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 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.
Arizona’s top water negotiator is working behind the scenes to
avoid “extremely draconian” cuts to the state’s share of the
Colorado River. It’s an eleventh-hour effort
to work with the federal government, which is expected to
release new rules for managing water in late July. Tom
Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water
Resources, briefed the public on the process of negotiations
and the state’s plans to adapt to water cutbacks. … The
three states that make up the river’s Lower Basin — Arizona,
California and Nevada, countered with a proposal to
voluntarily cut back on water use and avoid harsher, mandatory
cuts from the federal government. Now, Buschatzke
is trying to convince the federal government to adopt it.
The Stockton City Council proclaimed a local emergency
after invasive golden mussels began clogging the
city’s Delta Water Supply Project Intake Pump Station, raising
concerns about the reliability of the water
system serving nearly 200,000 customers in
northern and western Stockton. The council voted 7-0 on June 23
to ratify a local emergency proclamation issued June 19,
giving City Manager Johnny Ford expanded authority to
respond to the infestation. The resolution allows the city
manager to expedite emergency contracts and purchases, suspend
normal contracting limits, use contingency funds to cover
response costs, pursue actions necessary to protect public
health and maintain water operations, and seek state and
federal assistance.
After an exceptionally warm and dry winter, vast swaths of the
Western United States are up in flames—and conditions could get
worse. Several large fires are burning in Arizona,
Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, Nevada and Utah. In Colorado,
three federal wildland firefighters died while battling a blaze
over the weekend. … Winter weather set the stage for
this early and aggressive start to fire season. As I reported
in March, many Western states saw record or near-record lows in
snowpack coinciding with consistently high winter temperatures,
capped off by a heat wave in March that melted much of the
meager reserves. … With an even hotter, dry forecast on
the horizon, experts are concerned that the fires tearing
through much of the Southwest could be a sign of what’s to come
over the next few months.
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A long-simmering Northern California case over water use
restrictions tinged with racial overtones ended Tuesday with a
settlement. Siskiyou County and Sheriff Jeremiah LaRue reached
an agreement with the putative class over what the latter
called discriminatory traffic stops and improper search and
seizure methods. The class — which includes over 1,000 people,
many of whom are Asian American and live in a rural part of the
county called Shasta Vista — sued in 2022. They claimed the
sheriff and county used water ordinances to deprive
them in an area with no public water system. County
officials said they needed the ordinances to fight illegal
cannabis grows. On Tuesday, Chief U.S. District Judge Troy
Nunley approved the settlement agreement between the two sides.
A Kings County groundwater agency recently approved a $2.1
million budget – the minimum it will need to adhere to state
regulations – based on a future assessment election that even
its own manager doesn’t think will pass. The South Fork
Kings Groundwater Sustainability Agency (GSA) approved the plan
on June 18. It hinges on the county continuing an agreement to
loan the GSA money as an advance on existing land assessment
fees that are set to expire in 2028. A Proposition 218
election to set new land assessment fees, which has yet to be
scheduled, is expected to fail, according to South Fork General
Manager Johnny Gailey. Meanwhile, growers may be asked to
voluntarily pay a pumping fee as part of an “innovative revenue
stream” being considered.
The public’s input is being sought on ideas for long-term
resilience of two Tulare County waterways at a meeting July 7
from 1 to 3 p.m. via Zoom. The Tulare Basin Watershed
Partnership is kicking off “Sequoias to the Sloughs (S2S): A
Watershed Assessment and Stewardship Initiative” thanks to a
$300,000 grant from the Bureau of Reclamation’s WaterSMART
Cooperative Watershed Management Program. The meeting is the
inaugural event of implementing the grant. The goal is to begin
developing a unified vision for connecting the people,
agencies, and organizations along the Tule River and Deer Creek
watersheds, which begin high in the southern Sierra Nevada and
wind their way to the San Joaquin Valley floor.
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released today its second
quarterly public update for 2026 detailing the implementation
of two historic agreements signed with Mexico in 2025 to
permanently end the years-long Tijuana River sewage crisis.
