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 Chris Bowman.
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A proposed new agricultural water district could brighten
what had been shaping up as a grim future for a number of
farmers in the northern part of Tulare County’s flatlands under
the state’s groundwater law. Four private ditch companies are
working to form the new district to cover 84,000 acres, 24,000
of which are totally groundwater dependent. Pumping
restrictions under the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act
(SGMA) are expected to severely limit crop production in such
groundwater reliant areas. The proposed Consolidated Water
District has indicated it will use land assessment fees to buy
surface water and build systems to convey surface water
throughout the district. That’s significant, said Mark Larsen,
General Manager of the Greater Kaweah Groundwater
Sustainability Agency (GSA), which covers the area where the
new district is proposed.
Americans deserve a clean environment “without suffocating the
economy,” Lee Zeldin said during his Senate confirmation
hearing Thursday to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, a
department likely to play a central role in President-elect
Donald Trump’s pledge to slash federal regulations and promote
oil and gas development. “The American people elected President
Trump last November in part due to serious concerns about
upward economic mobility,” Zeldin said. “A big part of this
will require building private sector collaboration to promote
commonsense, smart regulation.” The hearing occasionally grew
pointed when Democrats questioned Zeldin about climate change
asking what, if anything, he thinks should be done about a
problem that has worsened floods and raised sea levels but that
Trump has dismissed.
Facing a $258 million budget deficit, San Diego City Council
members spent an hour Tuesday night delivering an unprecedented
public bashing of the region’s main water seller for
ever-climbing costs. Water purchases from the San
Diego County Water Authority are the city of San Diego’s
second-largest expense and its price increase this year was
double what the agency once forecasted. The city’s Public
Utilities Department has begun a campaign to alert City Council
that growing Water Authority prices threaten to eat up much of
the city’s water budget. The result means delays on city water
projects and maintenance on 3,000 miles of pipeline, and
potential staff cuts which has the labor union representing
city public utilities workers shook.
Eschmeyer’s Catalog of Fishes is the definitive global source,
with the Latin name for 65,000 species compiled by biologists
at the California Academy of Sciences under the leadership of
Bill Eschmeyer of San Anselmo, who spent 40 years on an
odyssey that took him to every museum with a collection of dead
fish in jars. The database he created, which started before the
Internet, was still growing and being refined long after
Eschmeyer retired and moved to the East Coast to be near his
three adult children. He died Dec. 30 at an assisted care
facility in Nashua, N.H., said his daughter Lanea Tripp, who
was named for an 18th century Swedish biologist her father
admired. Eschmeyer had suffered from dementia compounded by
long COVID. He was 85.
There are significant myths regarding almonds. Most of it is
about how they use too much water, but they get four crops from
every drop of water. They’re very efficient. Clarice Turner is
president and CEO of the Almond Board of California. “Part of
what we’re doing is just making sure that the public is aware
of the facts, Turner said. “And by the way, it’s not
marketing hype because we are a quasi-government overseen by
the USDA. Everything we publish has to be fact-based. That’s
coming from at least three peer-reviewed academic studies in
the traditional process. That’s how we get our information,”
she said. “It’s unfortunate that people think almonds use too
much water. A statement like this grows arms and legs.
When you irrigate almonds, you get four crops per drop—
There’s the kernel we eat, which grows inside a woody shell,
fuzzy outer hull, and the tree. The trees store tons of carbon
each year, the shells become livestock bedding, and the hulls
are nutritious dairy feed, reducing the water needed to grow
other feed crops,” explained Turner.
The collapse of a $1.5 billion plan to enlarge Los Vaqueros
Reservoir in Contra Costa County and share the water with
residents across the Bay Area is a disappointing setback for
the state’s efforts to expand water storage, and should be
studied to reduce the chances of it happening again with other
projects, state water officials said Wednesday. At a meeting in
Sacramento, several members of the California Water Commission,
a state agency which had promised the project $477 million in
state bond funding in 2018, said Contra Costa Water District
leaders should have kept them better informed when negotiations
between Bay Area water agencies on costs and risks began to
unravel this summer. … The project was scheduled to
begin construction by next year. It was considered by
water experts statewide as one of the most promising ways to
expand California’s water supplies in an era of more severe
droughts. It had no major lawsuits and wasn’t controversial
with environmental groups, largely because it was proposing to
expand an existing reservoir rather than damming a river.
