In general, regulations are rules or laws designed to control or
govern conduct. Specifically, water quality regulations under the
federal and state Clean Water Act “protect the public health or
welfare, enhance the quality of water and serve the purposes of
the Act.”
The Arizona Corporation Commission will consider green lighting
a long-term solution Wednesday for residents of the
unincorporated Rio Verde Foothills community who lost access to
their water supply earlier this year. After the city of
Scottsdale cut Rio Verde residents off from a city-owned
standpipe in January, state legislators passed a law that
temporarily restored water through an agreement that ends in
2025. At the same time, private utility EPCOR has been in
discussions to provide long term water service to the area, but
the utility first needs approval from the Corporation
Commission.
Water tests show nearly 3,000 private wells located near 63
active and former U.S. military bases are contaminated with
“forever chemicals” at levels higher than what federal
regulators consider safe for drinking. … According to
the Environmental Working Group, a Washington, D.C.-based
nonprofit that analyzed Department of Defense testing data,
2,805 wells spread across 29 states were
contaminated with at least one of two types of per- and
polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, above 4 parts per
trillion, a limit proposed earlier this year by the
Environmental Protection Agency. That new drinking water
standard is expected to take effect by the end of the year.
A string of emails appears to show that one state agency stood
in the way of stream channel maintenance for more than five
years, which may have led to flooding that caused severe damage
in Merced County, according to a recent lawsuit. The
emails begin in 2018 and go back and forth for years between
several Merced agencies – seeking a permit agreement to
clear stream beds of the Black Rascal, Bear and Miles creeks –
and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife
(CDFW.) The emails show repeated warnings by CDFW that
maintenance work could not be done without a permit agreement.
Then, after 2023 floods destroyed homes, businesses and
farmland, at least one email suggests staffers at CDFW sought
to shift blame for the delayed channel work onto local
agencies.
Reducing per capita water use in cities and suburbs is key for
helping communities get through droughts. And together with
strategies to improve water supplies, it can also help build
long-term water resilience in the face of our changing climate.
In recent decades, Californians have been making great strides
in long-term water conservation, and this latest drought showed
once again that communities will go the extra mile to save
water during droughts if needed. But while it’s often assumed
that water conservation is inexpensive, it actually can be very
costly. In response to 2018 legislation, the State Water Board
is now considering new urban water use regulations whose
statewide costs would far exceed their benefits. What’s more,
these costs would significantly impact affordability, hitting
inland, lower-income communities hardest.
It may be hard to be-leaf, but during the winter months, 90% of
vegetables come from fields in Yuma, Arizona. With 230,000
acres of land used for agriculture, Yuma county ranks third in
the nation for vegetable production, according to Visit Yuma.
But with drought conditions and water shortages in the West,
agriculture is at risk. To help address these issues,
researchers in Arizona evaluated water efficiency and salt
balances for 14 common crop varieties in the Winter Lettuce
capital, coordinated by the Yuma Center of Excellence for
Desert Agriculture. The study took place over seven years and
the results were published in a paper in November 2023.
The governing board of the Santa Clarita Valley Water Agency is
meeting in closed session Friday to discuss a 36-page complaint
against manufacturing giant 3M and more than a dozen other
businesses in October 2020, accusing them of poisoning the
state’s water supply with their products. The lawsuit
claims that from the 1960s through the present, the company has
manufactured and distributed “fluorosurfactant products” —
known to the average consumer as chemicals that create Teflon
coating, “Scotchgard,” stainproofing compounds, waxy surfaces
and aqueous film-forming foam (“AFFF”), a firefighting agent
used to control and extinguish Class B fuel fires.
A Utah nonprofit group is proposing legal protections and water
conservation measures like Nevada’s to save the rapidly drying
Great Salt Lake. The United States Geological Survey considers
a water level of 4,198 feet the “minimum healthy level” for the
lake, but it’s mostly been lower than that since 2000. Today,
the lake sits at 4,192 feet, according to the Utah Division of
Wildlife Resources. It has lost 73% of its water and 60% of its
surface area since 1850, according to a 2023 Brigham Young
University report.
So flash forward to the last section of the book, is all about
Arizona, where I grew up. And there the issue, obviously, is
not too much water, there’s too little water. I talk
about the Central Arizona Project, which is a canal that brings
Colorado River water hundreds of miles across the desert into
Phoenix and Tucson. Most of the book focuses on the farmers
there who because they’re the ones who are feeling the impacts
of the water shortages in the Colorado River. They’re finding
themselves–some of these cases, some of my sources and
characters in the book, are people who are being cut off from
their water supplies. One of them’s a young farmer, he’s in his
30s, he just had his first kid, he’s a fifth-generation grower,
and he’s now realizing that he doesn’t, he’s not going to have
any water, at least not the way he thought he was going to.
It was the last session at a recent One Water Summit in Tucson,
Arizona, and some of the Indigenous youth speakers about to
present were not sure if anyone would show up. The three-day
One Water Summit, which takes place annually in different U.S.
cities, brought together top leaders from the Environmental
Protection Agency, key Colorado River stakeholders, and others
discussing recent political actions and highly-debated
solutions to water issues like drought, flooding and clean
water. Would those important figures be interested in hearing
from youth? It turns out, yes. After youth speakers presented
during a session focused on Indigenous-based water solutions,
several attendees in the room were in tears. The young
panelists’ words were that powerful.
[The San Diego County Water Authority, the region’s water
supplier] dropped a 360-page lawsuit on San Diego’s boundary
referees – the Local Agency Formation Commission or LAFCO
– just weeks after it said Fallbrook Public Utilities
District and Rainbow Municipal Water District could ditch the
Water Authority. But the Water Authority won’t tell me how much
it spent suing everybody. … David Edwards, the Water
Authority’s general counsel, said in an email that the Water
Authority has the information I requested — the total cost per
hour and hours spent on the litigation, a copy of the contract
with Meyers Nave, and what part of the agency’s budget from
whence this expense came – but those records are “exempt from
production.”
In the immediate aftermath of a sewage spill at Carmel Valley
Ranch on Aug. 6 and then another on Aug. 16, California
American Water officials were out on the scene right
away, seeking to contain the overflow. Paperwork moves
much slower. Months later, in response to a notice of violation
issued on Oct. 26 by the Central Coast Regional Water Quality
Control Board, Cal Am has filed a technical report explaining
what the utility believes happened. … According to the
water board’s findings, “Due to the proximity of the storm
drain to the manhole and the County [Environmental Health
Bureau of the Monterey County Health Department]’s observation
that sandbags were not effective in stopping the overflow from
entering the storm drain, Central Coast Water Board staff
assume that up to 1,200 gallons of sewage discharged to the
storm drain.”
Two of the San Diego County Water Authority’s smallest
customers — avocado and citrus farming communities in North
County tired of paying ever-rising water rates to urbanize San
Diego — were prepared to leave quietly in search of cheaper
water elsewhere. These water divorce proceedings began
back in 2020. But at the 11th hour, the Water Authority started
pulling out all the stops to keep them in line, and all hell
broke loose. The Water Authority leaned on powerful friends at
the State Capitol and former enemies in Los Angeles, where the
biggest water supplier in the world lives: the Metropolitan
Water District of Southern California. The Water
Authority also turned to the courts, dropping a 360-page
lawsuit against its defectors, Rainbow Municipal Water District
and Fallbrook Public Utilities District, and a little-known
organization that gave them permission to leave: the Local
Agency Formation Commission or LAFCO.
Four recently announced federal Bipartisan Infrastructure Law
grants for water projects in the region all included one
notable common denominator — they all got help in their
application process through a special Colorado River District
program made possible by a voter-approved tax measure in 2020.
On Nov. 15 the Department of Interior announced $51 million in
funding via the Bureau of Reclamation for 30 new environmental
water resource projects in 11 states. The projects focus on
water conservation, water management and restoration efforts
that will result in significant benefits to ecosystem or
watershed health, the Interior Department says. Interior
Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Michael Brain visited
Grand Junction at the time of the funding announcement to
highlight recipients of funding in Colorado.
Everyone from policymakers to armchair warriors has a theory on
the best way to solve the Colorado River crisis. Soon they’ll
have a chance to test out their ideas. The Colorado River’s
flow is dropping — it’s about 18% lower in the 21st century
than it was in the 20th century — and that’s a big deal to the
40 million people who depend on it for water across the West.
But solving the crisis gets complicated, quickly. That’s where
a team of researchers at the University of California,
Riverside, think they can help. They’ve developed a new way of
looking at water-saving efforts across the enormous basin, and
they’re turning it into an interactive map and dashboard that
everyone can use.
… A series of hydroelectric dams had altered the Klamath’s
flow more than a century ago, creating an unnatural system that
left fish and people high and dry. … But the
6,500-member Yurok Tribe and its neighbors in the Klamath River
Basin still had cause to celebrate: They had won a 20-year-long
struggle to demolish four decommissioned hydroelectric dams in
the middle basin. That massive project, the largest in U.S.
history, is ongoing and expected to be completed sometime in
early 2025.
