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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The headlines below are the original headlines used in the publication cited at the time they are posted here and do not reflect the stance of the Water Education Foundation, an impartial nonprofit that remains neutral.
The federal government is limiting which bodies of water are
eligible for protection under the Clean Water
Act. Now, Colorado is working on its own set of rules
for places that will no longer be federally protected,
following a 2024 bipartisan law. … The Sackett
ruling, along with the new proposal to only protect permanent
rivers and wetlands directly connected to them, poses a problem
for Colorado and other Mountain West states. Because of the
region’s reliance on snowmelt for much of its water supply,
bodies of water are often ephemeral, or intermittent.
… The Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center has a sprawling
landmass greater than the city of Denver. It is home to the
largest data center in the US, built by the company Switch. …
The Truckee River supplies the industrial center with water and
also serves as the primary source of water for Pyramid
Lake. … And as data centers continue to proliferate
in water-stressed areas around the globe, which can offer cheap
land and energy as well as low humidity for easier chip
cooling, one of the central concerns in local communities is
what happens if the water runs dry.
A federal district court in California failed to consider
impacts to other endangered species before
ordering San Luis Obispo County to develop a flow and release
plan for local steelhead trout, a federal appeals court ruled
Wednesday. The injunction blocking the Lopez Dam expansion “may
benefit one protected species at the expense of other protected
species,” and the US District Court for the Central District of
California didn’t consider this factor or the public interest,
the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said.
… The Tribal Council of the Colorado River Indian Tribes
decided to recognize the river as a legal person under tribal
law. It’s the second time a Native tribe has declared legal
personhood for a river in the United States. The Yurok Tribe in
Northern California in 2019 declared the Klamath River a legal
person. I was interested to learn more about why the leaders of
the Colorado River Indian Tribes, or CRIT, wanted to take this
step, and Chairwoman Amelia Flores agreed to talk with
me.
California can still wring water out of its rivers — in theory,
and only if you’re willing to pay an increasingly steep premium
for it. Take Sites Reservoir, which could become the first new
major reservoir in California in decades. It would pull water
from the Sacramento River to fill a valley in the
coast range with enough water for roughly 3 million households,
then distribute it to the local farmers and Southern California
cities that would partly fund its construction. Sites has
serious political weight: it’s on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s
priority list, has growing interest from the Trump
administration and is drawing on tens of millions in state
dollars reallocated from other now-defunct water projects.
… The 2023 judgment of Las Posas v. Fox Canyon appointed Fox
Canyon as the regulatory “watermaster” with ultimate oversight
of the basins and allocations. Voices of dissent quickly
emerged, claiming that the judgment appeared to favor large
landowners. Lana Franklin, Rob Perry and Debra Tash, who own
smaller properties in and near Somis, were left with no water
allocations at all. … Franklin, Perry and Tash joined a
group of farmers who are currently appealing the outcome,
claiming that they never received proper notification through
certified mail, and were never alerted that they needed to join
the comprehensive adjudication in order to maintain their water
allocations.
For the first time in 70 years, adult Chinook salmon have been
spotted swimming the 86 vertical feet needed to return to
Alameda Creek in lower Niles Canyon – and it could be a turning
point in the decades-long effort to restore the East Bay’s
watersheds. … Since the beginning of November,
volunteers from the nonprofit group Alameda Creek Alliance —
which has worked to remove dams and install fish ladders since
1997 — have recorded nearly a dozen specimens of Chinook
Salmon. These sightings come just weeks after PG&E and the
nonprofit CalTrout finished a $15 million project to remove a
gas pipeline that was the last barrier impeding fish migration
upstream.
… While dry weather continues in California, high clouds from
the distant storms will dot the sky from San Francisco to
Sacramento, creating ideal conditions for colorful sunrises and
sunsets Thursday and Friday. A big high-pressure system
blocking storms from hitting California is steering them toward
the Pacific Northwest. … California’s Del Norte and
Humboldt counties could get hit with passing showers from the
storms, but rainfall totals are predicted to remain light.
… Atmospheric rivers hitting the Pacific Northwest leave
Northern California on the warm side of the moist air mass, and
temperatures from San Francisco to Lake Tahoe could be 10
degrees or more above normal next week.
Other weather and water supply news around the West:
Dr. Paula Stigler Granados, a researcher from San Diego State
University, says “without a doubt” pollution in the Tijuana
River Valley is making people sick. Her comments are based on
findings from an online survey being conducted by her and other
scientists who are studying the effects of raw sewage and other
contamination on those who live along the Tijuana River Valley,
which is polluted by effluent and chemicals that flow in from
south of the border. Studies have shown that contaminated water
that splashes on rocks or is churned by the surf in the ocean
releases dangerous gases such as hydrogen sulfide into the air.
… It’s just the latest phase in a drought that has crushed
the Southwest over the last two and a half decades: the driest
period the region has seen in 1,200 years. Even the
lashing rains of the atmospheric rivers that have swept over
the Southwest in recent winters have done little to alleviate
the trend. Drought, it seems, is here to stay for many more
years. In fact, the current dry spell could last another two
decades, according to a paper recently published in Nature. The
results of their analysis, which relied on the data of over 500
climate simulations produced by world-leading research
institutions, rewrite our understanding of one of the key
climate systems controlling weather in the western United
States.
