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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The chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee
warned Arizona and two other states that rely on the Colorado
River on Wednesday that they will lose access to hundreds of
millions in conservation aid if they pursue litigation over
water rights. Roughly $354 million is still available
under a 2022 climate law. But the funds expire at the end of
September. “States that choose to sue their fellow basin states
over Colorado River operations should not expect Congress to
reward that decision with additional federal funding,” Sen.
Mike Lee, a Republican from Utah – one of the four Upper Basin
states, said at the outset of a hearing onthe stalemate among the seven states that share the
river. “Federal taxpayers should not be asked to
subsidize litigation among the states.”
Some farmers in southern Tulare County – where
excessive groundwater pumping has already caused
hundreds of millions in damage to the Friant-Kern
Canal – are back to pumping like crazy while there’s a
gap in oversight. It hasn’t gone unnoticed. “They have got
to be serious about stopping the pumping,” said Jeevan Muhar,
general manager of Arvin-Edison Water Storage District
Groundwater Sustainability Agency. “It needs to stop for the
canal to function as it is supposed to.” The “they” Muhar
referred to is the Tule East Groundwater Sustainability Agency
(GSA), which took over a large chunk of the Tule subbasin after
its predecessor, Eastern Tule GSA, folded. But there’s not
much that can be done right now as Tule East is still in its
formation stages.
The Trump administration is not going to set nationwide
environmental requirements or recommendations for the rapidly
growing data center industry, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said
Wednesday. While there are technologies and practices that
reduce air pollution and water usage, states
and communities know what works best for them, Zeldin said at
the POLITICO Energy Summit in Washington. … Just 37
percent of Americans would support a data center being built in
their area, according to a POLITICO poll earlier this year.
There are myriad reasons cited by opponents, but water usage
and air pollution are common complaints. Zeldin on Wednesday
cited closed-loop data center designs that don’t have to
regularly tap into local water supplies.
… If a potential super El Niño materializes later this year,
as forecasters expect with 82% probability by July, the
combined warming could disrupt ecosystems, harm marine life and
threaten the juvenile salmon that are heading out to sea for
the first time since populations began to recover. The
concern is specific and urgent. Young salmon that hatch in
rivers like the Sacramento, Klamath and Eel
spend their first months in the ocean, where they depend on
cold, nutrient-rich upwelling water to find food and survive.
When ocean temperatures rise, that food web breaks down. The
prey species that juvenile salmon depend on shift northward or
decline, and survival rates drop.
A recently published study on the 2021 Caldor Fire burn scar is
shedding light on how fires can impact snowpacks. Often
referred to as the “frozen reservoir”, the Sierra Nevada
snowpack provides 30% or more of California’s water. As
wildfires in the west are not only burning increasingly more
acreage, but are also going higher in elevation—including into
areas where snowpacks occur—it’s raising questions
about what that means for one of the state’s biggest water
resources. Marianne Cowherd set out to find
answers, studying the Caldor Fire area during the
2022-2023 winter along with others, including UC Berkeley
Central Sierra Snow Lab Director Andrew Schwartz. “These
fires are massively problematic for us trying to ensure we’re
managing our water correctly,” Schwartz said.
Northern Water earned a mixed scorecard on its troubled $2.7
billion, two-dam supply project in recent months, with the
northern Colorado provider lopping an entire dam to cut costs,
even as more cities depart the venture. The cities who
spent the spring researching whether to stay in or flee the
Northern Integrated Supply Project are also hearing distressing
news from Northern Water’s other stumbling showcase project,
Chimney Hollow reservoir. Towns like Erie now assume the
uranium contamination combined with lack of runoff to fill
Chimney Hollow mean they won’t be able to sell water from that
reservoir to customers for five or six more years, complicating
the fundraising they need to pay for their shares of the larger
NISP project.
Just off the Logan River is a new diversion structure designed
to help farmers in the Cache Valley use water more efficiently.
“The canal company spent almost $2 million over the last year
putting in a new diversion structure here behind us with
automated, real-time water measurement and piping the first
mile or so of our canal company,” said Nathan Daugs with the
Cache Water District. “That gives us the option, or ability, to
measure exactly what we’re diverting with our water right.” The
Cache Water District is looking at other ways of stretching
water resources further. Some of the small canal company’s
farmers are participating in a pilot project with the Great
Salt Lake Commissioner’s Office to test a new law allowing them
to treat water like another crop and lease it to the lake.