In 2022, Ashok Gadgil conducted the first field trial of a
water-treatment system for the 600 or so residents of
Allensworth, California, who have been battling arsenic
contamination for some time. The system is a more efficient
iteration of technology that Gadgil and his team installed in
India in 2016 to provide rural and marginalized communities
with access to safe drinking water at low cost1. Like many
small rural communities, Allensworth — a historically Black
town with a majority Latinx population today — has no access to
high-quality surface-water treatment facilities that are common
in urban areas. Instead, these communities often use wells,
which are at high risk of contamination with arsenic and other
toxic substances.
Growing concern over per- and polyfluorinated substances (PFAS)
is cascading into a surge of unprecedented litigation. Like the
chemicals themselves, PFAS-related lawsuits are becoming
ubiquitous, spreading far beyond the initial exposure and
environmental contamination claims we’ve seen to date. These
legal actions are now encompassing a broader array of
defendants that have incorporated PFAS chemicals into their
products or packaging, venturing into uncharted territory
concerning bodily injury, and expanding into other causes of
actions. Given the current absence of substantial judicial
precedent regarding coverage matters and liability defenses in
the context of PFAS and aqueous film forming foam (AFFF),
manufacturers, sellers, and commercial consumers of PFAS and
their insurers will be closely watching litigation, looking to
future rulings for guidance about the viability of coverage
defenses raised in other pollution claims.
Arizona’s Senate president said he does not plan to introduce
legislation to alter water supply requirements for new
development despite his criticism of the historic 1980 law that
created them. Sen. Warren Petersen said his comments, given
last week to the Arizona Tax Research Association where he was
asked to preview his legislative priorities, were meant to
emphasize that the mandate to show an assured source of water
will be available for 100 years was “arbitrary.’’ … He
complained about the Arizona Department of Water Resources
halting new construction in two areas on the edges of Phoenix
earlier this year. He said that would not have happened if the
standard here were something less, like California’s.
On November 13, 2023, the Sixth District Court of Appeal issued
the first published decision interpreting California’s
Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (“SGMA”) in City of
Marina et al., v. County of Monterey et al., Case No. H049575.
The case arose after the County of Monterey elected to form a
groundwater sustainability agency (“GSA”) to resolve
overlapping claims to manage groundwater in a small area of the
Salinas Valley Groundwater Basin known as the CEMEX Area, a
seaside parcel on which CEMEX previously operated a sand-mining
facility and is now proposed to house a desalination plant to
provide fresh water to residents of Monterey County. The Court
upheld the trial court’s determination that the County of
Monterey Groundwater Sustainability Agency, rather than the
City of Marina, has the authority to manage groundwater in the
CEMEX Area.
If anyone thought a recent court order mandating 40% of the
Kern River’s flow remain in the river for fish was the end of
the story, think again. Agricultural water districts are
striking back. … at what they say is an historic water
heist by the city of Bakersfield. On Tuesday, a coalition
of ag districts filed a motion to stay and a motion
for reconsideration of Kern County Superior Court Judge
Gregory Pulskamp’s injunction and implementation order
requiring water in the river. The group, including Kern Delta
Water District, Kern County Water Agency and the North Kern,
Buena Vista and Rosedale-Rio Bravo water storage districts
contend, among other things, that the implementation order was
rushed by … not affording them due process.
If you don’t already know, it will surprise you to learn that
for all the attention that our state’s water supply receives in
California – for all the worry and effort it takes to make sure
there’s enough for our 40 million residents, 24 million acres
of farmland, countless acres of natural environment, and status
as the world’s fifth-largest economy (of which its agriculture
and environment are huge parts) – no statewide goal exists to
ensure a sustainable water supply for California’s future. What
big, bold vision has ever been achieved without first setting a
goal? Without such a goal, we have no clear path forward, and
we don’t know which direction and how far we need to go to
achieve a reliable water supply. In a state always preoccupied
with fears of drought and the impacts of climate change, we
have not determined how much water will be needed in the short-
and long-term to address these existential threats. -Written by Heather Dyer, the General Manager of
San Bernardino Valley Municipal Water District; and Graham
Knaus, the CEO of the California Association of
Counties.
California’s biggest water supplier is hurting for cash this
year as the recent record-breaking rainy winter means its
customers need to buy less water. The Metropolitan Water
District of Southern California is facing a more than $300
million budget shortfall – about a quarter of its normal
revenue from selling water. The agency, which provides drinking
water for 19 million people including San Diego, is drawing
money out of its cash reserves and taking out a $100 million
loan to make up the shortfall. But long term, its leaders
are talking about changing the way they charge for water,
realizing that decades of conservation policies in California
and diversification of water supplies with desalination and
wastewater recycling means water sales will continue to
drop.
Fresh carrots are an expanding $1.4 billion U.S. market, and
Americans are expected to consume 100 million pounds this
Thanksgiving — roughly five ounces for every human being in the
country. At least 60% of those carrots are produced by just two
companies, Bolthouse and Grimmway, both of which were acquired
by buyout firms, in 2019 and 2020 respectively.
… Cartels are less funny for neighbors of the two
producers in Southern California’s Cuyama Valley, who are
calling for a boycott of Big Carrot over the amount of water
their farms are sucking out of the ground. In 2022,
Bolthouse and Grimmway together were responsible for 67%, or
9.6 billion gallons, of the area’s total water use. Local
residents said they expect their wells to dry up if the carrot
farms continue to use as much water as they do …
Projections of water shortages have halted development on the
fringes of the Phoenix metro area. And Arizona Senate President
Warren Petersen, who is also a real estate broker, is no fan of
a regulation at the heart of those projected shortages, a
requirement for residential developers in urban areas to show
they have a 100-year-water supply. “You have to have a 100-year
water certificate for your house. Why wasn’t it 105 years? Why
wasn’t it 95 years? Do you know what the highest water supply
requirement in the nation is outside of Arizona? It’s
California. And it’s 25 years,” Petersen said. But Sarah Porter
with the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State
University says there’s a good reason the 100-year requirement
was included in Arizona’s 1980 Groundwater Management Act.
Who could forget last May, when Arizona, California and Nevada
made a three-year pact to conserve water from the Colorado
River? Many thought it couldn’t be done, but with Lake Mead
reservoir levels at a historic low, and the federal government
poised to wrest control of the process, the states agreed to
conserve 10 percent of their water — nearly a billion gallons —
between now and 2026. The deal, greased by an unusually wet
winter, was made possible by $1.2 billion in funding from the
Inflation Reduction Act that would pay water users to conserve.
But those payments, whose contracts are being finalized, may
come with a heavy toll over how much the feds are prepared to
shell out. A new investigation from POLITICO shows that much of
the water states agreed to save under new federally-funded
contracts was already accounted for under cheaper, pre-existing
agreements.
More than 30 years ago, a piece of federal legislation dropped
like a bomb on California’s Central Valley farmers.
Reverberations from that legislation continue through today.
Just last month, a San Joaquin Valley congressman added
language to an appropriations bill that would unwind a key
portion of the 1992 Central Valley Project Improvement Act
(CVPIA). … One of its cornerstones was that 800,000 acre
feet of water per year would be carved out of supplies that had
been sent to towns and farms and redirect it to the environment
instead. Specifically, the legislation hoped to save salmon
populations, which had been crashing. Thirty-one years later,
salmon are still on the brink. Now, Republican lawmakers
are trying to get rid of the environmental protections in the
CVPIA for good.
Merced and Monterey counties got $20 million each from the
state in October to help the residents of Planada and Pajaro
recover from January floods. But local officials want to
spend at least some of the money on infrastructure, while
residents want all of the money to help relieve debt they’ve
incurred from the natural disaster. That is, after all, what
state lawmakers ostensibly sent the money for. Days of
rain led to a flood of local canals and creeks in the area on
Jan. 9, forcing the complete evacuation of the majority-Latino
community of Planada, population almost 4,000.
Percy Deal, a member of the Navajo Nation, is looking up at a
pale stripe of sandstone that stands out against the rim of
Black Mesa in northeastern Arizona. Juniper trees speckle the
steep cliffsides facing the site of a proposed hydropower
project. … The hydropower company Nature and People First
applied for preliminary permits from the Federal Energy
Regulatory Commission (FERC) last year to investigate the
possibility of building three pumped water storage projects on
and below Black Mesa to generate electricity for nearby cities
like Phoenix and Tucson. Deal and other Black Mesa residents
are worried that the project could do damage to land and water
that has ecological and cultural significance to both the
Navajo and Hopi tribes. … They’re concerned about
potential overuse of groundwater underneath the Black Mesa
region, which is still reeling from the environmental
consequences of decades of extractive coal strip mining.
An important milestone was reached Friday for the construction
of another reservoir in California. The Final Environmental
Impact Report (EIR) for Sites Reservoir was certified and the
Sites Reservoir Project was approved by the Sites Project
Authority, the lead agency under the California Environmental
Quality Act. Next up for the Sites Project Authority is to
move the project through the final planning stages. After
getting through the final stages, crews will begin building the
reservoir. … The Sites Project says the final EIR
evaluates the environmental impact and proposed mitigation
measures that come with construction and operations. It
was updated to address public comments and updates to the
project following a draft that was released in 2021.