ASCE [American Society of Civil Engineers] Region 9 released
the 2025 Report Card for California’s Infrastructure, assigning
the state an overall grade of C-, unchanged from 2019 and below
the national grade of C. The report evaluated 17 infrastructure
categories and found that while six sectors improved,
several—including dams, drinking water, schools, and
stormwater—received lower marks than in the previous
assessment. Stormwater infrastructure was graded D, reflecting
persistent challenges with aging systems, climate-driven
extreme weather, and funding gaps.
The State Water Resources Control Board today announced six new
appointees and three re-appointments to the Safe and Affordable
Funding for Equity and Resilience (SAFER) Advisory Group. The
advisory group, which meets quarterly, consists of volunteers
who provide local perspectives to the State Water Board as it
works to improve access to safe drinking water in
disadvantaged communities throughout the state. The
new and re-appointees join ten continuing members, all with
diverse drinking water backgrounds and experiences.
The Association of California Water Agencies (ACWA) today
presented a Lifetime Achievement Award to California Farm Water
Coalition Executive Director Mike Wade. Presented during ACWA’s
2025 Fall Conference & Expo in San Diego, the award recognizes
individuals who have made remarkable and lasting contributions
to California water. Mike Wade has served as the Executive
Director of the California Farm Water Coalition since 1998,
educating the public about the critical connection between farm
water and the state’s food supply. He has also led the
Agricultural Water Management Council and serves on ACWA’s
Communications Committee.
The Trump administration plans to weaken environmental
protections for threatened fish in California’s
Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and pump
more water to Central Valley farmlands, according to letters
obtained by the Los Angeles Times. … The U.S. Bureau of
Reclamation recently notified California agencies that it plans
to pump more water out of the delta into the southbound
aqueducts of the federally operated Central Valley Project. …
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife wrote that it is
concerned about weakened protections for winter-run and
spring-run chinook salmon, steelhead trout, delta smelt and
longfin smelt.
The San Joaquin Basin faces significant water management
challenges due to decades of groundwater overdraft and severe
floods. According to the Department of Water Resources, their
newly released San Joaquin Basin Flood-MAR Watershed Studies
highlight strategies to address these issues across several
watersheds, including Calaveras, Stanislaus and
Tuolumne. The studies emphasize capturing and storing
floodwater underground, known as Flood-Managed Aquifer
Recharge, as a key strategy. This approach aims to transform
extreme weather events into opportunities to replenish
groundwater and support ecosystems.
The holiday season in the Kaweah subbasin got a little more
jolly thanks to its formal removal from the state’s groundwater
enforcement process on Tuesday. The state Water Resources
Control Board passed a resolution at its Dec. 2 meeting that
officially ended the threat of state intervention for the
Kaweah subbasin, which covers the northern part of Tulare
County’s flatlands and a portion of Kings County. It will
continue to work under Department of Water Resources oversight
to implement plans to reduce excessive groundwater pumping.
The Imperial Irrigation District (IID) on Dec. 2 announced its
transition from the Salton Sea Authority to the State of
California’s newly established Salton Sea Conservancy. IID’s
transition in participation from the Salton Sea Authority to
the Conservancy will strengthen alignment among state and
federal agencies and facilitate project operations and
management. This next step reflects a natural evolution of
IID’s long-standing leadership in Salton Sea progress that has
led from studies to planning to on-the-ground projects, along
with ongoing efforts to restore habitat and address regional
air quality concerns.
Amazon Web Services has pulled out of its long-planned role as
future operator of the Project Blue data center complex on the
Tucson area’s far southeast side, three sources told the Star.
Amazon has left the embattled project because its operations
aren’t compatible with the project’s recently announced plans
to use air cooling instead of water cooling of the data
centers’ servers. … Project Blue officials had pledged
to build a $100 million pipeline to deliver reclaimed water to
the data centers. But outside critics said the city would be
unable to effectively enforce those and other water-related
requirements for the project, including a commitment by the
company to be “water positive.”
Congressman Ken Calvert introduced the Agua Caliente Band of
Cahuilla Indians Water Rights Settlement Act, or H.R. 5935, on
Monday. … The Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians
Water Rights Settlement Act ratifies that the Tribe has a
federally reserved water right up to 20,000 acre-feet per year
of groundwater from the Indio Subbasin that is
held in trust by the U.S. for the Tribe and individual
allottees. The Tribe would also have surface water
rights in Tahquitz Creek, Andreas Creek, and
Whitewater Ranch, held in trust by the U.S.
Alter Terra, a binational environmental group, is sounding the
alarm about the need to dredge the Tijuana River channel just
inside U.S. territory to avoid massive flooding near and around
the San Ysidro Port of Entry. The group says the floor of the
channel has risen by 10 feet over the years, meaning it will
take less water for the river to crest over its levees.
… The sediment is made up of sludge from raw sewage,
dirt from construction sites, soil from Tijuana hillsides and
other materials that come in from Mexico. … The other
option is to raise the levees, which requires congressional
approval and major funding.