… Last week, Gov. Jared Polis declared a statewide
drought emergency. After record-low snowpack and persistent
above average temperatures, every county in Colorado is drier
than average. … The emergency declaration coincides with
moving to phase 3 of the state’s drought response plan. It
allows the Governor to access and appropriate money available
in Colorado’s disaster emergency fund and sets up stronger
state coordination on dispersing those resources. In addition,
it opens the possibility of asking the White House to issue a
federal emergency declaration. As it currently stands,
farmers and ranchers can apply for a suite of relief options
ranging from emergency loans, to grants for crop loss, to
reimbursements for the travel costs of hauling extra feed or
water for livestock.
The Center for Biological Diversity announced it sued the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service June 9 for failing to decide whether
western ridged mussels should be protected under the Endangered
Species Act. The center notified the service of its intent to
sue in March. … The agency missed a legally required deadline
to determine whether safeguards are warranted for the
freshwater mussels, which are disappearing from rivers across
Oregon, Washington, California, Idaho and Nevada. Many
historical sites no longer support mussels, and many local
populations no longer successfully reproduce. In California,
one of the 17 locations of live mussel observations since 1990
is Last Chance Creek in the East Branch North Fork Feather
River watershed, according to a report from the Xerces Society
for Invertebrate Conservation.
Julia Lee had no need for a new garden when she and her husband
purchased their Cheviot Hills home eight years ago. The
traditional 1950 home came with mature tropical plants in the
back and a sprawling grass hillside lawn in front, and it
suited them just fine. But as drought and wildfires dragged on
in California in recent years, she started to question whether
keeping the thirsty lawn made sense. … So in 2022, Lee
decided to replace her lawn with a drought-tolerant landscape,
using the LADWP Free Landscape Design Program, now called the
Landscape Efficiency Assistance Program, for help. She
also applied for the Metropolitan Water District’s turf
replacement rebate, which was $3 per square foot at the time
(now $5), and got $5,310 back when the garden was finished.
The Trump administration is planning a review of the powerful
California Coastal Commission and other state regulatory
agencies that deal with the state’s shoreline, saying they’re
likely out of compliance with the nation’s coastal management
laws — an assertion critics say is merely a pretense to weaken
their authority. U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick
directed the review in a recent letter to the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He alleged
that California regulators were making decisions about
development and other activities without giving due
consideration to military plans and possibly many other federal
interests, including offshore oil and gas drilling. …
[T]he administration is opening the door to changing how much
say the state has over federal and federally licensed projects
— from dredging harbors to developing wind farms in the ocean
to building undersea pipelines.
In a neighborhood flanked by grapevines and orange groves on
the east side of the San Joaquin Valley, people cannot drink
the water from their faucets because it’s contaminated.
Residents in the area north of Porterville, many of them
farmworkers, have been discussing a solution, which they expect
will require running pipes to connect to the nearby city
system. But the clean water program that has been one of Gov.
Gavin Newsom’s major initiatives, bringing solutions like
these, is significantly cut in his latest proposed budget.
… Newsom’s latest proposed budget estimates that the
state’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund will provide
about half of what it provided last year for the Safe and
Affordable Drinking Water Fund — $68 million compared
with $130 million.
For the second time in two months, a Superior Court judge has
blocked separate efforts by the Arizona Department of Water
Resources to limit groundwater pumping in the rapidly
growing Phoenix area. On Tuesday, Judge Scott Blaney
of Maricopa County tossed out a rule that established an ADWR
program allowing cities and other water providers to approve
new development in areas the state believes are short of
groundwater if they replace 25% of the groundwater they use
with an alternative water supply. This follows Blaney’s April
ruling that overturned ADWR’s 2023 decision to stop allowing
new homes to be built in much of the Phoenix area that rely on
groundwater. In both cases, Blaney ruled that the state
agency exceeded its legal authority, as spelled out in the 1980
Groundwater Management Act and subsequent regulations.
President Donald Trump is poised to nominate a Western
water and agriculture expert with deep ties to California’s
Central Valley farm industry to lead the Bureau of
Reclamation. The administration intends to nominate Aubrey
Bettencourt to the post overseeing the Interior Department’s
Western water programs, a White House official confirmed. It’s
a move that sidesteps the seven-state brawl over the
drought-withered Colorado River that has given the Trump
administration a litany of political headaches and led to the
withdrawal of the administration’s first nominee for
Reclamation, a long-time Arizona water hand who had drawn
opposition from powerful Republican officials in Utah and
Wyoming.