The debate over coastal cattle and dairy ranching has revived
as unsafe levels of fecal bacteria continue to contaminate
waterways in the Point Reyes National Seashore. Park data from
a year of testing concluded that E. coli exceeded health
standards in roughly 31% of the samples collected from 24
sites, including at Kehoe Beach and Drakes Bay. The data were
presented to the California Coastal Commission on Thursday as
part of a first annual update on the National Park Service’s
water quality management plan to curb water contamination
caused by the ranching. Commissioners and environmentalists
said they want a resolution, with many calling for a halting or
reduction of coastal ranching.
[John Brooks] Hamby 27, … California’s
boyish-looking representative on issues concerning the river,
sat shoulder-to-shoulder with the other states’ powerful water
managers, many of whom have decades of experience, an almost
uncomfortable sight given their latest brawl over the
beleaguered Colorado River. … Combined, these roles
position Hamby as arguably the most powerful person involved in
talks on the future of the Colorado River, a waterway that
is relied upon by an estimated 35 million people and
supports about $1.4 trillion worth of commerce. They
also place him at the center of the river’s most consequential
moment since midcentury, when Arizona and California went
to the Supreme Court to fight over the amount of water
they were allocated.
The Solano County supervisors this week accepted the Cache
Slough Public Access Recreation Action Plan – a document that
offers few options to expand public access opportunities. The
board action on Tuesday was part of the consent calendar so
there was no comment from the supervisors. An agreement was
reached in 2021 between Solano County and the state Department
of Water Resources and other state agencies with the goal of
enhancing public recreation opportunities – and
particularly more land access to the waterways – in the Cache
Slough region.
A first-of-its-kind winegrower sustainability certification
program in Napa Valley is changing its rules to require that
vineyards eliminate the use of synthetic herbicides. Napa
Green, a nonprofit established in 2004, announced Tuesday it
will require members to phase out their use of Monsanto-made
weed killer Roundup by 2026, and all other synthetic herbicides
by 2028. The program currently has around 90 participating
wineries. … The move makes Napa Green the first of about 20
sustainable winegrowing certification programs worldwide to
phase out synthetic herbicides. It also represents a change in
position for Napa Green. Last year, Brittain told the San
Francisco Chronicle that she feared banning Roundup would
alienate growers. Glyphosate, the active ingredient in
Roundup, has been linked to cancers such as non-Hodgkin’s
lymphoma with repeat exposure.
… The Coastkeeper Alliance and Russian Riverkeeper are
accusing Sonoma County of failing its duties under the Public
Trust Doctrine. That by allowing so many water wells, as the
initial complaint states, “the extraction of groundwater
interconnected with nearby streams and rivers impacts
streamflow and public trust resources and uses, such as the
fish and availability of water for recreation, in those surface
waters.”
The San Diego County Water Authority’s board voted Thursday to
drop a lawsuit the water seller filed in August against two of
its customer water districts that are trying to leave and the
agency that gave them permission to do so. After a
closed-door deliberation, the Water Authority publicly directed
its lawyers to enter into a settlement agreement with Rainbow
Municipal Water District, Fallbrook Public Utilities District
and the Local Agency Formation Commission or LAFCO – the
boundary referees that agreed to allow two of the Water
Authority’s customers to divorce from their water seller.
Dr. Thomas Holyoke, professor of political science at Fresno
State, was dissatisfied with the textbooks he was using for his
class on water policy, so he decided to take matters into his
own hands. “I decided to write my own book and it kind of
became this larger project about the fragmentation of water
policy,” Holyoke said. Holyoke’s book, “Water Politics:
The Fragmentation of Western Water Policy,” was released on
Nov. 13. The book is about the enactment of government
policy regarding the use of water in the western United States
and its eventual fragmentation, in part due to the rise of
environmentalism as a political force.
The Elk Grove Water District is putting together a free sign-up
event Friday that will provide a leg up for low-income
households struggling to pay bills. The event will help
residents apply for assistance through the Low Income Household
Water Assistance Program (LIHWAP), a federally funded program
operated by California Department of Community Services and
Development. The program offers one-time support to help
individuals pay past due or current water and sewer bills to
their local water service providers.
Climate activists are pushing back on a contentious shoreline
housing project in the South Bay city of Newark. By building
there, the activists believe, the city will miss an opportunity
to restore sensitive wetlands and areas for them to migrate to
as seas rise. Marshes are the region’s first line of defense
against rising seas, and the Bay Area has just 15% of its
wetlands left. Environmental advocates want these ecosystems
protected. … Scientists project seas could rise by at
least 1 foot by 2050 and as much as 7 feet by 2100 because
global emissions are still increasing. A recent study by
researchers with the British Antarctic Survey suggests
that rising sea levels will speed up this century no matter if
the world curbs emissions.
A Western Slope coalition is making a play to buy the water
rights of a small hydropower plant with a big role in how water
moves across Colorado. If the group succeeds, farmers, water
providers, anglers and rafters say they could sleep more easily
for years into the future. … The Shoshone Power Plant,
owned by Xcel Energy, is small compared with some of the
company’s other power plants, but its right to water on the
Colorado River is one of the oldest and largest within state
lines. Local economies and communities from Glenwood Springs to
Grand Junction are dependent on consistent flows out of the
plant and have been worried for decades about another entity
snapping up the Shoshone water rights and siphoning off their
water supply.
A struggle over water rights has led to a carrot boycott in
California’s Cuyama Valley north of Santa Barbara. The cause of
contention is groundwater rights. Groundwater is the only
source of water available in the region, and its aquifers are
being rapidly drained. Wells have had to be sunk to 680 feet
below the surface to gain access to the water, reports The Los
Angeles Times. Signs reading “BOYCOTT CARROTS” and “STAND
WITH CUYAMA AGAINST CORPORATE GREED” are aimed at the region’s
two largest growers, Grimmway Farms BB #:112956 and
Bolthouse Farms BB #:111358, which specialize in carrots
and are by far the largest water users in the area. -Written by Richard Smoley, contributing editor for
Blue Book Services.
The Department of the Interior today announced $51 million from
President Biden’s Investing in America agenda for 30 new
Environmental Water Resource Projects in 11 states through the
Bureau of Reclamation. The collaborative projects focus on
water conservation, water management and restoration efforts
that will result in significant benefits to ecosystem or
watershed health. … As part of the Biden-Harris
administration’s commemoration of the two-year anniversary of
the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Principal Deputy Assistant
Secretary for Water and Science Michael Brain announced the
selections during a visit to Grand Junction, Colorado, where
eight of the selected projects are located.
In 2014, California voters passed a proposition using $7.5
billion dollars in state funds to expand water storage
capacity. Nearly 10 years later, people say not much has come
from the vote. The main focus on their minds is the failure to
expand Shasta Dam. Kern County Congressman David Valadao (R-CA)
has authored legislation that makes it easier for Shasta to
receive federal funding. … So what’s the problem with
raising the dam? Jon Rosenfield, Science Director at San
Francisco Baykeeper, says a whole lot. “Raising that dam is
going to have negative impacts,” Rosenfield said.
A judge’s order signed Tuesday ensures there will be at least
some water flowing in the Kern River through Bakersfield in
perpetuity. Unless, of course, it’s overturned. Kern County
Superior Court Judge Gregory Pulskamp signed an order that
requires 40% of the Kern River’s flow to remain in the river to
keep fish populations healthy. This order is the implementation
of an injunction granted by Pulskamp October 30 mandating that
some amount of water must flow through the river for fish
populations. Pulskamp instructed the City of Bakersfield and
plaintiffs to work out how much water should be kept in the
river for fish, which is what Tuesday’s implementation order
lays out.
Hundreds of scientists working for the state of California to
protect water supplies, respond to oil spills, study wildlife
and track foodborne outbreaks marched in Sacramento today in
what’s being called the first-ever strike by state civil
servants. Today was the first day of a three-day
“Defiance for Science” rolling strike by more than 4,000
rank-and-file state scientists, who are seeking to close pay
gaps with their counterparts in local, federal and other parts
of state government. Many of the workers picketing at the
headquarters of the California Environmental Protection Agency
carried signs reminding Californians what they do
behind-the-scenes: “I am a scientist and I give you safe food,”
read one. “No science? No salmon!” Others called for the Newsom
administration to “Smash the sexist gender pay gap!”
While tap water in California is considered safe by most
standards, specific contaminants are finding their way into the
drinking water supply. Take per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances
(PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals”) for example, which
have been shown to have serious adverse effects on human
health, including cancer, thyroid disorders, ulcerative
colitis, infertility. The list goes on. In fact, tap water in
urban areas in Southern and Central California appears to be a
hot spot for contamination by these chemicals, according to new
U.S. Geological Survey research. Pollution involving “forever
chemicals” is widespread. -Written by Mike DiGiannantonio, an attorney with
Environmental Law Group and lives in Hermosa Beach.
