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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Denver Water can finish its Gross Dam expansion and fill the
controversial reservoir in western Boulder County, the 10th
U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday, lifting an
injunction by a lower court judge and confirming the dam’s
permits as sound. The appeals court said the U.S.
Army Corps of Engineers had acted responsibly in issuing
construction permits for the $600 million expansion,
which is largely complete and will be filled using
water rights Denver holds in the Colorado River basin
on the western side of the Continental Divide. While a
federal district judge in Denver had issued the injunction
after declaring the Corps had failed to consider less-damaging
alternatives, or the fact that climate change could rob
Colorado of river water, the appeals court rejected that
view.
As the region braces for the looming threat of flooding posed
by a strengthening El Niño system expected to batter much of
the West Coast this winter, Sonoma County’s
northernmost city is working to safeguard critical power and
water infrastructure from flood damage. The Cloverdale
City Council earlier this month unanimously passed a
resolution declaring a local emergency — the first in Sonoma
County — in anticipation of what’s expected to be another
heavy, if not, historically stormy winter. … The city,
which sits directly adjacent to the Russian
River, is no stranger to the chaos unleashed by
atmospheric rivers that have in recent years drenched the
region and led river levels to rise.
San Diego County officials presented preliminary findings
Tuesday from a long-awaited study that estimates the Tijuana
River sewage and pollution crisis costs the regional economy
between $125.6 million and $503.5 million annually,
with unmitigated losses potentially reaching $7.9
billion over 20 years. The Board of Supervisors
received the draft report during its regular meeting, though no
action was required. The board directed the county’s chief
administrative officer in September 2025 to commission the
study, which was ultimately awarded to the consulting firm
ECOnorthwest. Supervisor Paloma Aguirre said the
findings will bolster the county’s case for outside
intervention and aid in this crisis.
From neighborhood protests to countywide moratoriums, water-
and energy-intensive data centers have united protesters who
distrust the industrial behemoths. … There are now
more than 70 data centers either operating in or
planned for Nevada, but as more are planned, Nevadans
across the state are turning out in droves at public meetings
to speak against their construction. … Water
consumption per data center varies. … City of Reno
planning numbers forecast the Keystone and Webb data centers —
which are on the “smaller” side for data centers, requiring
less than 30 megawatts of power per project — will each require
around 650,000 gallons of water a year. … Across
Southern Nevada, data centers account for about 0.5
percent of water usage. Golf courses account for more than 5
percent while casinos use 7 percent.
The commission that represents Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and
Wyoming received sobering updates on declining reservoir
levels, worsening conditions on the Colorado
River and the ongoing struggle to keep Lake
Powell from dropping to record lows. The states
offered grim reports of their snowpack conditions, underscoring
the drought hammering them. … The Upper Colorado
River Commission met Monday for the first time since Interior
Secretary Doug Burgum released his agency’s decision on how to
manage the river for the next two years. The decision was left
to Burgum after the seven states of the Colorado River
Basin failed to reach an agreement after two years of
negotiations on how to operate when the river’s
current agreement ends on Sept. 30.
Golden mussels appear to have – so far – skipped one district
in Kings County, Tulare Lake Basin Water Storage District.
The invasive species wreaking havoc throughout
California’s water systems from Yolo to San Diego
counties are in districts immediately to the north and
south, but not the Tulare Lake Basin district. … It’s
not because Tulare Lake Basin hasn’t taken deliveries from the
State Water Project, which is spreading the mussels from their
initial infestation point in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta,
throughout California. Tulare Lake Basin has taken 43,760 acre
feet of water off the aqueduct as of Aug. 31. But no mussels.
Every few minutes, an airplane flies over the Upper Elkhorn
Basin, reminding those who live and work there that changes are
coming. Bounded on the east by the Sacramento River and the
west by the Yolo Bypass, the quiet, agricultural stretch of
Yolo County has been farmed for more than a century. … But as
climate change and development along the eastern edge of the
river increases flooding risk for thousands of residents in the
Sacramento region, state and federal water managers are eyeing
the Upper Elkhorn Basin as a potential solution. To protect
vulnerable points along the river, including the airport and
other parts of the Natomas Basin, the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers recently released a tentative plan to widen
the Yolo Bypass into the Elkhorn Basin. The
move would inundate roughly 1,200 acres of prime
farmland, fundamentally altering how the land would be
used.