The Socorro County Board of Commissioners unanimously adopted a
yearlong moratorium on data centers and related infrastructure
projects Tuesday evening after residents for months opposed a
Canadian tech CEO’s proposal to build a data center and solar
array on 10,000 acres of nearby land. … [Green Data CEO
Jason] Bak proposed a massive solar array to power the
data center and said it would rely on technology called
atmospheric water generation to pull moisture out of the air
and convert it into usable water, rather than draining local
aquifers. … In the months since Bak first
unveiled his proposal, residents have packed the room at City
Council and New Mexico Tech town hall meetings to oppose the
project, often contending that the solar array could harm the
surrounding desert environment and that the water technology
was not a proven solution.
It’s late May at Lee’s Ferry, the starting point for rafting
trips down the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. … There’s
the smell of spray-on sunscreen, the buzz of excited crowds,
and — beyond that — the extrasensory vibrations of a tinge of
collective anxiety. Anxiety, because the water level in the
river is on the lower side of normal for this time of
year. Because a historically dry winter in terms of
snowpack in some parts of the West means less water in Lake
Powell, and less water released into the Colorado River
by Glen Canyon Dam. Because, aside from the millions
of people who rely on the river system for water and
hydropower, there’s an entire river rafting economy in the
Grand Canyon that does not know what to expect going forward.
Every summer a line of volunteers in masks and wetsuits floats
down the South Fork Eel, shoulder to shoulder across the
current, counting the one fish almost everyone on the river
wants gone. They are counting Sacramento pikeminnow, and this
is the 11th year they’ve done it. The Eel River Recovery
Project runs the dive every summer. … The pikeminnow is the
most reviled animal in the Eel. Someone dumped it into Lake
Pillsbury in 1979 — a bait-bucket introduction, illegal — and
by 1986, it had spread through the whole basin, its numbers
climbing into the millions. A torpedo of a fish, it eats
juvenile salmon and steelhead on a river fighting to bring
those runs back. … Here is the part that complicates the
hatred: the Sacramento pikeminnow is not an invader. It’s a
California native.
For decades, the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center
has been tracking the clarity of Lake Tahoe with a white disc
known as a Secchi disk, lowered into the depths of “Big Blue.”
For nearly 60 years, their findings have been released annually
in the Lake Tahoe Clarity Report. The most recent report, which
contains the data from 2025, was released on Tuesday. The 2025
report shows that the annual average clarity remains at a
plateau, neither significantly improving nor declining compared
to previous years. The annual average was 69.2 feet in 2025.
That is 7 feet clearer than last year’s average of 62.3 feet,
but not statistically different from recent years, mostly due
to a continuing trend of relatively low clarity during summer.
There’s a new [Colo.] state law aimed at reducing soil erosion
caused by the transfer of water rights out of the Arkansas
River Basin. Once effective next year, it will require
revegetating the land with native plants before water can be
used elsewhere. Municipalities and developers often purchase
and move irrigation water away from agricultural areas, often
known as “buy and dry.” … During the hearings for the
bill, [Colo. state Sen. Cleave] Simpson said there’s an
unintended consequence. “If you make it incrementally just a
little bit harder in Division Two (the Arkansas River Basin) to
transfer water rights from ag to municipal, guess where they go
to look for other transfers: the Rio Grande Basin, the
Colorado River Basin, and the South Platte
where maybe the barriers and the obstacles are a little less
intrinsic and cumbersome.”
Monsoon season is Arizona’s stormiest time of year. Each June
into early July, our predominant winds shift out of the south
as high pressure builds near the Four Corners. That shift in
the winds brings in moisture, which rises to form towering
thunderstorms in the heat of the day. The monsoon season
officially begins on June 15 and runs until September 30.
During that time, thunderstorms often form in the heat of the
day, bringing heavy rain, lightning, damaging winds, dust
storms, and flooding. Not all monsoons are the same,
though. Some years, our monsoon season is hot and dry, while
other years are not as hot and very rainy. … The NOAA
Climate Prediction Center has odds favoring a
wetter-than-normal monsoon across Arizona this year.
