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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Gov. Gavin Newsom said his administration is “moving forward
aggressively” to continue laying the groundwork for a giant
tunnel beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to
replumb the state’s water system. “We got to move faster. Move
faster,” Newsom said … during a speech Thursday at a
conference held by the Assn. of California Water Agencies.
… Newsom cast the tunnel as a “climate adaptation
project,” noting that climate change is projected to shrink the
amount of water the state can deliver with its current
infrastructure. … The project is particularly
acrimonious, drawing out geographical battles between north and
south and thorny fights between officials who want to build the
tunnel and environmentalists and Delta residents seeking to
protect the local ecosystem and their way of life.
The Trump administration will soon propose softening Biden-era
limits on “forever chemicals” in drinking
water, delaying but keeping tough standards for two common
types and rescinding limits on some rarer forms of the
substance, according to an EPA official. The proposal will
start the formal process of rolling back parts of the
first-ever limits on PFAS in drinking water finalized during
former President Joe Biden’s administration. … Jessica
Kramer, head of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of
Water, said at a conference in Washington, D.C., on Thursday
the agency intended to rescind and revisit certain limits she
said were improperly issued by the Biden administration.
Federal forecasters are predicting an increasingly dire summer
across the Colorado River basin, with the latest
projections showing the waterway on track for record-low
flows. The Colorado Basin River Forecast Center’s May
projections for the West’s most important river show
just 13 percent of average flowsinto the
river’s biggest headwaters reservoir, Lake Powell, amounting to
just 800,000 acre-feet. “The record hot and dry winter is the
main story,” Cody Moser, a hydrologist with the center, said on
a webinar Thursday. “Just really no good news this winter.”
Monitoring stations across the region’s mountainous headwaters
registered record-low snowpack at many locations, he said.
The heinously polluted Tijuana River, which has sickened
residents and even researchers with its hydrogen sulfide fumes,
is gaining attention, and now a coalition of politicians,
activists, physicians and economists are pushing California
Gov. Gavin Newsom to declare the fetid and toxic river valley a
public health emergency. They’ve also put together a plan to
clean it up and are pleading with state lawmakers to fund it,
even as the state faces a multibillion-dollar deficit.
… Among the elements in the package announced Thursday:
state Senate Bill 58, which would establish air quality
standards for hydrogen sulfide, a toxic pollutant emitted from
the river, and Senate Bill 1046, which would set standards and
guidelines for workers employed near the river.
The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump has proposed
a 41 percent budget cut to NOAA Fisheries, which
includes the removal of effectively all protected
species and habitat conservation functions.
… The proposal mirrors many of Trump’s priorities
in the fiscal year 2026 budget proposal. … Trump is
again pushing for steep spending cuts and the elimination of
conservation and habitat work at NOAA Fisheries. Many of those
conservation functions – specifically around the Marine Mammal
Protection Act (MMPA) and the Endangered Species Act (ESA) –
would instead be transferred to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service (USFWS). Spending on some projects – such as Species
Recovery Grants – would be outright terminated.
The group behind a controversial data center in Box Elder
County has filed a notice to withdraw its water rights
application, but it does not appear it will abandon the
project. In a notice sent Wednesday to the Utah State Engineer,
Bar H Ranch announced its application will “be stopped and the
application be considered withdrawn.” Utah State Engineer
Teresa Wilhelmsen’s office confirmed to FOX 13 News on Thursday
morning that she had canceled the application, ending any
review of their water rights application. It’s expected
that the company will resubmit its application at a later time.
… [M]ore than 3,800 people paid $15 and submitted formal
protests to the Utah State Engineer over a 1,900-acre-foot
water rights application for the data center.
A late spring snowstorm is offering a brief reprieve from
drought conditions across the Front Range, but experts say the
region still has a long way to go. … Denver7 Chief
Meteorologist Lisa Hidalgo said the storm did provide some
benefit to the state’s snowpack but cautioned that drought
concerns remain. “I think at one point we were down to about
18% of normal — as of this morning with this most recent snow,
statewide snowpack is at about 25% of normal,” Hidalgo said.