When Leigh Harris and her husband Franck Avril moved into their
dream home, Leigh said she felt like the luckiest person in the
world. The home is in Rio Verde Foothills, Arizona, near
Scottsdale in unincorporated Maricopa County. … There was
just one downside. Their home was built on a dry lot, which
means there were no pipes connected to a city water supply.
… Leigh and Franck’s experience is an extreme version of
the kind of trade-offs we all may have to consider in the
future. Under the growing threats from drought, extreme heat,
wildfire and floods, what are we willing to endure to keep
living in the places we love? And who will have a choice?.
Years of complaints about billing mistakes and hours-long
customer-service hold times have prompted San Diego officials
to make sweeping changes to the city’s Water
Department. The changes include a new billing system,
switching customer service software, new call routing, more
payment options and a new policy alerting customers when their
bill is being withheld for a leak investigation. The city
is also hiring more customer service workers, paying them more,
expanding their training and putting new leaders in charge of
their efforts.
On Friday, the State Water Resources Control Board will hold
the first day of a three-day public hearing on the draft staff
report for the Sacramento Delta update to the Bay Delta Water
Quality Control Plan. The Board is accepting public
comments on the report through December 15. The report examines
the potential economic, environmental, and other impacts of
various options for updating the Bay Delta Plan, including the
proposed voluntary agreements. Curious to know how the
staff proposal and voluntary agreements compare? In a workshop
held on October 19 workshop, the State Water Board staff delved
into the details of the report, discussing the background, key
components, and modeling results for both the staff proposal
and the voluntary agreements. This is essentially a transcript
of the staff presentation.
Former Humboldt County 5th District Supervisor Ryan Sundberg
was appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom to the North Coast Regional
Water Quality Control Board. The board’s stated goal is to
“preserve, enhance, and restore the quality of California’s
water resources and drinking water,” according to the agency’s
website. The board also works to “ensure proper water resource
allocation and efficient use.” Sundberg is the general manager
of the Heights Casino in Trinidad.
If you asked Katie Creighton in May how native fish would fare
this year, “cautiously optimistic” might have been her answer.
Spiking flows across the Colorado River basin, the result of
last winter’s strong snowpack, were setting the stage for the
river’s small cadre of endangered and threatened fish. Six
months later, the optimism has become less cautious. …
Indeed, counts from this year suggest that at least two
endangered fish species — the razorback sucker and Colorado
pikeminnow — saw a bumper season around Moab. It’s at least
partly due to the spring inundation that flooded the Scott and
Norma Matheson Wetlands Preserve.
Businesses and institutions gearing up to comply with a new
state ban on using potable drinking water to irrigate
non-functional lawns will soon get additional help from the
Metropolitan Water District to transform turf into more
sustainable landscaping, thanks to a state grant awarded to the
district. The California Department of Water Resources
presented a $38 million check to Metropolitan officials today
as part of its Urban Community Drought Relief program, which
has awarded over $217 million to 44 projects to help
communities strengthen drought resilience and better prepare
for future dry conditions.
California water agencies say they have nearly secured $4.5
billion in funding needed to build the state’s largest
reservoir in nearly a century, Sites Reservoir, as a state
environmental review process for the project comes to a rapid
close after decades of delay. … Approving it would mark a key
procedural milestone and official green light for construction
scheduled to begin in 2026.
On October 11, San Francisco Baykeeper put the US Fish and
Wildlife Service on notice that the environmental advocacy
organization intends to sue the agency for for violating the
Endangered Species Act by missing a Congressional deadline for
the listing of the longfin smelt. … The longfin smelt is
a cousin of the Delta smelt, once the most abundant fish
in the entire estuary and now virtually extinct in the wild. No
Delta smelt have been found in the past five years of the
California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Fall Midwater
Trawl (FMWT) survey on the Sacramento- San Joaquin River
Delta: apps.wildlife.ca.gov/… The abundance
index, a relative measure of abundance, for the Longfin
Smelt was 28 in 2020, 323 in 2021 and 403 in 2022. Those
figures contrast with an index of 81,737 when the survey
first began in 1967.
Scientists based in and/or work on issues in California—from
The Nature Conservancy and Ocean Conservancy—will be traveling
to Nairobi, Kenya for the UN environment programme’s third
session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC-3)
from Nov 13-19. At this session, the following scientists will
hold observer status on behalf of their organizations as
nations come together for the goal of developing an
international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution,
including in the marine environment.
The Marin County Board of Supervisors has denied efforts to
block a proposed house on the last vacant beachfront property
in Stinson Beach. … The owners of the 15,200-square-foot
property, which has been in their family for almost 90 years,
hope to build the vacation home on the site of a cottage that
burned down in the 1980s. But in the intervening decades,
concerns about environmentally sensitive habitat and sea level
rise have made development more difficult. … Impacts of
flooding from a nearby creek during a 100-year storm, as well
as from sea level rise, would be “less than significant”
because of the site elevation, Taplin said at the meeting. He
also said that inspections two weeks after January’s
destructive winter storms showed no damage to the parcel, while
nearby areas were severely impacted.
For several decades, many coho salmon returning to waterways
around Seattle to spawn have died mysteriously following heavy
rains. In some urban streams, nearly all of the coho returning
from the ocean died. It wasn’t until 2021 that scientists
figured out what was behind what they called “urban runoff
mortality syndrome,” and it was not until this month that
federal regulators at the Environmental Protection Agency moved
to do something about it. The EPA on Nov. 2 said it would
consider an August petition from the California-based Yurok
Tribe and the Washington-based Port Gamble S’Klallam and
Puyallup tribes, calling for a ban of the chemical 6PPD-q. It’s
used in car tires to keep them from cracking and degrading, but
as tires wear down, they shed particles containing the chemical
into stormwater and streams.
Goleta plans to be on track to add 1,837 new homes over the
next eight years, part of the city’s effort to satisfy
California’s push to reach the building of 180,000 homes
annually. Goleta’s Planning Commission takes its turn to attack
the problem at the local level during a series of rezoning
discussions and votes on Monday evening concerning 11
properties on the city’s much-debated rezoning list. … Creeks
have been flowing since California’s good winter of rains, too
good at times for some flooded areas. But it means the aquifer
below Goleta is filling, which the Goleta Water District
anticipates will allow it to lift the moratorium on new water
meters sometime this year.
A new institute created by a national Native nonprofit law
group and a foundation that works to protect rivers will
support tribal water rights advocacy, recruit and train the
next generation of tribal water attorneys and provide education
on tribal water law and policies. The Tribal Water Institute
will be housed at the Native American Rights Fund, known as
NARF, a national nonprofit organization that provides legal
assistance to tribal governments, organizations and individuals
in need of legal help on Indigenous law cases. The Walton
Family Foundation committed $1.4 million over the next three
years to support the institute.
In the Cuyama Valley north of Santa Barbara, lush green fields
stretch across the desert. Sprinklers spray thousands of acres
to grow a single thirsty crop: carrots. Wells and pumps pull
groundwater from as deep as 680 feet, and the aquifer’s levels
are dropping. As the valley’s only water source shrinks, a
bitter legal battle over water rights has arisen between carrot
growers and the community. Residents are fighting back with a
campaign urging everyone to stop buying carrots. Along the
valley’s roads, in cattle pastures and outside homes and
businesses, signs and banners have sprung up declaring “BOYCOTT
CARROTS” and “STAND WITH CUYAMA AGAINST CORPORATE GREED.”
The Solano County Water Agency Board of Directors told its
staff not to continue discussions with California Forever
regarding their proposed development project in eastern Solano
County. At a regular meeting of the board Thursday evening,
over 90 attendees and public commenters filled the meeting
room, spilling out into the hallway as the zoom room exceeded
its capacity of 100 throughout most of the evening, leaving
some citizens unable to access the meeting in real-time.
… Friday morning, California Forever released a
statement to their website which indicated they will seek other
water sources. “Regrettably, under pressure from a vocal group
of opponents of the project, the board declined staff’s
recommendation to continue discussions with us,” the statement
reads, “so we are proceeding with other water supply options we
have been considering.”
California’s state government began drawing up plans for Sites
Reservoir in the Sacramento Valley 70 years ago. And it still
only exists on paper. So, kudos to Gov. Gavin Newsom for
deciding that it’s finally time to put this tardy project on
the fast track. Fast track means there’ll be limited time for
any opponent to contest the project in court on environmental
grounds. Newsom used a new law he pushed through the
Legislature in June aimed at making it easier to build
transportation, clean energy and water infrastructure by
expediting lawsuits under the California Environmental Quality
Act. -Written by LA Times columnist George Skelton.
California environmental nonprofits and local agriculture
organizations recently filed lawsuits against the state and
regional water boards over nitrate regulations, but for
different reasons. Agriculture wants a better balance
between the need to grow food and need to protect water
quality, while environmental groups want to see a limit to
nitrates’ use in agriculture. Nitrates are inorganic
compounds containing nitrogen that can come from man-made or
natural resources and are used to help with the soil quality in
agriculture, but they can cause problems when they enter into
ground or surface water, said Ted Morton, executive director
for Santa Barbara Channelkeeper.
