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 on Monday denied listing the Western
Coast Chinook salmon as threatened or endangered under the
Endangered Species Act. The decision came after what the
National Marine Fisheries Service called a comprehensive review
of the Oregon Coast and Southern Oregon and Northern
California Coastal Chinook salmon. The agency examined
the issue after a petition called for listing them as
threatened or endangered and designating their habitat as
critical. … While inadequate regulations persist, they
pose a low risk to the Chinook salmon’s viability, the service
said.
More money is headed to farmers in the Colorado River
Basin, paying them to not grow as many crops and send
the water they save downstream. During a special meeting on
Monday, the Colorado River Authority of Utah’s board voted to
approve almost $895,000 in funds to some agriculture producers
under the “Demand Management Pilot Program.” It is estimated
the funds would save as much as 2,500-acre feet of water. This
is the second year of the program, which has spent nearly $5
million total. … Politically, the program can be seen as a
goodwill gesture by the state of Utah as negotiations continue
over the future of the Colorado River.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta is “looking at all
available options to respond,” his office said Monday in
response to the Bureau of Reclamation’s decision last week that
updates the Central Valley Project’s operating plan to permit
higher water exports from the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta.
… On Thursday, the Bureau of Reclamation approved Action
5, revising the long-term operating plan for the Central Valley
Project and allowing greater flexibility in Delta operations —
a step consistent with the Trump administration’s broader push
to increase federal water supplies.
When it comes to water resources, the northern Sierra Nevada
snowpack is a harbinger of abundance or scarcity for 40 million
California residents and businesses. The 2025-26 snow season
has arrived and is off to a very slow start. Northern
California, driver of the state’s water bounty is currently at
just 16 percent of average to date.
Other snowpack and water supply news around the West:
Chuck Bonham, the director of the California Department of Fish
and Wildlife and a longtime driver of hotly debated state
policies on wolves, salmon and water, is leaving the state job
for a top post at the Nature Conservancy. … In a
state with nearly 40 million people, Bonham faced the
impossible task of balancing wildlife conservation with human
development, a responsibility that frequently won him critics.
For example, his largely fish-friendly policies, sometimes
forcing cuts to water supplies and promoting dam-removal
projects, drew criticism from agriculture and industry. At the
same time, environmental groups often wanted him to do more.
President Trump threatened on Monday to impose an additional 5
percent tariff on Mexican goods over a long-running water
dispute, reigniting diplomatic tensions that had flared earlier
this year over water shortages in the borderlands. In a social
media post, Mr. Trump accused Mexico of failing to provide more
than 800,000 acre-feet of water — or more than 260 billion
gallons — under a 1944 treaty mediating the distribution of
water from three rivers, the Rio Grande, the Colorado
and the Tijuana. The president said that Mexico needed
to “release 200,000 acre-feet of water before December 31st,
and the rest must come soon after.”
States facing drought and dwindling groundwater
supplies are seeking to pull back the curtain on water
use at data centers, in a push for transparency that has
scrambled traditional partisan alliances. Lawmakers from at
least eight states this year introduced legislation to require
data centers to report their water use. … The proposal
in California … would have required data centers to report
estimated water use to their local supplier before applying for
a business license. Companies would have also needed to report
annual use when applying to renew their license. The bill
passed both of California’s Democratic-controlled chambers, but
Gov. Gavin Newsom did not sign it.
The heat of summer is in the rearview mirror as California
enters the wet part of the year. This also comes with an
increased risk of flooding, especially for places like
Sacramento which sits along the banks of the American
and Sacramento rivers. The region has seen significant
development and construction in low-lying areas and historic
floodplains, which are at greater risk when waters rise. The
city and county have an extensive network of flood control
infrastructure in place, from miles of levees to the Yolo
Bypass, and several projects are underway to help shore up
protection across the region. However, some of these projects
are running into setbacks and opposition.
The International Boundary and Water Commission has
acknowledged that its heavily criticized $2.5 million
“nano-bubble” project in the Tijuana River was destroyed and
swept away during a recent storm. On September 9, the IBWC
launched the controversial technology, hoping it would clean up
sewage and chemical contamination in the Tijuana River, where
daily readings of gases such as hydrogen sulfide are detected.
Critics, including several politicians, scientists and
environmental groups, have said the method has not been proven
effective or safe for humans. … The federal agency
claimed it and its contractor “are evaluating the data
collected and hope to share the results of the project soon.”
Drinking water contaminated with Pfas chemicals probably
increases the risk of infant mortality and other harm to
newborns, a new peer-reviewed study of 11,000 births in New
Hampshire finds. The first-of-its-kind University of Arizona
research found drinking well water down gradient from a
Pfas-contaminated site was tied to an increase in infant
mortality of 191%, pre-term birth of 20%, and low-weight birth
of 43%. … The study also weighed the cost of societal
harms in drinking contaminated water against up-front cleanup
costs, and found it to be much cheaper to address Pfas water
pollution.
A big thank you to everyone who attended the International
Symposium of River Science (ISRS) conference, hosted by the
Center for Watershed Sciences (CWS)! The International
Symposium of River Science (ISRS) conference took place October
6th–9th and featured 4 days of speakers hailing from across the
globe, many field trips, and an excellent evening of
water-themed trivia. This conference had nearly 300 attendees
from over 10 different countries across several different
disciplines, speaking on a range of topics such as floodplains,
rivers as classrooms, flow management, and more! By bringing so
many people together from across job sectors and fields of
river research, the conference fostered collaboration on both a
national and international level.
