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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Solano County staff penned a letter to the California
Department of Water Resources asking for changes to the Public
Review Draft of the Yolo Bypass Cache Slough Master Plan. The
letter is included as part of the agenda packet for the Tuesday
meeting of the Solano County Board of Supervisors. “While
improvements have been made, Solano County maintains several
critical concerns about the Public Review Draft,” the letter
reads. “We respectfully request additional revisions to better
align the Master Plan with regional priorities for
flood protection, agricultural sustainability,
water supply reliability, and local economic
resilience.” Having already been awarded $5.1 million for the
improvements to the water system, the county is now asking for
$15 million more in state funding to construct more
levees over the next five years.
Dozens of House Democrats are sponsoring legislation to block
the Trump administration from shuttering NOAA and National
Weather Service offices. The “Stop NOAA Closures Act,” from
Rep. Gabe Amo of Rhode Island and Natural Resources ranking
member Jared Huffman of California, would impose a moratorium
on closing offices, terminating leases, stopping construction
and other new limits on access. The bill is co-sponsored by
Science Space and Technology ranking member Zoe Lofgren of
California and 59 other House Democrats. It’s the latest
in a series of congressional actions trying to stop or slow
President Donald Trump’s campaign to downsize NOAA and
extinguish much of the nation’s climate science apparatus.
Residents in San Benito County have been paying a water tax
since 1977 for imported water, but a civil grand jury report
claims the tax is outdated and should have ended in 2017,
prompting calls for the issue to be put back on the ballot. …
The tax was initially approved to pay off a $19.9 million
federal loan for imported water to address local shortages and
support a growing community. … [San Benito County Water
District General Manager Dana] Jacobson explained,
“Without that water that comes in from the Central
Valley Project from San Luis Reservoir, there wouldn’t
be a high enough quality of water to deliver to the municipal
customers and the agricultural customers as well.” The district
maintains that the tax has no expiration date and funds ongoing
maintenance and operations of the system.
If you go to a beach this summer, you might end up sunbathing
in disputed territory. That’s partly because of climate change
and partly because of a legal principle from the Roman Empire.
Most beaches have a natural defense against rising seas: The
sandy area simply moves landward. But when property owners
install sea walls or other barriers to protect beachfront homes
and other buildings, the beach has nowhere to go. So it
vanishes underwater. Geologists call it coastal squeeze. It’s
not a new problem, but it’s been accelerating recently as
climate change causes sea levels to rise. And that’s prompting
urgent questions about how coastal landscapes should be
managed.
Groundbreaking on one of California’s newest reservoirs could
begin by the end of next year, officials announced Friday. Work
on the Sites Reservoir, west of Maxwell in Colusa County,
starts when crews begin testing soils and rocks in and around
the 14,000 acre site of the proposed lake, said Fritz Durst,
chairman of the Sites Project Authority Board of
Directors. Officials expect to complete construction of a
dam, roads and other structures around the reservoir within six
years. The project is expected to cost about $6.8 billion,
according to preliminary estimates, Durst said. The Sites
Authority also recently received a favorable opinion from the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Agency on the reservoir’s environmental
impact.
Buckeye and Queen Creek can now access groundwater from a
farming area in western Phoenix. The move comes after officials
from the Department of Water Resources approved the first-ever
legal transfer of water from rural Arizona to cities. The
agreement will allow the communities of Buckeye and Queen Creek
to withdraw up to 5,926 acre-feet per year and 5,000 acre-feet
per year, respectively from the Harquahala basin. Still, the
question remains as to whether this is a permanent
solution. Sarah Porter is the director of the Kyl Center
for Water Policy at Arizona State University. She says this
inter-basin transfer isn’t a total answer to ensuring that
Arizona has enough water to continue to grow.
Three House panels will meet this week to discuss strategies
for natural disaster recovery and weather prediction. The House
Science, Space and Technology Committee will mark up the
“Weather Act Reauthorization” bill, H.R. 3816, by ranking
member Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) and the Rep. Frank Lucas
(R-Okla.), the committee’s former chair. The legislation seeks
to fund and improve NOAA forecasting capabilities and its work
to inform the public, along with promoting collaboration with
the private sector. The bill comes as lawmakers worry
about staffing woes at the National Weather Service —
particularly after this month’s deadly flooding in Texas — and
lawmakers debate whether to cut NOAA spending.