The Bureau of Reclamation recently announced the selection of
31 planning projects to receive more than $28 million in
appropriated funding to support potential new water reuse and
desalination projects. The 31 projects are in California,
Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas and Utah. The projects also
bring a cost-share contribution of $64.7 million, bringing the
total investment of $93.7 million. Reclamation said the funding
is aimed at creating new sources of water supply less
vulnerable to drought and climate change. Recipients will use
the funding to prepare feasibility studies and undertake other
planning efforts like preliminary project design and
environmental compliance activities.
The 13 largest U.S. tire manufacturers are facing a lawsuit
from a pair of California commercial fishing organizations that
could force the companies to stop using a chemical added to
almost every tire because it kills migrating salmon. Also found
in footwear, synthetic turf and playground equipment, the
rubber preservative 6PPD has been used in tires for 60 years.
As tires wear, tiny particles of rubber are left behind on
roads and parking lots, breaking down into a byproduct,
6PPD-quinone, that is deadly to salmon, steelhead trout and
other aquatic wildlife when rains wash it into rivers.
… The Institute for Fisheries Resources and the Pacific
Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations filed the lawsuit
in U.S. District Court in San Francisco on Wednesday against
Goodyear, Bridgestone, Continental and others.
As you walk along the Tijuana River Valley, it’s hard not to
smell the pungent smell of sewage, effluent flowing its way
down the valley toward the Pacific Ocean. It’s been a problem
for decades as Tijuana’s sewage infrastructure has failed to
keep up with a city that seemingly grew to two million
residents overnight. The system constantly spews untreated raw
sewage that eventually makes its way north of the border. In
1999, the International Wastewater Treatment plant was built in
the valley just north of the border to help control the
problem.
The Napa City Council on Tuesday unanimously approved two
separate items, one to increase rates for city water customers
and the construction of a new 53-home subdivision in northern
Napa. The rate increases — the first since October 2021 — will
go into effect Jan. 1, 2024, and the first bills with the new
rates will be in March and April. The increase will add up to
about $5 per month more in the winter and $10 per month more in
the summer for average residential water users. Water rate
increases along similar lines will also move forward for
irrigation, other commercial uses and multifamily residential
customers. Additional increases will go into effect each year
until 2028.
Desert cities around Phoenix are constantly facing questions of
water supply — not just at water management agencies but also
at city councils considering where to develop. That’s because
Arizona has one of the most powerful laws in the country
linking water with the decision to build. State law limits
growth where water is in short supply, requiring new
subdivisions to show they have 100 years of water for their
customers. … Developers have found a profitable workaround.
Arizona’s water law applies only when lots are subdivided into
smaller lots for six or more homes and those houses are either
sold or made available for long-term rentals. Instead,
developers have turned to building short-term rentals on a
single large piece of land.
Voters in Fallbrook and Rainbow approved of detaching from the
San Diego County Water Authority for cheaper water in Riverside
County in early voting results Tuesday night. After nearly
three years of battling the Water Authority over what they say
is increasingly high water rates, voters have had enough. …
In July, the San Diego County Local Agency Formation Commission
(LAFCO) approved the request for Rainbow Municipal Water
District and Fallbrook Public Utility District to leave the
Water Authority for Riverside’s Eastern Municipal Water
District. Detachment is a two-step process. After LAFCO’s
decision, voters in both Rainbow and Fallbrook would also need
to approve the detachment.
The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) is now in its
tenth year since passing in 2014, and we are beginning to see
some real progress in coordination and implementation.
Groundwater sustainability agencies (GSAs) have been formed and
initial groundwater sustainability plans (GSPs) submitted.
Following submission, some plans have been approved, some are
still under state review, and many have gone through some
iteration to correct deficiencies. … The Department of Water
Resources recently sent plans for five Sacramento Valley
basins back for revisions, largely due to ongoing concerns
around dry-year impacts of pumping on drinking water wells and
land subsidence.
The ailing Colorado River, serving 40 million people in seven
Western states, has long been described as being on life
support by water managers. Drought. Diversions. Seven states
that don’t want to give up what they believe is their fair
share of its water resources. Add Native American tribes’ water
rights and Mexico’s use of the river and it becomes complicated
and fraught with divisions. U.S. President Joe Biden says he
has a plan with new money aimed at conservation for a river
that has long been described as the “Workhorse of the West.” It
is the vital water lifeline for the mostly arid Southwest and
helped foster the development and the livability of cities like
Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Denver. It irrigates
15% of the nation’s farmland and provides 90% of the country’s
winter vegetables.
City of Napa residents are invited to attend a public hearing
on proposed water rate increases scheduled for Tuesday, Nov. 7,
the city reminded residents on social media today. The meeting,
which is scheduled to begin at 6:30 p.m. will be held at Napa
City Hall located at 955 School Street. … Proposed water
rate increases, should they be approved by city leaders, will
help to pay for maintenance, including infrastructure
Investments which include planned capital improvements and debt
service on past capital improvements, the city said.
Entire towns flooded last winter because of permit delays,
according to lawmakers and others. Debris from overgrown creeks
and waterways up and down the state hadn’t been cleaned out in
years for lack of proper permits. When water barreled down
those channels, debris piled up, pushing water over levees and
into hundreds of homes and businesses. … The
California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW), the main
state-level permitting agency, agreed there were past delays,
though it downplayed them as the culprit for last winter’s
floods saying agencies could have gotten “emergency permits” if
needed.
Deadlines are upcoming related to the multi-district per- and
polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) litigation. The relevant
settlements are with DuPont, Chemours, and Corteva
(collectively, DuPont) and 3M, parties who allegedly
manufactured various PFAS chemicals. The currently-pending
settlements cover $1.185 billion for DuPont and $10.5-$12.5
billion for 3M. The litigation is focused on alleged
contamination of drinking water caused by DuPont’s and 3M’s
alleged manufacture of PFAS chemicals. PFAS are a family of
manmade chemicals that are used due to beneficial properties
like repelling water.
After years of studies, public meetings and deliberation over
the future of the receding Salton Sea, the first visible signs
of major projects at the sea are starting to appear. Local
and state officials are hoping to build on the momentum
generated by the near-completion of the largest project at the
sea to date: The 4,100-acre Species Conservation Habitat
Project along the sea’s southern edge should be finished by the
end of the year; a pilot project along the northern edge is
officially in the works; and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
is in the early stages of a feasibility study focused on
potential long-term solutions at the Salton Sea. … With
further reductions expected due to mandated cuts to Colorado
River water use, the crisis at the Salton Sea has taken on
additional urgency over the past few years.
On October 30, 2023, the Kern County Superior Court
preliminarily enjoined the City of Bakersfield (“City”) from
operating six Kern River weirs in a way that reduces flows
below the amount sufficient to keep downstream fish in “good
condition.” The ruling in Bring Back the Kern et al. v. City of
Bakersfield (BCV-22-103220) seems likely to result in further
development of the law regarding the application of Fish and
Game Code section 5937 (“Section 5937”) and the public trust
doctrine.
State lawmakers are advancing a bill that would prohibit the
planting of new, nonfunctional turf. If the bill passes next
year, it would prohibit local and state governments and unit
owners associations from allowing the planting of nonfunctional
turf or nonnative plants or installing artificial turf in
commercial, institutional or industrial properties beginning in
2025. Although new bluegrass could still be planted around
homes, homeowners associations and others would be prohibited
from planting such grass for ornamental purposes in medians or
areas fronting streets, sidewalks or driveways. The bill is not
intended to be retroactive and would not affect already
existing nonfunctional turf.
Living the good life has often meant finding ways to allow for
growth and construction while ostensibly protecting the natural
environment on which we depend. Want to build a housing
development, but there’s a wetland in the way? Mitigate the
harm by building a new one somewhere else. Want to dam a river,
but there’s a salmon run in the way? Build fish passage around
the dam. If that’s not feasible, build a hatchery instead.
… Unfortunately, these creative approaches often fail.
Constructed wetlands fail to reproduce the essential
hydrologic or biodiversity or other functions of natural
wetlands. Fish passage fails to get enough fish up
and down stream to keep populations viable.
Hatcheries can’t sustain fisheries over the long term
in the same way that habitat can.
The precarious state of Big Basin Water Co. is beginning to
stabilize, but the private water provider still faces a long
and bumpy road ahead. That was the message delivered by Big
Basin’s newly appointed receiver late Thursday night to a crowd
of roughly 50 customers packed into the Boulder Creek Fire
District station along with 40 more who tuned in via Zoom. The
meeting featured Nicolas Jaber, an attorney and project manager
of receiverships with Silver and Wright LLP, which is the law
firm tasked in early October by a Santa Cruz County Superior
Court judge with managing the water system and bringing it back
into compliance with regional standards.