A billionaire couple was accused of withholding water that
could help stop Los Angeles’ massive wildfires. Democratic
leadership was blamed for fire hydrants running dry and for an
empty reservoir. Firefighters were criticized for allegedly
using “women’s handbags” to fight the fires. Those are just a
few of the false or misleading claims that have emerged amid
general criticism about California’s water management sparked
by the fierce Los Angeles fires. Much of the misinformation is
being spread “because it offers an opportunity to take potshots
at California Democratic leadership while simultaneously
distracting attention from the real contributing factors,
especially the role of climate change,” said Peter Gleick,
senior fellow at the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit he
co-founded that focuses on global water sustainability.
Snowpack in the upper Colorado River basin is slightly less
than normal for this time of year, meaning Arizona could see
sustained water cuts through 2026. Though trends could change
through the rest of the winter, the snowpack in the basin is
about 94% of the median for mid-January. While Arizona’s share
of Colorado River water in 2025 is already set, the snowpack
numbers are early indicators of how much river water the state
could get next year. Even with an average snow year, water
managers say dry conditions and warming temperatures could
create below-average runoff, keeping Arizona water users in
shortage.
Extreme Santa Ana winds whipped flames across Los Angeles
County last week, with gusts catapulting embers across
tinder-dry landscapes spreading devastating
wildfires across the region. The Palisades and Eaton fires
have caused at least 25 deaths, as of Tuesday, and destroyed
over 12,000 structures. One factor that drove the destructive
blazes began years earlier. California has some of the U.S.’s
most variable precipitation, with increasingly dramatic swings
between wet and dry periods, also known as “hydroclimate
whiplash.”
The US Forest Service likely overstepped its authority by
ordering bottling company BlueTriton to remove its California
water infrastructure, a federal judge ruled. Judge Jesus G.
Bernal this week granted BlueTriton Brands’ motion for
preliminary injunction, thereby allowing the company to keep
using water infrastructure in the San Bernardino National
Forest for the foreseeable future, according to an order filed
in the US District Court for the Central District of
California. The decision marks the latest win for BlueTriton,
known for popular water brands Arrowhead and Ozarka, in its
battle to maintain California water operations.
… In December 2024, a new framework took effect to
minimize harm to endangered species from the operation of
California’s two biggest water projects. The framework,
developed by federal fishery agencies and called a “biological
opinion,” replaces a framework that had been in place since
2019. … The new science and additional flexibility that
underpin the revised framework allow water project operators to
respond more nimbly to real-time conditions in California
rivers and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, where rivers drain
to San Francisco Bay. Farms and cities have the potential
to gain additional water supply, while endangered species are
protected. … The State Water Project, a network of
reservoirs and pumping plants, provides some or all of the
water used by 27 million Californians and 750,000 acres of
farmland. Since the new biological opinion went into effect on
December 19, the State Water Project – a major source of
Southern California water supply – already has gained 12,500
acre-feet of additional water supply beyond what would have
been possible under the 2019 framework. The additional supply
is approximately enough water to meet the needs of
37,500 households for a year.
Almost 100 million people in the US may be exposed to
unregulated industrial chemicals in their drinking water, with
communities of color especially at risk, according to a new
analysis of federal monitoring data for water systems across
the country. The study, published Wednesday in the journal
Environmental Health Perspectives, analyzed data gathered by
the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from 2013 to 2015
for four types of unregulated chemicals, finding that 27% of
those nearly 5,000 public water systems had detectable levels
of at least one contaminant. Overall, more than 97 million US
residents were served by a public water system with detectable
levels of the contaminants examined in the study.
UC Davis researchers, working with the Solano County Water
Agency, counted 170 adult salmon returning this winter to spawn
in Putah Creek. Officials said the number could be as high as
200 as a number of individuals typically escape count, even
with the use of a counting weir this year. Still, the total is
down from 735 in 2023. “As you know, the salmon fishery has
been closed the past two years, so it (low numbers) is a
statewide thing and not just Putah Creek,” said Max
Stevenson, the Putah Creek streamkeeper. The count started in
early October and continued through Dec. 18.
The proposed fee for the Tuscan Water District has passed with
overwhelming support, securing more than 87% of the vote.
