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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With the leaders of seven states deadlocked over the Colorado
River’s deepening crisis, negotiations increasingly seem likely
to fail — which could lead the federal government to impose
unilateral cuts and spark lawsuits that would bring a complex
court battle. … In a meeting this week, Arizona
officials seemed to be anticipating failure. They pointed out
that the amount of water flowing into Lake Mead, the nation’s
largest reservoir, could soon fall to a trigger point —
a legal “tripwire” that would allow Arizona to demand
cuts upriver and sue for a violation of the compact.
… The water reaching the Lower Basin will probably fall
below that point later this year or next, which has never
happened.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin convened national and local
elected officials on Thursday at the Coronado Community Center
to discuss progress on the Tijuana River sewage crisis, marking
his second visit to San Diego since April. … Zeldin
presented several key projects in various stages of completion,
with completion dates scheduled for 2026, 2027 and 2028. …
The Tijuana River Gates, a collection pipe project, emerged as
a centerpiece of the discussion. Mexico funded the first phase,
which began construction in September 2025. Zeldin expects
construction to conclude in six months and to remove 5
million gallons of sewage per day once operational.
The American West’s snowpack is valuable for many reasons.
Snowmelt supplies much of the water flowing through the
region’s streams, rivers, irrigation canals and household
faucets—a vital role that has taken on new urgency this winter
as much of the West struggles with scant snow cover.
… But in the economic realm, researchers have attempted
to put a dollar figure on the region’s snow, and the numbers
they’ve generated are huge. “This stuff’s worth trillions,
not billions” of dollars, said snow scientist Matthew Sturm,
lead author of a widely cited 2017 paper in Water Resources
Research that estimated the value of the water embedded in the
West’s snowpack.
Other snowpack and water supply news around the West:
The groundwater in parts of western Kern County is salty and,
generally, considered a bit crummy, longtime farmer Brad
Kroeker admits. But that doesn’t mean it should be abandoned to
wholesale pollution as Kroeker believes will happen if a
“de-designation” recently approved by the Central Valley
Regional Water Quality Control Board gains final approval from
the state Water Resources Control Board. The regional board
voted 5-1 at its Dec. 12, 2025 meeting to “de-designate”
groundwater for municipal and agricultural uses under a
six-square-mile area north of McKittrick. … The
de-designation action was the end result of a lawsuit filed
against the regional board by Valley Water Management Company,
which has operated two large, unlined oilfield produced water
percolation ponds in the area since the 1960s.
California doesn’t have a water scarcity problem. It has a
distribution problem, according to Nícola Ulibarrí. … In a
report commissioned by UC Berkeley’s Possibility Lab, Ulibarrí
argues that California’s existing water infrastructure already
collects enough water to sustain all state residents. The real
crisis, says the UC Irvine associate professor of urban
planning and public policy, is that thousands of Californians
remain disconnected from that abundant supply.
… Thousands of households, particularly in rural areas,
remain unconnected to the state’s large-scale water
infrastructure system. These residents depend on groundwater
wells. … Nearly a million California residents who are
connected to the water system receive water that fails to meet
federal Safe Drinking Water Act standards.
California American Water Co. is asking state regulators to
deny an application to lift a moratorium on new hookups from
Carmel River water that has left the Monterey Peninsula for two
decades without the ability to construct badly needed housing.
Cal Am is saying other water supplies, such as Pure Water
Monterey and its expansion, are not stable enough to lift a
cease-and-desist order regulators placed on pumping a specified
amount of water out of the Carmel River aquifer. … The desist
order was slapped on the Peninsula because Cal Am was pumping
significantly more water than could sustain a steelhead
fishery, a protected species. The order was put in
place following lawsuits filed by the Sierra Club and
others.
The golden mussel, an invasive species that is making its way
across the delta, through waterways and pipes, is now
reaching as far south as Riverside County. … On
top of concerns that farmers won’t be able to pump water during
the dry months, it also poses a flooding threat to urban areas.