U.S. regulators say they will review the use of a chemical
found in almost every tire after a petition from West Coast
Native American tribes, including one in Northern California,
that want it banned because it kills salmon as they return from
the ocean to their natal streams to spawn. The Yurok tribe in
Northern California and the Port Gamble S’Klallam and Puyallup
tribes in Washington asked the Environmental Protection Agency
to prohibit the rubber preservative 6PPD earlier this year,
saying it kills fish — especially coho salmon — when rains wash
it from roadways into rivers. Washington, Oregon, Vermont,
Rhode Island and Connecticut also wrote the EPA, citing the
chemical’s “unreasonable threat” to their waters and fisheries.
[A]t least once a year since 2019, the Smithwick
Mills water system, which serves about 200 residents in
[Texas], has reported high levels of the synthetic chemical
1,2,3-trichloropropane … Water quality tests from the
Smithwick Mills utility have revealed an average TCP level of
410 parts per trillion over the past four years — more than 80
times what would be allowed in California. But the utility
hasn’t taken any action. It doesn’t have to. The chemical isn’t
regulated in drinking water by the EPA or the Texas Commission
on Environmental Quality, which means neither agency has ever
set a maximum allowable level of TCP.
The feud over the flow of water in California is as old as the
state itself. The regional debate continues over whose needs
for the precious resource should take priority. The latest
exchange will take place in the upcoming State Water Resource
Control Board (SWRCB) hearings on Phase 2 of the Bay Delta
Plan. SWRCB will be considering updates to its Plan for the
Bay-Delta over the next year or so. State Water Board staff
released a series of documents in September that describe the
process to evaluate alternatives and other supporting
documents. The public will have the opportunity to comment over
the next several months. It is anticipated that the SWRCB will
consider those comments and adopt the Bay-Delta Plan Update in
late 2024, after considering the alternatives and their
environmental effects.
Federal environmental regulators have granted a petition to
develop regulations addressing a vehicle tire compound that,
when it reacts with the air and mixes with water, kills coho
and other salmonids. The petition was submitted by three West
Coast tribes last summer, and in response the Environmental
Protection Agency announced it will publish an advance notice
of proposed rulemaking around the chemicals 6PPD and
6PPD-quinone by fall 2024, according to a notice.
The San Mateo County Event Center has received $7.2 million
Thursday to convert the center into an emergency shelter during
emergencies like earthquakes, wildfires and floods. The
money, granted by The California Department of Food and
Agriculture, is meant to improve programs at the center. It
will go towards the construction of a new community kitchen,
shelter for 600 people and feeding thousands during
emergencies. The county said the center is especially important
for financially vulnerable members of the community.
Scientists and technicians will be keeping a close and detailed
watch on something not easily seen from the surface—the
amount of water beneath Sonoma County. That’s a critically
important source with California’s fickle rainy season. Unlike
other NorCal counties, none of the county’s water comes from
snowmelt. It’s all dependent on rain filling up Its
rivers…reservoirs: Lake Mendocino and Lake Sonoma…and
seeping underground. On Monday state officials handed giant
novelty checks clocking in just above $15 million to
representatives of Sonoma county’s three groundwater
basins. … Sonoma Valley basin is near the bay,
so infiltration by sea water is a serious issue. Santa
Rosa Plain comes through Sebastopol. It’s a little bit more
urban, but it also has wells around it. Petaluma Valley
contains some agricultural users, but it also butts up against
the city and rural residents.
Two environmental groups have filed a lawsuit against the
federal Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Fish and
Wildlife Service for allegedly failing to protect the habitat
for two endangered species of birds along Arizona’s Gila River.
The Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity and Maricopa
Audubon Society said damage from cattle grazing is decimating
the streams that the southwestern willow flycatcher and western
yellow-billed cuckoo rely on. … The Gila River is a
nearly 650-mile-long (1,046-kilometer-long) tributary of the
Colorado River and flows through parts of Arizona and New
Mexico.
Colorado scientist Brad Udall spent hours digging — with
frustration — through the federal government’s 700-page
proposal for managing key dams and reservoirs in the Colorado
River Basin over the next three years. … Udall [senior
water and climate research scientist at Colorado State
University] is one of many water experts and officials
across the West who are carefully analyzing the federal
proposal released Oct. 25 by the Bureau of Reclamation. The
draft document focuses on how water is stored in and released
from two key reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead. It says
basin conditions have improved and outlines options to either
maintain the status quo or to conserve 3 million acre-feet of
water in the Lower Basin … Udall had some concerns,
mainly that the federal analysis could be too optimistic.
… Last year, San Diegans paid almost $148 million to the
Imperial Irrigation District for what amounts to just over 40
percent of San Diego’s water supply. That funds about half of
the Imperial Irrigation District’s budget on the water side, an
agency that operates almost debt free. (It also operates a
public energy utility with an over $775 million budget.) And it
was the San Diego deal that paid $5.7 million for this
reservoir. … The water San Diego buys from Imperial
Valley is some of its most expensive supply. A few San Diego
political leaders have suggested the Water Authority sell off
that water, arguing that the region doesn’t need all of it as
rates continue to rise despite San Diegans using less.
New research describes the development and operation of a novel
incentive program that uses water rebates to pay for some of
the costs of stormwater capture, according to a press
release from the University of California – Santa Cruz. Many
aquifers in California and around the world are being drained
of their groundwater because of the combined impacts of excess
pumping, shifts in land use, and climate change. However, the
new study published on Oct. 18 in Nature Water, may offer a
solution. The study describes the development and operation of
a novel incentive program that uses water rebates to pay for
some of the costs of getting stormwater runoff into the ground.
The program is called recharge net metering (ReNeM).
We all know that out here in western Colorado, water is life.
It sustains our agriculture, powers our outdoor recreation
economy and is the keystone of the beautiful environment we all
cherish. All of us also know that our state’s water future
faces immense challenges; from ongoing megadrought in the West,
overuse of the Colorado River by California and Arizona, and
much more. … That is why the state legislature, among other
public and private entities, have been hard at work on a
multifaceted approach to protect Colorado’s water future. The
2023 legislative session was one of the most productive and
historic sessions for water in recent memory. As your state
senator, I made sure that water was at the forefront of my
colleagues’ minds and am proud to have led several successful
water measures. -Written by Dylan Roberts, State Senator for
Clear Creek, Eagle, Garfield, Gilpin, Grand, Jackson, Moffat,
Rio Blanco, Routt, and Summit counties.
In the last four years, the Nolls have spent almost half a
million dollars on consultants, investigatory reports, water
bottles and filtration systems, well testing, and more.
Starting on July 31, 2019, the family lived under constant
threat from the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control
Board: a fine of $5,000 a day for not complying with a cleanup
and abatement order for pollution that the Nolls maintained
from the beginning wasn’t their fault. … This summer,
the water board finally rescinded its order against them,
acknowledging the Nolls’ “time and resources to provide safe
drinking water to the residents of the Buckley Road community”
in its July 2023 notice to the Nolls but not much else.
America’s stewardship of one of its most precious resources,
groundwater, relies on a patchwork of state and local rules so
lax and outdated that in many places oversight is all but
nonexistent, a New York Times analysis has found. The majority
of states don’t know how many wells they have, the analysis
revealed. Many have incomplete records of older wells,
including some that pump large volumes of water, and many
states don’t register the millions of household wells that dot
the country. … While farmers face severe risks from
groundwater depletion, many warn that too much regulation would
harm their livelihoods and the nation’s food supply. “Farming
would not exist as we know it in California without the use of
groundwater,” said Chris Scheuring, a water attorney at the
California Farm Bureau and a family farmer himself.
Crop insurance payouts surpassed $118 billion between 2001 and
2022 nationally for damage caused by extreme weather like
drought, heat and floods. The report, released this week by the
advocacy organization Environmental Working Group, points to
climate change’s increasing impacts to agriculture. The
findings follow a tumultuous growing season, wrought with
extreme drought ravaging the Midwest and much of the
surrounding Mississippi River basin. … Hail payments
were largely concentrated in the Great Plains and Montana, with
smaller pockets in Iowa and Minnesota. Indemnities related to
heat and freeze were concentrated in California, Texas, Kansas
and Washington.
The House has recently passed a bill that will ensure residents
of the Central Valley have continued access to a clean and
reliable water supply. The House of Representatives approved
the bill, H.R. 4394, on Oct. 26. Congressmember David Valadao,
22nd District, authored the Working to Advance Tangible and
Effective Reforms (WATER) for California Act, which – at
Valadao’s insistence – was included in H.R. 4394. According to
Valadao’s office, WATER guarantees that Central Valley Project
(CVP) and State Water Project (SWP) water stakeholders,
including Friant Water Authority, Westlands Water District,
Kern County Water Agency, San Joaquin River Exchange
Contractors Water Authority, will receive the water they
contract and pay for.
California growers can expect no major changes. But
bureaucratic delays and significant regulatory uncertainty
could hamper rural infrastructure projects that support
agriculture.