“People are still going to be mindful, and we’ll likely see
more drought restrictions pop up here.” Many Front Range
residents are already under water restrictions, including
limits on lawn irrigation.
The future of Arizona’s water will depend not only on
Colorado River negotiations and groundwater
policy, but also on long-unresolved tribal water rights, three
water experts told attendees at the 99th Annual Arizona Water
Conference and Exhibition here on April 28. … [T]he
Northeastern Arizona Indian Water Rights Settlement is one step
toward addressing that gap. The settlement involves 39 parties,
including the Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe, San Juan Southern
Paiute Tribe, the U.S. Department of the Interior, the state of
Arizona, the Arizona Department of Water Resources, Salt River
Project and the city of Flagstaff. The settlement would resolve
claims involving the upper and lower Colorado River, the Little
Colorado River, Cibola allocations, groundwater and supplies
tied to the Navajo-owned Big Boquillas Ranch.
The Association of California Water Agencies (ACWA) has
appointed Karla Nemeth, current director of the California
Department of Water Resources (DWR), as its next Executive
Director. The announcement was made by ACWA President Ernie
Avila following a nationwide recruitment process and approval
from the association’s Board of Directors. Nemeth will assume
the role on 1 September, succeeding the leadership of the
organisation that represents around 470 public water agencies
across California. … Nemeth has led the California
Department of Water Resources since 2018, after being appointed
by Governor Jerry Brown and later reappointed by Governor Gavin
Newsom.
A super El Niño is increasingly likely later this year, and it
could become record strong with potential global impacts on
rainfall and temperatures from summer through winter.
… The majority of model forecasts now suggest there is
at least a 50-50 chance this El Niño could become a “super El
Niño,” one in which ocean surface temperatures are at least 2
degrees Celsius warmer than average. … In winter, the
southern, or subtropical, branch of the jet stream usually is
turbocharged in a stronger El Niño. That means a wetter
winter usually is the result across the southern tier of states
from parts of California and the Desert Southwest.
… This could also mean more snow across these areas if
the air is cold enough.
The Gardena Willows Wetlands Preserve is full of huge willow
trees, ponds teeming with chorus frogs, and immersive walking
trails. … Stormwater runoff from the surrounding
neighborhood passes through the Gardena Willows Wetlands
before flowing into the Dominguez Channel and out to San Pedro
Bay. Pollutants and nutrients in the runoff are
naturally filtered by native plants and living soils within the
wetlands before flowing downstream, supporting clean water at
the coast. The South Bay Chapter’s Teach and Test
Program just opened their second Blue Water Task Force Lab
location at the Gardena Willows, an exciting expansion that
will introduce more students to hands-on water quality
monitoring and community science.
… To boost a dwindling Lake Powell hundreds
of miles downstream and keep its dam generating electricity for
more than 350,000 homes, federal officials are planning
to let out as much as one-third of the water in Flaming Gorge
over the next year. … In a way, it’s familiar
territory. A similar effort four years ago sent big quantities
of water from Flaming Gorge into the Green River, eventually
reaching the Colorado River and feeding into Lake Powell. But
the new plan could draw down up to double the 2022 amount.
… Matt Tippets, chair of the three-member commission for
Daggett County, which encompasses the Utah side of Flaming
Gorge, is staying optimistic, saying the reservoir will remain
vast even if it dips down to just 60% full. … “If this
happens two or three times, two or three years in a row, it may
be dire, but I don’t believe we’re at that point yet.”
Chances are rising that an El Niño expected to form soon could
become one of the most powerful such events on record,
according to new data released this week. … It’s
the third consecutive month that multiple models have predicted
that a potentially record-breaking El Niño could drive
global temperatures to new highs and shift patterns of
droughts, floods, heat, humidity and sea ice across the
planet. … Above-average summer and fall
temperatures in the Western U.S., possibly coming with
unusual humidity, downpours and tropical storm remnants in the
Southwest and Intermountain West. … This could
contribute to milder winter temperatures in the U.S. — as well
as big storms along the West Coast … as El Niño’s impacts
reach a peak from the end of the year into early 2027.