… Since the last quarterly public update in March, the
Trump Administration and Mexico have taken a number of
important actions to end the sewage crisis, including EPA
releasing previously agreed to Border Water Infrastructure
Program (BWIP) funds to begin construction on Pump Station 1
(PB-1) and Tijuana River Gates projects. Mexico is also
advancing procurement and construction of critical sewer line
and pump station rehabilitations. Additionally, both the U.S.
and Mexico have advanced progress on a suite of actions agreed
to in Minute 333, including infrastructure projects, research
studies, and planning for operation and maintenance (O&M)
of critical sites and systems that will account for future
population growth in Tijuana.
Governor Gavin Newsom today announced the release of the
California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) California
Salmon Strategy for a Hotter, Drier Future: Second Progress
Report — showcasing extensive progress on the 71 actions to
restore salmon populations mapped out in the 2024 Salmon
Strategy set by the Governor. In the last two years, the state
has fully completed 49% of the actions and partially met or
advanced progress on 51% of the actions towards safeguarding
salmon populations and their habitats. … The progress
led by the state, combined with recent wet winters, has created
a strong foundation for improving habitat, rebuilding salmon
populations, and applying new science to fisheries management.
… For the fourth year in a row, Shasta Lake is over 90% full.
At this capacity, its shoreline is longer than that of San
Francisco Bay and Lake Tahoe. … Built in the 1940s,
Shasta Lake and its dam are a water valve and storage tank for
around 41% of the state’s supply into the Central Valley
Project, the aquatic backbone of California. Water that passes
through one of the highest concrete dams in the country
irrigates the valley’s numerous farms before spilling out
through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta into San Francisco
Bay. It also keeps the rivers under human control, shielding
those who are downstream from major flooding. The Bureau
of Reclamation manages Shasta Lake with four main priorities:
store water for the Central Valley Project, generate
hydroelectric power, control potential floods to protect farms
and cities like Redding, and provide recreation opportunities
for Californians and visitors.
Speculation is growing over whether a data center could be
linked to a rare bacterium discovered in Cheyenne’s reuse
wastewater system earlier this year, as city officials continue
to withhold the identity of the industrial user responsible for
the discharge. Four days after the Cheyenne Board of Public
Utilities publicly disclosed the contamination, which happened
in February, officials have yet to identify either the company
or the industry involved, saying legal and regulatory reviews
are still underway. … The Board of Public Utilities has
fielded multiple public records requests as residents demand to
know what industry is behind the hazardous discharge, who the
offender is and why the public wasn’t notified as soon as the
contaminant was discovered in February.
The South Tahoe Public Utility District has released its 2025
Water Quality Consumer Confidence Report, confirming that the
community continues to receive safe, reliable, and high-quality
drinking water that meets or exceeds all state and federal
drinking water standards. Each year, water providers across the
country are required by the Safe Drinking Water Act to prepare
and distribute a Consumer Confidence Report to inform customers
about the quality of their drinking water. The District’s 2025
report highlights the results of thousands of water quality
tests conducted throughout the year and provides detailed
information about the source and treatment of South Lake
Tahoe’s drinking water.
We’re proud to announce that SJV Water was recognized for its
outstanding journalism in the statewide 2025 California
Journalism Awards contest by the California News Publishers
Association. We won two first place awards in our division, one
for our weekly newsletter “The Splash” and the other for best
enterprise reporting for our video series “Who Owns the Kern
River?” … Our entry for “enterprise reporting” was
unusual as it wasn’t a print entry but video. Our goal was to
help viewers understand at least some of the complexities of
how the ownership of the Kern River has evolved over the years,
who gets how much water and when.
… Thomas Gibson, of West Sacramento, has been appointed
Director at the California Department of Water Resources.