Below-average precipitation and snowpack during 2020-22 and
depleted surface and groundwater supplies pushed California
into a drought emergency that brought curtailment orders and
calls for modernizing water rights. At the Water Education
Foundation annual water summit last week in Sacramento,
Eric Oppenheimer, chief deputy director of the California State
Water Resources Control Board, discussed what he described as
the state’s “antiquated” water rights system. He spoke before
some 150 water managers, government officials, farmers,
environmentalists and others as part of the event where
interests come together to collaborate on some of the state’s
most challenging water issues.
An immediate crisis on the Colorado River has been averted, but
negotiators now must turn their attention to the next problem
at hand: How will they manage the drying river after the
current guidelines expire at the end of 2026? Federal officials
announced this week that last winter’s heavy snowpack and cuts
in use likely will be enough to keep the river basin’s two
major reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, from draining to
water levels too low to generate power or move water downstream
for at least three years. Federal officials, the seven Colorado
River basin states and 30 tribes in the basin are negotiating
the future of water management on the Colorado River and
creating the next set of guidelines that will govern use of the
critical water source in decades to come.
Environmental activists in Bakersfield have won an initial
victory in their legal fight to keep water flowing in the Kern
River, which for many years was reduced to a dry, sandy
riverbed. A judge has granted a preliminary injunction
preventing water diversions that would dry up the river,
requiring sufficient water to provide for fish and keep the
Kern flowing in the city. … The order, issued Monday by
Kern County Superior Court Judge Greg Pulskamp, will remain in
effect pending a trial and decision in the case. Six
environmental groups sued the city last year, saying
that continuing to allow so much water to be taken from the
river was harming the environment and the community.
The U.S. Department of the Interior announced last week the
most recent batch of funding to help the federal government
meet its requirement to pay tribal water rights settlements.
Out of the $326.5 million announced for nearly a dozen
settlements and projects, $235.1 million will go to two water
supply projects in New Mexico. The bulk of the money coming
into the state from the Interior Department and the largest
allocation announced is $164 million for the Navajo-Gallup
Water Supply Project. An additional $2 million in separate
funds will also go toward operation and maintenance on the
project.
Californians who need help paying their water bills can benefit
from a state-administered program. The Low Income Household
Water Assistance Program, which is administered by the state
Department of Community Service and Development, is available
to both renters and homeowners. “Many low-income residents
behind on their water or sewer bills have received hundreds or
even thousands of dollars in financial support to help pay
their bills,” California CSD said on its website. Through March
or until federal funding runs out, Californians can apply for
one-time help to “pay past due or current residential water and
sewer bills and keep their water on,” state officials added.
The Republican-controlled House of Representatives just passed
an odious spending bill, H.R. 4821, that terminates the
environmental restoration provisions of the Central Valley
Project Improvement Act (CVPIA) that made fish and wildlife a
purpose of the Central Valley Project for the first time in
history. … Buried in the 100-page bill are eight lines
written by Representative David Valadao (R-CA-22) and
co-sponsored by eleven other California Republicans, including
Speaker Johnson’s predecessor, Kevin McCarthy (R-CA-20),
the Tribe reported. They order the Secretary of the
Interior to “deem complete the fish, wildlife, and habitat
mitigation and restoration actions” required by the 1992
Central Valley Project Improvement Act (PL-102-575 Title XXXIV)
signed into law by President George H.W. Bush.
Pasadena’s Winter Watering Schedule goes into effect on
Wednesday, Nov. 1, and reduces outdoor watering to just one day
a week through March. This change marks a reduction from the
two-day-per-week limit in place from April through October.
Watering days are determined by property address. Odd-numbered
addresses may water on Tuesdays and Fridays, while
even-numbered addresses may water on Mondays and Thursdays. All
watering must occur before 9 a.m. or after 6 p.m.
Last week, the Bureau of Reclamation released an updated
proposal for the near-term management of Lake Powell and Lake
Mead. Its revised draft supplemental environmental impact
statement (SEIS) includes a proposal crafted by the Lower
Colorado River Basin states — Arizona, California and Nevada —
that commits to conserving 3 million acre-feet of water through
the end of 2026. The new plan comes after a period of relative
optimism thanks to last winter’s record snow year, a wet summer
in parts of the Rockies and increased water-conservation
efforts across the region. But while federal officials and
state leaders celebrated the new cuts and sunnier short-term
water projections, environmental groups warned against
minimizing the gravity of the crisis.
In what one attorney called a “moment of truth” for the City of
Bakersfield, a judge ordered the city to keep enough water in
the normally dry Kern River to protect fish populations. The
21-page preliminary injunction was issued by Kern County
Superior Court Judge Gregory Pulskamp Monday afternoon. Colin
Pearce, who represents the city on Kern River issues, declined
to comment saying the city is still reviewing the order. It’s
unclear if the city, or other Kern River interests, will appeal
the injunction.
Low-income Los Angeles County residents who are behind on their
utility payments have a chance at keeping the water on, with a
federally funded program that has been extended through March.
The Low Income Household Water Assistance Program, administered
by the California Department of Community Services and
Development, was established by Congress in December 2020 as a
one-time support to help low-income Californians pay past-due
or current bills for water, sewer or both services. Through the
program, eligible applicants can receive up to $15,000 in
assistance. The program kicked off in 2021 with an estimated $5
million funding …
California regulators have told local agencies in western
portions of the Sacramento Valley that their plans to combat
groundwater overpumping need fixing, giving them six months to
revise their plans before the state agency makes a final
determination. The Department of Water Resources said Thursday
that officials determined that local groundwater plans are
incomplete in areas of the Sacramento Valley where prolonged
drought and heavy agricultural pumping drew down aquifers and
left residential wells dry. … This step marks the first
of two approval opportunities for Sacramento Valley agencies.
Groundwater sustainability plans deemed incomplete include
Colusa, Corning, Antelope, Los Molinos and Red Bluff — located
in the west and northern reaches of the valley.
Fiona Skye McKenna, a project manager for a firm developing
properties in the Otay Mesa area [of San Diego], pleaded guilty
in federal court [Monday], admitting that she falsified permits
that led to the illegal discharge of pollutants in connection
with a project known as the International Industrial Park. In
pleading guilty, McKenna admitted that she forged permits
purportedly issued by the California Regional Water Quality
Control Board and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to place
fill dirt, rock and sand into Johnson Canyon Creek at the
International Industrial Park site. McKenna falsified the
permits by cutting and pasting from permits the firm had
obtained for work at another site. … The wetlands area of
Johnson Creek flows into the Otay River, which flows into San
Diego Bay.
It was a rough debut. JB Hamby, 26 years old, had rocketed to
the innermost circle of state and federal officials charged
with saving the Colorado River from collapse. In mid-January,
he was elected to chair California’s river board, representing
Imperial Irrigation District, by far the biggest recipient of
the overused river’s supply. Federal officials had bluntly
threatened to impose mandatory cuts across the region if huge
voluntary reductions weren’t made. But 12 days later, after
contentious closed-door talks, he watched in dismay as media
outlets across the U.S. published stories about six states
releasing a joint plan to save the river, with only his state,
California, refusing to sign on. It was a baptism by near
drowning for the youngest “water buffalo,” as negotiators of
Colorado River agreements have historically called themselves.
Every five years, the California Department of Water Resources
(DWR) prepares the California Water Plan, a statutorily
mandated strategic plan to guide the management and control of
the state’s water resources. The main purpose of the 2023
California Water Plan (2023 Water Plan) is to outline the
status and trends of California’s water supplies,
water-dependent natural resources, and agricultural, urban, and
environmental water demands while also reflecting the current
legislative and administrative priorities for water resources.
Ultimately, the 2023 Water Plan will serve as a planning and
policy roadmap that will guide DWR in the proceeding five-year
period.
Food grows where water flows. So goes the saying on signs I
have seen in farmlands in Fresno, Tulare, Merced and Kings
counties since I moved to the San Joaquin Valley 10 years ago.
The signs, and others like them, are protests against cuts to
water deliveries to growers in those regions. More often than
not, farmers were angry with whoever was California’s governor.
Since the Republican party has been stuck in super minority
status, California’s governors have been Democrats, namely
Jerry Brown and now Gavin Newsom. Despite persistent droughts,
they often get blamed for whatever water cuts are happening,
along with Fresno congressman Jim Costa and his colleague from
San Francisco, Nancy Pelosi. They also are Democrats. -Written by Tad Weber, the Fresno Bee’s opinion
editor.
Four years ago, two of the biggest farmers in California sent
messages to each other regarding the biggest farmer in America:
Stewart Resnick. What the messages made clear is that Resnick’s
personal relationship had started to fray with Farid Assemi, a
pistachio grower and home builder who had immense acres on the
west side of Fresno County. Who was stepping in as peacemaker:
it was none other than John Vidovich, the second biggest grower
in the state, who had a reputation for feuding over land and
water with other big growers.
Water disputes have become so pervasive in Utah that the state
Judicial Council established a new program last year that
designates and trains judges to handle these cases. “It was
inspired by panic,” says Senior Judge Kate Appleby. … In
Colorado a water court has been in place for decades; the
judges there work on water cases full time. Utah’s law mandates
that at least three district court judges specialize in water
disputes in addition to handling other cases. Because of
overwhelming interest, the state has 10 water judges. Nevada is
following suit.