… For Courtland, a 521-person community along the Sacramento
River, the Bartlett pear is its core identity, even though it
might also be a best-kept secret. … The future of the pear
and life in the California Delta region may hinge on the
outcome of the ongoing Delta Conveyance Project. … The
45-mile-long and 36-feet-wide tunnel could carry 6,000 cubic
feet of water from the Sacramento River every second. Two
of the proposed tunnel intakes are just upriver from Courtland
near the tiny town of Hood. Last December, the
Metropolitan Water District of Southern California approved
$142 million to fund the project’s planning and
pre-construction costs, and earlier this year, Gov. Gavin
Newsom proposed fast-tracking it. For many in the Delta, losing
their water is a looming concern that’s troubled the region for
decades.
Water managers and state wildlife officials last year hoped the
discovery of a microscopic zebra mussel larva in the Colorado
River was a one-time event, not a sign of a larger problem
lurking beneath the surface. It was the first time larvae from
the destructive invasive species had been found in the river in
Colorado. For nearly a year, despite increased sampling, state
wildlife officials didn’t see any more evidence of the mussels.
But their hopes were dashed earlier this month when Colorado
Parks and Wildlife detected three more tiny larvae in the
stretch of the Colorado River between Glenwood Springs and
Silt. The mussels — known to devastate ecosystems and clog
critical infrastructure — had once again found their
way to the river that is the backbone of Colorado and the
Southwest’s water supply.
Two days before the waters of the Guadalupe River swelled into
a deadly and devastating Fourth of July flood in Kerr County,
Texas, engineers with a California-based company called
Rainmaker took off in an airplane about 100 miles away and
dispersed 70 grams of silver iodide into a cloud. Their goal?
To make it rain over Texas — part of a weather modification
practice known as cloud seeding, which uses chemical compounds
to augment water droplets inside clouds, making the drops large
enough and heavy enough to fall to the ground. But in the hours
after the flood swept through the greater Kerrville area and
killed at least 135 people, including three dozen children,
conspiracy theories began swirling among a small but vocal
group of fringe figures.
In a thick forest along the remote northern California coast
earlier this month, a group of mostly young Indigenous kayakers
pushed off into the clear-emerald waters of the recently
undammed Klamath River. The 13- to 20-year-olds from more
than six tribes in the Klamath Basin, along with several
instructors, had been paddling for a month, covering over 300
miles. In just a few hours, they would reach the Pacific
Ocean, making the group among the first in over a century to
descend the river from its headwaters in southern Oregon to its
mouth in northern California. The expedition began in early
June after the largest dam-removal project in history was
completed last fall to restore salmon populations, improve
water quality and support tribe-managed lands.
… [F]ederal policy changes are forcing California leaders to
get creative to protect our shared natural resources and public
health. The Supreme Court’s now-infamous Sackett v. EPA
decision dramatically reduced the reach of the Clean Water Act,
leaving many formerly protected waterways and wetlands much
harder to protect from pollution, especially in the
West. Fortunately, we have leadership in California to
ensure this seismic disruption in policy is muted by a response
that could expedite how state law will capture the same
protections that federal clean water permits once did. SB 601
(Allen), also known as The Right to Clean Water Act, attempts
to piece back together the regulatory system established under
the federal Clean Water Act over the past five decades. –Written by Martha Guzman, who was the US Environmental
Protection Agency Region 9 Administrator from December 2021 to
January 2025 and the Deputy Legislative Affairs Secretary in
the Office of the California Governor from 2011 – 2016.
Last September, worry had surged for residents along the
Tijuana River Valley. Research teams announced they had found
concerning levels of toxic gas emanating from the millions of
gallons of raw sewage that have, for years, spilled over from
Mexico via the river. By the next day, San Diego County
Supervisor Nora Vargas, South County’s top local elected
official, tried to assuage concerns, downplaying researchers’
findings and how they collected their data. … Vargas’
stance on the Tijuana River Valley issue would cement a rift
between her and many environmentally minded residents, but also
with one of the area’s rising Democrats — Imperial Beach Mayor
Paloma Aguirre. … Hopes of fixing the sewage crisis have
created some overlap between Aguirre’s labor base and some of
the very groups that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars
opposing her candidacy — the region’s business establishment.