Gibson has been Chief Deputy Director at the California
Department of Water Resources since 2024, where he was Chief
Counsel from 2021 to 2024. He held multiple positions at the
California Natural Resources Agency from 2014 to 2020,
including Deputy Secretary and Special Counsel for Water,
Undersecretary, and General Counsel. Gibson held multiple
positions at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife
from 2007 to 2014, including General Counsel and Assistant
Chief Counsel. He held several roles at Best Best &
Krieger LLP from 2002 to 2008, including Partner and
Associate.
For the past 20 years, the Colorado River has been operated
under a set of guidelines negotiated between the seven states
that depend on the river. Those guidelines expire this year,
and after five years of grinding negotiations over a new
agreement, the upstream states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and
New Mexico remain deadlocked against the downstream states of
California, Arizona and Nevada. … That has set up a showdown
over a legal time bomb that’s been ticking away at the
heart of the Colorado River Compact since the river’s
guiding document was signed more than 100 years ago. The Lower
Basin states believe the Compact promised them a minimum
delivery of water sent down the river from the Upper Basin. The
Upper Basin states believe the Compact promised them a fixed
amount of water that they could rely on to meet future growth.
As the river’s flows have dwindled, those two supposed
guarantees are proving to be irreconcilable.
For the next five years, the Environmental Protection Agency
has indicated it will not require public water utilities to
test for microplastics or pharmaceuticals in drinking water,
according to a proposed rule published in the Federal Register.
On Friday, the EPA submitted a list of chemicals it plans to
test for under the Unregulated Contaminant Monitoring Rule, a
mandatory testing program used to collect information about
concerning chemicals in drinking water that could be harming
human health. It did not include microplastics or
pharmaceuticals. The omissions come after
announcements by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin earlier this year
that his agency was designating microplastics and
pharmaceuticals priority contaminants for testing.
The U.S. Supreme Court will weigh in on a legal battle over
one of Colorado’s critical water sources as a
neighboring state seeks to use more water from the South Platte
River. The nation’s highest court on Monday announced it would
hear the case, in which Nebraska officials claim Colorado water
administrators are violating a century-old water
compact by failing to send enough of the river’s water
across the border. They also say Colorado officials are
interfering in the neighboring state’s efforts to build a canal
that would allow it to take more of the river’s water. Colorado
Attorney General Phil Weiser on Monday denied Nebraska
officials’ allegations that the Centennial State was violating
the 1923 South Platte River Compact.
When four dams were torn down along the
California-Oregon border two years ago, scientists were stunned
by the large numbers of salmon that moved so quickly
up the newly unobstructed Klamath River. This month brought
another striking development. A Chinook salmon was detected
going up the river in Oregon, past the former dam sites, and it
was not part of the fall run of fish that’s already
been racing up the Klamath in late summer and in early fall.
It was a much rarer fish: a spring-run salmon,
which migrates earlier in the year and has long struggled to
survive on the West Coast. … The success of the
run, on top of the fall run, stands to increase the prevalence,
diversity and resilience of struggling West Coast salmon.
A Kern County conservation district has announced it is
opposing the potential data center slated to be built in the
Ridgecrest and Inyokern area, citing low water levels. The
Eastern Kern County Resource Conservation District submitted a
letter of opposition to the California Energy Commission saying
the project would create “significant environmental impacts”
and would “undermine decades of local and state efforts to
achieve groundwater sustainability” in the area if built.
… If approved, the project — formally named the Inyokern
RB Data Center — would pull water from the Indian Wells
Valley Groundwater Basin to support its cooling
towers.
Northwest Colorado is no stranger to dry years, but 2026 is
shaping up to be one for the books. With a record-low snowpack,
rising temperatures and extremely limited runoff, the State of
Colorado, as of June 4, has declared a statewide drought
emergency, leaving ranchers across the Yampa-White-Green River
basin facing difficult decisions that affect both their
livelihoods and their way of life. … This year, the impacts
are already being felt across pastures, hay fields and water
systems. Many ranchers are reporting lower forage production,
dry stock ponds and reduced irrigation supplies. As a result,
some have made the tough choice to reduce herd sizes earlier
than planned, while others are hauling water long distances
just to meet basic livestock needs.