The Chico City Council discussed protests over a sewer rate
hike and a third-party review of the Chico Police Department’s
audit of its automated license plate reader program at its
meeting Tuesday night. The Chico City Council began a
public hearing on recently approved sewer rate
hikes. … The council decided to continue the
hearing on November 17th after the city received protest
letters from property owners. The protest letters are part of
the Proposition 218 process, which limits local governments
from increasing property-related fees without specific taxpayer
consent or voter approval. … The city council approved
the rate increase in June. It amounts to, on average, more than
a 160-percent rate increase over the next 5 years.
Parts of Merced County have slowly sunk over time because large
amounts of groundwater have been pumped from beneath the San
Joaquin Valley, according to the U.S. Geological
Survey. One of the most heavily affected areas is near El
Nido, south of Merced. USGS has mapped a large sinking area
covering about 1,200 square miles. The area stretches roughly
from Merced to Mendota and from Los Banos to Madera.
… USGS researchers found significant sinking near El
Nido between 2007 and 2014. At the fastest point measured
during that study period, the ground near El Nido was sinking
at about 270 millimeters per year.
The Carmichael Water District (CWD) Board of Directors is
pleased to announce the appointment of Pablo Arroyave
as the district’s new general manager. Arroyave will
lead the public agency responsible for providing water to
Carmichael residents and oversee its operations, workforce,
finances and customer service. … Arroyave joins CWD from
the San Luis & Delta-Mendota Water Authority, where he has
served as chief operating officer since 2019. … Arroyave
previously held senior leadership positions with the U.S.
Bureau of Reclamation, including acting regional director and
deputy regional director for the Mid-Pacific Region.
Tucson’s long-term water supply “is in significant danger” if
PFAS contamination of the city’s central wellfield isn’t
addressed, City Manager Tim Thomure says. He made the statement
Tuesday in a pitch to the City Council to approve what he said
is a first step toward launching a cleanup: the proposed
agreement between the city and a private, nonprofit group of
Air Force veterans, which sources previously told the Star
would result in the Air Force helping to pay to start PFAS
cleanup. … In the past 20 years, the city has stopped
using most of those [contaminated] wells in favor of the
renewable CAP water delivered from the Colorado River. But with
CAP supplies jeopardized for the long-term due to river flow
declines, city officials may need to rely on city groundwater
supplies to some extent instead.
A federal judge appears split on a bid to stop the expansion of
a pit mine in eastern Arizona that has reduced the flow of a
nearby creek by more than 90% in the last decade. The Pinto
Valley Mine uses more than 5 trillion gallons of water per
year, extracting copper from the Tonto National Forest east of
Miami, Arizona, and consequently reducing subflow of Pinto
Creek, home to at least two species of endangered birds.
Because the mine extracts most of its water from privately
owned wells on private land outside Forest Service
jurisdiction, the government claims it has no authority to
limit how much water the mine can pump. In a Phoenix courtroom
Tuesday afternoon, Thomas Delehanty said the federal government
can and should regulate activity on private land if the result
of that activity materially harms conditions on nearby public
land.
Americans have a lot of questions about their drinking water.
How is it treated? What’s in it? Most importantly, is it safe?
“I’ve even been out to eat where people overhear me talking
about my work and come over to ask me a question about their
tap water,” said Kimberly Parker, an environmental engineer who
studies chemical contaminants in drinking water at Washington
University in St Louis. Most Americans have access to municipal
water, which “tends to be really well treated” and largely safe
to drink, said Parker. Across the US, water is monitored for
contamination via centralized infrastructure at federal and
state levels. In Parker’s experience, “many environmental
engineers choose not to use filtered water” because of their
informed confidence in the safety of tap water, she said.
Officials in the Upper Colorado River Basin plan to continue
draining Flaming Gorge in Wyoming to protect Lake Powell, one
of the basin’s largest reservoirs. The Colorado River
Basin, which extends from Colorado to California and northern
Mexico, uses a network of reservoirs to store vital water
supplies for cities, farms, recreation, the environment and
millions of people. But the basin’s overall storage has
dropped to a third of its capacity, officials said
during an Upper Colorado River Basin meeting
Monday. Lake Powell holds about 22% of its total
capacity. Since April, the Bureau of Reclamation has
released about 450,000 acre-feet of water to help boost storage
in Lake Powell. Colorado and other Upper Basin state officials
agreed Monday that those releases should continue
through April.