California Department of Water Resources Director Karla
Nemeth has been selected to lead the Association of
California Water Agencies (ACWA) as its next executive
director, President Ernie Avila announced today. Her selection
follows a nationwide recruitment process and overwhelming
support of the association’s Board of Directors. Effective
Sept. 1, Nemeth will oversee staff of the nation’s largest
statewide coalition of public water agencies. Based in
Sacramento, ACWA represents approximately 470 members
responsible for 90 percent of the water delivered to cities,
farms and businesses across California.
… Last year, more sections of the country’s rivers were
reconnected thanks to dam removals than at any other time in
history, according to the nonprofit group American Rivers.
… But federal money allocated to rehabilitate and remove
dams is far less than what’s needed. … Under the Trump
administration, many federal grants for dam removal and safety
have also stalled amid staffing and budget
cuts. … In April, the Trump administration
intervened in PG&E’s decommissioning of two
hydropower dams in Northern California. The two dams
have not produced electricity since 2021 because of equipment
failure and the utility determined that fixing the equipment
didn’t make economic sense. But the administration said they
were needed for water security.
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… Under SGMA, which is implemented by local agencies,
groundwater basins have until 2040 or 2042 to achieve
sustainability. But since 2020 or 2022, depending on local
conditions, groundwater agencies have been required to prevent
“undesirable results” such as land subsidence and household
wells running dry. In the San Joaquin Valley, where the
aquifers are especially depleted, preventing those outcomes
requires major changes ahead of the law’s final deadline.
Groundwater agencies covering much of the valley adopted
pumping limits, or allocations, within the past few years as
the state began cracking down on subbasins with inadequate
plans. … The pumping reductions required by SGMA
could cause as much as 20% of the San Joaquin Valley’s farmland
to be taken out of production by 2040, according to a
report by the Public Policy Institute of California.
Colorado’s trout fisheries could face a difficult summer,
impacting the state’s billion-dollar angling industry, as
widespread drought conditions drive predictions that
streamflows will be well below-average. Kirk Klancke, the
president of the Colorado Headwaters Chapter of Trout
Unlimited, said he is concerned that the drought will stress
fisheries this summer, especially if temperatures are anywhere
near as elevated as they were this winter. “If this summer is
anything like this past winter was, the chances are pretty good
that there’s going to be fish kills in our streams,” Klancke
said. … Colorado, and much of the West, experienced one
of the hottest, driest winters on record.
Headwaters are the landscapes where California’s streams and
rivers begin. … Up until about 150 years ago, most
of California’s headwater forests experienced frequent,
lower-intensity fires that kept understories open, limited
brush, and supported mature, fire-resilient tree species with
high, widely spaced canopies—conditions that also helped
sustain reliable water supplies. … Fire suppression has
allowed vegetation to build up, increasing the risk of
high-severity wildfires. This has major implications for the
state’s water supply. When headwater forests burn in severe
wildfires, those fires disrupt the processes that
regulate water supply—reducing snowpack, degrading water
quality downstream, and increasing sediment in
reservoirs.
A spring snowstorm across the Denver metro area is
bringing moisture and a temporary break from dry conditions,
but water managers say it will do little to improve the
region’s long-term supply. Despite steady rain and snow in
cities like Denver and Aurora, the storm largely missed key
mountain basins that feed the reservoirs serving much of the
Front Range. … Most of the water used in Aurora and
Denver comes from snowpack in the mountains, which melts
gradually and flows into river systems like the South Platte,
Colorado and Arkansas basins. This year, that snowpack has been
far below normal. … As a result, even a noticeable storm
in the metro area is not expected to make much of a difference.
