasn’t the appearance of a flashy, high-ranking California
official at the podium, or the review of 35 years of efforts to
protect the Bay’s watershed at the beginning of the May 2024
State of the Estuary conference that made me sit up in my red
velvet auditorium seat. It was an awards ceremony for
outstanding projects. … There to receive each small plaque
from Friends of the Estuary were long lines of “collaborators.”
As they snaked on and off the stage for a photo and handshake,
the line of folk who had helped complete this or that project —
from mapping the range of the salt marsh harvest mouse to
involving students and teachers in watershed restoration — got
longer and longer. … Though the region’s ability to
collaborate with other agencies and scientists and managers to
protect and restore the San Francisco Estuary has grown
exponentially, over the years, these same folks are now
tangling with a new challenge: how to make this work relevant
to the Bay Area’s most “underserved” communities.
Officials from the California Water Resources Control Board are
urging people to avoid Lake Elsinore due to an algae bloom
that’s created dangerous levels of harmful toxins. Visitors are
urged to stay out of the water, keep their pets at a safe
distance and do not drink water or eat any fish or shellfish
from the lake. Five “distinct areas” of Lake Elsinore were
tested and high levels of toxins were detected that officials
say pose a significant health risk.
Today, U.S. Representative John Garamendi (D-CA08) voted
to pass the “Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) of 2024″
(H.R.8812) in the House Committee on Transportation and
Infrastructure by a bipartisan vote of 61 to 2. The full House
of Representatives is expected to take up the bill in the
coming weeks. “The biennial Water Resources Development Act
strengthens flood protection and our precious water resources
in communities across California and the country. This
soon-to-become law will upgrade our water infrastructure,
strengthen climate resiliency, and restore aquatic ecosystems
across the Bay Area and California Delta,” Garamendi
said. ”As a longstanding member of the House Committee on
Transportation and Infrastructure, I secured key provisions in
the bill to support dredging the Mare Island Strait, enhance
environmental restoration efforts at Lake Tahoe, and expand the
Army Corps’ existing vessel removal authority to also include
abandoned and derelict vessels. I expect President Biden to
sign this bipartisan bill into law.”
Since Sacramento’s acclaimed Museum of Science and Curiosity
(MOSAC) opened in November 2021, more than 331,000 visitors
have toured the facility, which features dozens of interactive
exhibits on topics such as health care, nature, space
exploration and water. A popular MOSAC section is the Water
Challenge Exhibit, which includes three interactive displays
sponsored by Cultivate California and its nonprofit parent
organization the California Farm Water Coalition that
illustrate how farmers are working hard to use less water.
Governor Katie Hobbs’ recent veto of three Republican water
bills, including the “Ag to Urban” bill, represents a
significant setback for Arizona’s efforts to address its
ongoing water crisis. … The “Ag to Urban” bill was a
pragmatic approach to one of our state’s most pressing issues:
water conservation. Arizona’s current water management laws
inadvertently discourage transitioning land from agriculture to
suburban use, despite the fact that agricultural practices are
substantially more water-intensive than residential or
municipal uses. This transition is essential for our state’s
future, and the vetoed bill aimed to facilitate this shift by
addressing the outdated and counterproductive incentives
embedded in our water laws. … The Governor’s veto, therefore,
is not just a rejection of a Republican bill, but a refusal to
embrace a forward-thinking solution to Arizona’s water and
housing crises. — written by Alexander Kolodin, attorney and Republican
member of the Arizona State House
Almost 400 water systems serving nearly a million Californians
don’t meet state requirements for safe and reliable drinking
water supplies — and fixing them would cost billions of
dollars. More than two-thirds of these failing water systems
serve communities of color, and more than half are in places
struggling with poverty and pollution, according to an annual
assessment released today by the State Water Resources Control
Board. These water systems failed to provide water “which
is at all times pure, wholesome, and potable,” as required.
Some violated drinking water standards for chemicals, bacteria,
taste or odor. Others rely on bottled water, or have failed to
meet treatment, monitoring or other requirements. … The price
tag for ensuring safe, affordable and accessible water supplies
for all Californians is staggering — an estimated $16 billion
over the next five years — as the state grapples with a
multibillion-dollar deficit.
… The Biden Administration has poured money … allocating $4
billion from the Inflation Reduction Act for Colorado River
projects. … The Biden administration framed the spending
effort as “water conservation,” but Arizona’s municipal water
leaders aren’t using it to make changes traditionally thought
of as conservation. Instead of paying for small tweaks to water
use – like encouraging residents to install low-flow
showerheads or rip out their thirsty lawns – many are thinking
bigger, putting their multimillion dollar checks towards
billion dollar infrastructure projects that are aimed at
keeping taps flowing for decades to come. Basically, cities
like Peoria are planning to engineer their way out of the
problem.
Today, the Bureau of Reclamation announced another increase in
the Central Valley Project 2024 water supply allocation for
south-of-Delta contractors. While all north-of-Delta Central
Valley Project contractors are currently at 100% of their
supplies, south-of-Delta agricultural contractors are being
increased from 40% to 50%. All other Central Valley
Project contract allocations remain the same per the March 22
water supply update. Initial contract allocations were
announced on Feb. 21 and updated in March and April.
As the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) approaches
its tenth anniversary, California is making progress towards
implementation—but the 2020–22 drought shows that much work
still lies ahead. Drought poses a particular challenge for SGMA
compliance in many farming regions. Increased groundwater use
keeps crops irrigated when surface water is scarce, but it can
cause undesirable impacts such as dry wells, infrastructure
damage from land subsidence (sinking lands), and increased
rates of seawater intrusion. While SGMA allows some flexibility
for extra groundwater pumping during droughts, it also requires
local agencies to guard against these undesirable impacts.