… Action is already being taken at the county and state
levels. The San Joaquin County Board of Supervisors created a
local golden mussel committee to help communicate better with
state and affected areas in the county. The state has also
secured $20 million in this year’s budget to combat the spread
and support local prevention efforts. In the meantime, these
small invaders are here to stay.
An Arizona bill would prohibit the use of fluoride in state
public water systems. State Sen. Janae Shamp, R-Surprise,
introduced Senate Bill 1019, which would prevent people
and political subdivisions from adding fluoride or
fluoride-containing compounds to Arizona’s public water system.
The Senate Committee on Government recently advanced SB 1019 to
the floor for a full Senate vote. … If SB 1019 becomes
law, the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality would
enforce it, Shamp told The Center Square. … If Arizona were
to pass SB 1019, it would join Florida and Utah as the only
states that prohibit fluoridation of their water systems.
A controversial data center and power plant development in the
West Valley has cleared a key hurdle with an Arizona
Corporation Commission vote. The commission voted
unanimously Feb. 4 in favor of a Certificate of Environmental
Compatibility for Project Baccara, a first-of-its-kind
arrangement in the state whose developers want to build a
700-megawatt gas-fired power plant to fuel a data center
project just outside Surprise. … Baccara is seeking out
agreements with a neighboring facility to use their
treated wastewater, according to Davies, but
as it stands they have permission to use
groundwater.
The Mendocino County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday discussed
a proposal to remove one of its supervisors from a commission
after she attended an event with the U.S. Secretary of
Agriculture, which one board member said could be a conflict of
interest. The board did not end up taking action against
Supervisor Madeline Cline, who went to a conference last month
headlined by U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, who
has opposed the decommissioning of the Potter Valley
Project. Cline represents District 1, which includes
Potter Valley. On Tuesday, supervisors discussed the
possibility of unseating Cline from the Mendocino County Inland
Water and Power Commission.
U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla rolled out two new water bills aimed at
easing the state’s growing climate-driven water shortages and
making water supplies more dependable across the state. The
Making Our Communities Resilient through Enhancing Water for
Agriculture, Technology, the Environment, and Residences Act —
the MORE WATER Act — and the Growing Resilient Operations from
Water Savings and Municipal-Agricultural
Reciprocally-beneficial Transactions, — the GROW SMART Act —
have drawn strong backing from regional water agencies, which
praised the measures as important steps toward improving water
reliability and affordability throughout the Golden State.
San Luis Obispo County has designed a new program to support
farmers who wish to stop irrigating their land. The goal: To
reduce overpumping in the Paso Robles Area Groundwater
Basin. It’s one of 21 basins in the state considered
“critically overdrafted” by the California Department of Water
Resources, which means more water is pumped from the basin than
is returned. On Tuesday, the San Luis Obispo County Board of
Supervisors voted 4-0 to create a registry for farmers who
voluntarily decide to fallow their land. … Farmers who enroll
in the program will maintain county property tax benefits
related to their status as agricultural producers. Meanwhile,
contrary to county law, they also will be allowed to resume
irrigating their land when they want to, even if it is fallowed
for more than five years.
Water agencies of all sizes are crafting plans and forming task
forces across local, state and federal entities to protect
infrastructure from the spread of golden mussels, a tiny,
invasive species that has already spread the length of the
state’s network of waterways. In the San Joaquin Valley,
Friant Water Authority is in the midst of another round of
environmental DNA testing, this time on the entire length of
the 152-mile canal, after golden mussel eDNA was detected near
the White River intake in Tulare County. Initially, the
authority hoped the mussel was contained to the southern
reaches of its canal, in the Arvin-Edison Water Storage
District, where State Water Project supplies enter the Friant
system via the Cross Valley Canal.