The Klamath Tribes filed a motion Nov. 19 in Klamath County
Circuit Court seeking to amend their petition to overturn what
they call illegal orders that removed the longtime
administrative law judge overseeing the Klamath Basin
Adjudication (KBA). Tribal leaders say the judge’s removal
followed a secret agreement between Oregon’s Office of
Administrative Hearings and Upper Klamath Basin water
users. In August, Chief Administrative Law Judge Jeffrey
Rhoades replaced Joe Allen, who had presided over the KBA for
years. The Tribes say the move ignored two prior rulings — in
November 2024 and March 2025 — that rejected challenges to
Allen by the Upper Basin Irrigators and affirmed he should
remain on the case.
US water and wastewater utilities navigated a year marked by
disruption and shifting federal policies. Stakeholders
navigated a maze of permitting reforms, evolving EPA guidance
on PFAS and new interpretations of the Clean Water Act after
Sackett v. EPA. For operators, the rulebook kept changing,
while costs and compliance risks continued to rise.
… With all that as backdrop, let’s look back on 2025.
We’ll dig into the shifting permitting and WRDA/IIJA landscape,
the ongoing tug-of-war over PFAS and WOTUS, Colorado River
uncertainty, the emerging water-AI connection and the growing
momentum behind collaborative delivery.
The Bureau of Reclamation on Thursday updated the long-term
operations plan for the Central Valley Project to allow
increased exports from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, a move
that conflicts with California’s own requirements, potentially
shifts more of the water burden onto the state and threatens
the Delta’s ecosystem and water quality. … The
Reclamation Bureau stated that under the updated plan, the
federal-managed CVP could gain an additional 130,000 to 180,000
acre-feet of water a year — roughly 40 billion to 60 billion
gallons — while the State Water Project could see an increase
of 120,000 to 220,000 acre-feet, or about 39 billion to 70
billion gallons.
The state of Colorado is ramping up an effort to measure water
use on the Western Slope, developing rules and standards and
rolling out a grant program to help water users pay for
diversion measurement devices. With input from water users,
officials from the Colorado Division of Water Resources are
creating technical guidance for each of the four major Western
Slope river basins on how agricultural water users should
measure the water they take from streams. … The
push for more-accurate measurement comes at a time when there
is increasing competition for dwindling water supplies, as well
as growing pressure on the Colorado River’s Upper
Basin states (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming)
to conserve water.
San Luis Obispo County can reduce the amount of water it
releases from Lopez Dam, a federal court ruled [last week].
Lopez Lake supplies drinking water to about 50,000 South County
residents. … After a coalition of environmental groups
sued the county, a U.S. District Court judge ordered the county
last year to release more water from Lopez Dam to support
steelhead trout migration through Arroyo
Grande Creek. The county appealed the decision on Jan. 24,
saying that releasing the prescribed amount of water into the
creek would wash away the eggs of two other protected
species: the tidewater goby and the California
red-legged frog.
A coalition of more than 230 environmental groups has demanded
a national moratorium on new datacenters in the US.
… The push comes amid a growing revolt against moves by
companies such as Meta, Google and Open AI to plow hundreds of
billions of dollars into new datacenters, primarily to meet the
huge computing demands of AI. At least 16 datacenter projects,
worth a combined $64bn, have been blocked or delayed due to
local opposition to rising electricity costs. The facilities’
need for huge amounts of water to cool down
equipment has also proved controversial, particularly in drier
areas where supplies are scarce.
The American Society of Civil Engineers gave California’s
levees and roads D grades in its “Report Card for California’s
Infrastructure,” while warning that extreme weather events
becoming more common with climate change are straining
already-stressed waterways and streets. … Levees across
the state received a grade of D+. … But in the capital
region, the report cited huge investments in safeguarding
people around the Sacramento River basin. The region has
pursued updates around Natomas and improvements through the
American River Watershed Common Features Project, the
Sacramento River east levee, the South Sacramento Streams Group
Project, Feather River West Levee Project and the Marysville
Ring Levee.
This study investigates the accuracy of long-term water demand
projections and tracks the evolution of water demand management
incentives across 61 California water suppliers from 2000 to
2020. Through a systematic analysis of Urban Water Management
Plans, we find that water suppliers consistently overestimated
future demand by an average of 25% for 5-year projections and
74% for 20-year projections. This overestimation stems
primarily from assumptions about per capita water demand rather
than population growth estimates. While suppliers generally
projected stable or increasing per capita demand, actual water
demand per capita declined by 1.9% annually between 2000 and
2020, leading to a decoupling of water demand from population
growth.
When Colorado Parks and Wildlife personnel tested a small pond
that feeds the irrigation system at the Mesa County
Fairgrounds, looking for invasive zebra mussels, the results
came back as a surprise. … Mussels of different ages,
including adult ones, were discovered during the early-October
testing. … It seemed more likely that mussels might be
present at some of the public areas along the Colorado
River or on larger reservoirs with a lot of potential
for cross-contamination involving things such as watercraft.
… This very issue is high on the minds of Parks and Wildlife
officials as the agency deals with an expanding zebra mussels
problem along the Colorado River in multiple counties.