… [S]omething unusual is sliding up the west coast of Mexico
right now, and it is aimed squarely at California. A mass of
warm, elevated ocean water hundreds of miles long is
moving north at roughly 6 mph — about the pace of a
jogger — and currently less than 350 miles from Southern
California’s beaches. … For Sacramento and the Delta
region, the connection is closer than it looks on a
map. The Delta is tidal, and in early fall — when
river flows are near an annual low — the ocean’s twice-daily
pulse reaches all the way up the Sacramento River to downtown.
A higher ocean at the Golden Gate Bridge also
translates into a smaller but measurable lift in water
levels through the Delta’s leveed margins upstream. It
also shifts the balance in the ongoing tug-of-war between river
outflow and salty bay water pushing inland.
The Tule East Groundwater Sustainability Agency in southern
Tulare County just can’t seem to put a foot right. The
state is bearing down, demanding an end to overpumping that has
sunk huge swaths of land – taking the critical
Friant-Kern Canal with it. Surrounding farmers and water
managers want action and they want it now. Tule East directors
and staff are still dotting the “i”s to create a
legitimate governing agency. Meanwhile, Tule East
farmers have apparently abandoned all restraint and are
“pumping like it’s the wild west.” The situation is a mess,
according to someone familiar with the process and the players
who agreed to talk with SJV Water.
Byron Sher, a collegial Stanford University law professor who
ran for Palo Alto City Council in the 1960s after losing a
battle over the widening of a local street, then rose to the
state Legislature, writing many of California’s landmark
environmental laws over three decades, has died. … Over
a career that stretched from 1980 to 1996 in the state
Assembly, and from 1996 to 2004 in the state Senate, Sher
passed dozens of groundbreaking bills that made California a
national leader in environmental policy. Among them are the
California Clean Air Act in 1987, the state’s Safe
Drinking Water Act in 1989, and a complex deal with
former Sen. Dianne Feinstein in 1999 to preserve thousands of
acres of old-growth redwoods at Headwaters Forest in Humboldt
County.
Hand-width cracks crisscross Armin’s pistachio orchard in
southeastern Iran, damaging irrigation pipes and swallowing
precious water as the ground beneath him sinks. … The region
has long covered much of the world’s demand for pistachios, but
a combination of drought and groundwater
extraction for irrigation has made Rafsanjan one of the
fastest-sinking areas in Iran. One study found parts
of the ground are dropping by up to 37 centimeters (14
inches) annually. And that is impacting
production. It’s a similar picture in California,
where some pistachio farmers are also seeing their ground
sink. … The link between growers in the two
countries goes back to the 1960s when US famers started
building a pistachio industry. They did it using an
Iranian variety.
In a rugged, sparsely populated patch of Arizona, there’s a
fragile system of rivers and creeks that cuts through
the desert. The San Pedro River and its tributaries,
locals and environmentalists say, are a unique gem. Now,
they’re sounding the alarm about a number of potential
threats to its water and surrounding ecosystems.
Residents are pushing back on a number of proposed
developments, including two mining projects, a natural gas
pipeline and a petroleum pipeline. Organizers say they could
harm the San Pedro, one of the last undammed,
free-flowing rivers in the Southwest, and the Aravaipa
Canyon area, a striking section of wilderness that attracts
tourists from around the state. Melissa Crytzer Fry, chair of
the board of directors for the Lower San Pedro Watershed
Alliance, said new mining activity could pose a “grave danger”
by leading to over-pumping of groundwater.
Members of Arizona’s congressional delegation on Monday
announced a $2 million investment into water reuse
research for semiconductor manufacturing. The federal
funding will go to Arizona State University to “develop, test,
and demonstrate innovative water reuse technologies.” The
announcement comes from Democratic Sens. Ruben Gallego and Mark
Kelly, along with Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari and Congressman
Greg Stanton. The project will test out various water
treatment technologies at ASU’s MacroTechnology Works
facility in Tempe. Researchers will measure each
technology’s water savings, cost reductions and any operational
benefits. The data can inform what works best for
water conservation.