Developers are descending on a rural desert
community along California’s Mexican border, trying to
build over $15 billion worth of data centers to power Silicon
Valley’s artificial intelligence boom. But concerns over
pollution and Colorado River water use have
turned one of the projects into a charged legal fight. …
Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing LLC, started
purchasing land for the project in 2024, spending $12 million
on 95 acres in the city of Imperial, as well as $15 million
more for land in the county and nearby city of El Centro,
according to a lawsuit filed last month. … [The] company has
also said that the data center will send its used water
to the Salton Sea, helping reduce air pollution from
the drying body of water.
Go beyond the headlines and gain a deeper understanding of how
water is managed and moved across California during our annual
Water
101 Workshop on March 26. One of our most popular
events, the daylong workshop at Cal State Sacramento’s Harper
Alumni Center offers anyone new to California water issues or
newly elected to a water district board — and anyone who wants
a refresher — a chance to gain a solid statewide grounding on
water resources. Leading experts are on the agenda for the workshop that details the
historical, legal and political facets of water management in
the state. Don’t miss a once-a-year
opportunity from the only organization in California
providing comprehensive, unbiased information about water
resources across the West.
Environmental groups and tribal communities submitted written
comments to state water regulators this week reiterating that
the proposed Bay-Delta water management plan weakens water
protections and could open the door to ecosystem
disaster. During a three-day hearing last week, the tribal
members warned that the plan would result in “privatizing
water, prioritizing corporate profit over people.” In a news
release on Tuesday, Gary Mulcahy of the Winnemem Wintu called
the California State Water Board “clueless,” and Regina
Chichizola, executive director of Save California Salmon,
blasted state officials’ move to “advocate for an eight-year
experiment that fails to meet water, environmental and aquatic
species needs on so many levels as the VAs currently stand.”
The Montezuma Wetlands drape across 1,800 acres of Solano
County, California, where the Sacramento River empties into San
Francisco Bay. Once drained and diked for farming and grazing,
the marsh has been rehabilitated over the past two decades, and
in 2020, tidal waters returned for the first time in a century.
… But just as the ecosystem is on the mend, another makeover
may be coming. A company called Montezuma Carbon wants to send
millions of tons of carbon dioxide from Bay Area polluters
through a 40-mile pipeline and store it in saline aquifers 2
miles beneath the wetland. … If the project proceeds, it
could be the Golden State’s first large-scale, climate-driven
carbon capture and storage site.
Gov. Katie Hobbs said Monday that unless Upper Basin states
actually offer up some firm commitments to conserve water she
won’t agree to any deal for Arizona to cut its own withdrawals
from the Colorado River. And that would lead to either Interior
Secretary Doug Burgum imposing his own solution on the seven
states that draw water from the river — or the situation having
to be hashed out in court. Only thing is, Burgum has so far
refused to do more than bring the governors of the affect
states together, as he did on Friday. … Still, the
governor said she thinks it doesn’t necessarily have to wind up
in court, even though Arizona already has set aside $3 million
for litigation.
Colorado’s snowpack situation continues to worsen despite
recent snowfall, with statewide levels dropping from 57% of
average last week to 55% of average today. … A
persistent ridge of high pressure over the western United
States has dominated weather patterns this winter, keeping
storm systems away while maintaining unusually warm
temperatures across the region. La Niña conditions in the
Pacific Ocean are partly responsible, but the upper ridge has
been further east than usual as well. That’s partly been driven
by a persistently “positive” PNA – the Pacific North American
Oscillation. The combination of the northerly jet stream
changes from La Niña plus the positive PNA – and a couple of
other patterns – are why it has been so dry.
One year after taking office, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin will
return to San Diego County Thursday to continue addressing the
decades-old Tijuana sewage crisis that has plagued the South
Bay community. Since being sworn in as the 17th administrator
of the Environmental Protection Agency on January 29, 2025,
Zeldin has made the cross-border sewage issue a priority,
promising to deliver a “100% solution” to the problem that has
impacted Imperial Beach and surrounding areas for years.
… During his Thursday visit to San Diego County, Zeldin
will meet with small business owners and elected officials
impacted by the crisis as he continues efforts to address the
long-standing environmental issue.