It had been five years since the first of the frog eggs had
been moved, carefully plucked from Mexico’s Baja Peninsula and
transported by cooler to Southern California. Anny
Peralta-Garcia was getting nervous. The eggs belonged to
California red-legged frogs, an amphibian that had been eaten,
bulldozed and eventually pushed out of the state decades
earlier. Peralta-Garcia, an Ensenada-based conservation
biologist, had helped harvest fresh eggs from a pond in Baja.
The efforts to move them back to the frogs’ historic range in
California had been monumental — involving private landowners,
federal agencies, conservation groups, helicopters and an
international border. And now, 87 more moved egg masses later,
everyone was waiting to see if it worked. If the re-introduced
frogs were breeding.
… Flexential’s North Las Vegas facility is one of more than
30 data centers spread across the Las Vegas Valley. Other
facilities belong to companies such
as Switch and Google, which has a site in Henderson.
… In Nevada, the country’s driest state, the recent growth of
generative artificial intelligence has put increased
attention on data centers’ power demands and
the water needed to cool servers. … Out
of a list of 23 data centers provided by the Las Vegas Valley
Water District, the city of North Las Vegas and the city of
Henderson, Google’s site had the highest estimated water use in
2024 at roughly 352 million gallons. The Flexential facility
used around 20 million gallons. The sum of every facility’s
estimated usage in 2024 was more than 716 million
gallons.
Blue glow agave, gold fernleaf yarrow and California fuchsia
are among the plants featured at a new low-water-use
demonstration garden at the North Marin Water District
headquarters in Novato. Looking to help customers replace their
thirsty lawns with these and other drought-tolerant plants, the
district recently unveiled the garden and increased its
cash-for-grass rebate incentive hoping to promote change. Last
month, the rebate increased 50 cents, to $1.50 per square foot
of lawn area replaced with qualifying plantings, up to $1,500
per house. Projects that meet an extra set of standards can
earn a bonus $1 per square foot. The new incentives are
supported by an influx of grant funding, including $87,750 from
the Bureau of Reclamation.
For the first time in decades, the San Diego County Water
Authority’s representatives on the board of the Metropolitan
Water District will not enjoy, or have to deal with, the
guidance of Chris Frahm, the former chair of the Water
Authority, who became the architect of its legal approach to
Metropolitan. In this week’s Politics Report, Scott Lewis broke
the news that Frahm’s contract would not be coming back to the
board after a tense exchange at the last board meeting.
… It’s further indication that the hostile relationship
between the Water Authority and Metropolitan Water District is
becoming more amicable. … The Water Authority’s only
hope to ease pressure on rate payers in San Diego is to work
with Met to sell some of the excess water we have
purchased.
A caution advisory remained in effect for Lake Oroville’s
Middle Fork due to a visible algal bloom. The Department of
Water Resources issued the advisory after observing the bloom
on July 3. DWR staff collected a sample of the algal bloom for
analysis, finding no toxins present. Officials say they will
continue monitoring the bloom and collecting samples if
conditions change. The advisory will stay in place until the
bloom dissipates. … Blue-green algae, also known as
cyanobacteria, naturally occur in ecosystems. Under certain
conditions, such as warmer temperatures and increased
nutrients, algae can grow rapidly, causing blooms.
After nearly a decade of planning and negotiations, the
Humboldt County Board of Supervisors today unanimously approved
a water diversion agreement that will support PG&E’s plan
to decommission the aging Potter Valley Project and demolish
its two dams — Scott Dam and Cape Horn Dam — on the upper
stretches of the Eel River. The historic agreement marks a
major turning point in a years-long effort by federal, state,
tribal and local agencies to craft a “two-basin solution” that
meets the needs of communities in both the Eel and Russian
River basins, which have long been at odds over ownership and
control of water diverted from the Eel River.
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.