Property owners in the district gathered today to submit their
votes and voice concerns about the fees, which are based on the
acreage of their land. Despite the strong approval, the meeting
left many attendees feeling more confused and frustrated by the
process. The vote, which included a breakdown of over 34
million yes votes versus 4.8 million no votes, was a crucial
step for the TWD, which was established in 2023. The fees,
according to the district, are mandated by the state to support
groundwater conservation, storage, and use in the Vina
Subbasin. However, some property owners are expressing concerns
about the fairness and transparency of the proposal.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is proposing to
list the Clear Lake Hitch, a large minnow found nowhere else in
the world outside Lake County and the Clear Lake watershed, as
a threatened species. The move comes after a 12-year
campaign by environmental and tribal interests to win
federal protection for the fish. Once so abundant they crowded
local creeks during spawning season, the hitch, known as “chi”
to local Indigenous communities, have plummeted in abundance
over recent decades, threatening their survival and putting an
end to long-held tribal traditions centered on the
seasonal run and a bountiful harvest.
… California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management
Act—the state’s solution to groundwater depletion—is projected
to result in as much as a fifth of the San Joaquin Valley’s
farmland going fallow in the next 15 years. For farmers in the
region, their future depends on finding ways to farm while
adapting to the new paradigm of groundwater regulation.
In November, water managers and farmers in the Kaweah Subbasin,
where Wilbur farms, did something no other basin had since SGMA
enforcement began last year. After the subbasin’s initial
sustainability plan was deemed inadequate, it faced the
prospect of state intervention, beginning with a yearlong
probation period. Probation would have sidelined local projects
and imposed costly pumping fees on growers, more than doubling
the amount some local groundwater agencies charge farmers. Two
neighboring subbasins were put on probation last year.
But the Kaweah Subbasin’s groundwater agencies overhauled their
sustainability plan, and state regulators canceled the
probation hearing—for now—noting “substantial progress” in the
revised plan.
The California Chamber of Commerce and a diverse coalition of
organizations highlighted the far-reaching economic impacts of
proposed changes to water management within the San Francisco
Bay/Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta (Bay-Delta) system in a
comment letter submitted to the State Water Resources Control
Board (State Water Board) on January 10. To avoid a substantial
reduction in water supplies for much of California, the
coalition asked the State Water Board to support a holistic
approach, proposed by federal, state, and local water agencies,
that would balance the diverse needs of urban and agricultural
uses and the environment.
Drinking water that started out as sewage may not sound very
attractive—but it’s an attractive idea for cities looking to
stretch their water supplies. Now a $86.7 Million Federal grant
puts Tucson on track to build a special treatment plant able to
purify wastewater so well it will be good to drink. Getting
water that’s pure and safe to drink already takes a lot of
processing. Now the City of Tucson has accepted a nearly 87
million dollar Federal grant to build a plant able to process
wastewater so thoroughly it will be safe to
drink. Tucson’s water director says 2.5 million gallons a
day from the plant will be between two and five percent of what
the city uses each day but it’s an important start in a desert
city with a growing population.
Flood zones along the Russian River just got bigger, on paper
at least. Sonoma County supervisors have accepted new flood
risk maps from FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency,
for the Russian River watershed. They are the first new maps in
30 years. When voting on the maps, District 5 Supervisor Lynda
Hopkins, who represents the lower Russian River said, “I do
believe that this needs to pass.” “It has passed with the
support of my colleagues,” Hopkins said. “But I just do want to
register the protest of whether it’s, you know, appropriate for
us to take actions that negatively impact property owners.”
Hopkins cast a symbolic ‘no’ vote on adopting the updated maps.
The county needed to accept FEMA’s latest flood risk assessment
or get the boot from the National Flood Insurance Program, but
the new maps are a bit of a catch-22.
Yuba Water Agency recently awarded a $76.8 million contract to
upgrade key components of its hydropower generation
infrastructure in the Yuba County foothills. A joint venture
company made up of Obayashi and Drill Tech Drilling & Shoring,
Inc. was awarded the contract for the agency’s Colgate tunnel
outage project, set to begin in the fall of 2025. The tunnel
outage will focus on a four-mile-long rock tunnel and
one-mile-long penstock pipe that carries water from New
Bullards Bar Reservoir to New Colgate Powerhouse at the base of
Lake Francis Road in Dobbins. During the outage, Yuba Water
will remove rocks and debris, repair and reinforce worn parts
and install a new protective valve system at the top of the
penstock pipe. The upgraded valve will enhance the agency’s
ability to protect downstream infrastructure and improve
maintenance access without requiring the entire tunnel to be
dewatered.