The House voted to approve H.R. 4394, which includes Rep. David
Valadao’s Working to Advance Tangible and Effective Reforms
(WATER) for California Act, a measure focusing on ensuring
access to clean and reliable water supply in the Central
Valley. The bill aims to address water shortage issues by
providing funding eligibility for the Shasta Dam project and
bringing accountability to water management. It requires
the Central Valley Project and State Water Project to be
operated consistent with the 2019 Biological Opinions, which
inform long-term operations plans and have been a source of
uncertainty for Valley farmers.
California Water Service Group (Group) (NYSE: CWT) today
announced the election of Jeffrey Kightlinger, 63, to the
Group’s Board of Directors, effective Nov. 1, 2023. Kightlinger
has the distinction of having been the longest serving Chief
Executive Officer of the Metropolitan Water District of
Southern California, the largest municipal water supplier in
the nation. In this capacity, he oversaw the agency’s $1.8
billion budget along with water and power operations serving 19
million residents in Southern California. During his tenure, he
negotiated strategic agreements on the Colorado River and the
50-year renewal of Hoover Dam hydroelectric power.
This month, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation announced that San
Luis Obispo County was among 31 Western U.S. planning projects
to receive $28.9 million in funding to support potential new
water reuse and desalination projects. SLO County was awarded
$550,000 in matching funds to start a feasibility, technology
and project location study to take advantage of our over 80
miles of ocean frontage that could help transform seawater into
drinking water. With the prospect of future droughts due
to global warming, “this renewable, almost inexhaustible
resource would not be diminished by climate change,
insufficient rainfall, or water conservation efforts,” says
Angela Ford, SLO DESAL (Desalination Executable Solution and
Logistics) Plan manager and supervising water resources
engineer with the county.
The company that sells Arrowhead 100% Mountain Spring Water is
suing to challenge California regulators’ recent ruling that
the company must stop taking much of the water it pipes from
the San Bernardino National Forest for bottling. BlueTriton
Brands filed the lawsuit this month in Fresno County Superior
Court, arguing in its complaint that the State Water Resources
Control Board overstepped its authority “far beyond what
California law allows.” The board voted
unanimously in September to order the company to halt its
“unauthorized diversions” of water from springs in the San
Bernardino Mountains.
Last year, three new directors were elected to the five-member
Marin Municipal Water District Board of Directors. They are a
big part of the effort pushing for a turnaround already
underway. Consumers can’t declare victory until new sources of
water and increased storage facilities are up and running. As
voters demanded, the agency that supplies water to 191,000
southern and central Marin residents is moving in the right
direction. The prior MMWD board majority was slammed for
excessive reliance on conservation while failing to develop
new, dependable water sources. -Written by columnist Dick Spotswood.
On November 7, leaders from 18 of the state and federal
agencies charged with implementing California’s long-term
management plan for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta – the
Delta Plan – will gather to focus on two critically important
efforts to advance and improve the way we all manage the Delta:
integrated modeling and climate change adaptation strategies. A
key focus for the discussions will be on how the committee can
collectively strengthen the partnerships needed to move these
efforts forward in support of the coequal goals of water supply
reliability and ecosystem health for the Delta.
California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot ruffled
some feathers with local water districts Wednesday when he said
the state needs to conserve water like it has with energy. He
made his comments at the Water Education Foundation’s annual
Water Summit.
Officials with the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control
Board have voted to require Boeing to better monitor water
discharged from Santa Susana Field Lab that is tucked in the
hills between San Fernando and Simi valleys. The board
unanimously voted last week to approve a new five-year
permit that requires Boeing, which along with the federal
government owns the Santa Susana site, to perform a more
precise level of testing of water discharged from the site.
… The vote came a few weeks after the watchdog group
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER,
released a report showing that two highly toxic chemicals are
not being monitored at the Santa Susana Field lab and
potentially could leak into the Los Angeles River.
The Utah Rivers Council has released a 12-part plan to bring
the struggling Great Salt Lake back to a sustainable elevation.
The nonprofit unveiled the 4,200 Project Wednesday, which
outlines several policy changes to bring the lake to an
elevation of 4,200 feet above sea level. This “Goldilocks zone”
means the lake’s dust hot spots are covered. Islands become
islands again. Salinity levels are optimal for supporting brine
shrimp, brine flies, and the millions of migrating shorebirds
and waterfowl that depend on them. But it’s going to take a lot
of time and water to get there — the Great Salt Lake currently
sits at 4,192 feet in the south half and 4,189 feet in the
north. The Great Salt Lake’s current record low, set last
November, is 4,188.5 feet.
California, Nevada and Arizona’s historic pact to cut their use
of the Colorado River’s overtapped supplies should be enough to
keep the basin’s massive reservoirs from hitting dangerously
low levels — for now, a federal analysis reported
[Wednesday]. With the release of its revised environmental
assessment today, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is poised to
move forward with the three-state plan to give up about 13% of
water they receive from the Colorado River through the end of
2026. … It’s a major milestone for fraught negotiations
that began in the summer of 2022, as a megadrought parched the
already-overdrafted Colorado River and federal
officials called for massive cuts to water
use.
The removal of a species from the government’s endangered
species list is often a cause for celebration, as it means a
plant or animal variety has somehow beaten the odds and
recovered from its parlous condition. That’s not the case for
21 animal species just delisted from the Endangered Species Act
by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. They’re being taken off
the list because they have moved in the opposite direction.
They’ve gone extinct. … Conservatives and business
lobbyists commonly dismiss concern about the fate of ostensibly
unimportant species as pointy-headed liberal
hand-wringing. A good example is the disdain shown by
Central Valley farmers and their political mouthpieces for the
unassuming delta smelt, a tiny endangered fish they blame for
mandated diversions of the water they use for irrigation into
rivers and streams to preserve the ecosystem. -Written by LA Times business columnist Michael
Hiltzik.
For California, a mixed bag of results on irrigation regulation
has occurred with the signature of Assembly Bill 1572 into law
by California Governor Gavin Newsom, while Assembly Bill 1573
was ordered to the inactive file by the state’s Senate.
The two bills each had different aims to address conservation
measures in California and targeted various irrigation methods
as a means of advancing that effort. AB1573 was
ordered to inactive file at the request of Sen. Henry Stern,
D-California, in early September. The Irrigation Association,
Fairfax, Virginia, published a letter in June that expressed
deep concern with the bill. The legislation would
have prohibited the use of traditional overhead sprinklers,
defined as including ”spray sprinkler nozzles with application
rate greater than 1.0 inch per hour,” in new or rehabilitated
landscapes.
Cadiz, Inc announced today that the Company has entered into a
long-term contract with El Paso Natural Gas Company, L.L.C.
(“EPNG”) to install a tap on their natural gas pipeline, which
runs through the Cadiz Ranch property in the California eastern
Mojave Desert. The gas tap will allow Cadiz to replace diesel
engines with natural gas engines to power the Company’s
groundwater wellfield, pump stations and related facilities for
its agriculture operations and the Cadiz Water Conservation,
Supply and Storage Project (“Cadiz Project”). The high
efficiency gas engines are expected to be integrated into
solar-hybrid microgrids able to reduce energy costs, cut carbon
emissions, and provide 100% uptime reliability for the
Company’s water supply and storage operations.
A fisheries biologist’s bid to protect multiple endangered
California salmon species by blocking flood control releases
authorized by the US Army Corps of Engineers and National
Marine Fisheries Service failed after a federal court denied an
injunction. Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley of the US District
Court for the Northern District of California ruled Monday that
even though Sean White would likely succeed on the merits of
his Endangered Species Act claim, he failed to show the
“serious or extreme” harm required for an injunction or how
that injunction would remedy his alleged harms. White lives
downstream of Coyote Valley Dam …
Providing affordable, safe and reliable water service in
California is becoming increasingly challenging. Water service
providers must deal with aging infrastructure, increasingly
stringent water quality regulations and the threat of more
frequent and extreme weather events, such as fires, drought and
flooding, due to climate change. Smaller water service
providers may struggle with adapting their operations to comply
with changes in water quality requirements. These systems,
which often rely on a single water source, are less resilient
in dealing with contamination or natural disasters.
Additionally, due to their smaller customer bases, it can be
difficult for these systems to charge rates that cover
necessary long-term improvements while maintaining
affordability.
The San Gorgonio Pass Water Agency (SGPWA) received state
funding of more than $2 million for a project to install four
nested casing monitoring wells in the San Gorgonio Pass
Subbasin. The project will expand the SGPS GSA groundwater
observation network to fill data holes that are key to
supporting sustainability of the subbasin, which encompasses
approximately 35,965 acres. … The San Gorgonio Pass
Subbasin serves disadvantaged communities, including the City
of Banning, Banning Heights, Cabazon and the Morongo Band of
Mission Indians.
U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein … who died last month at age 90
[helped] make extraordinary places throughout the Mojave Desert
off-limits to development. Three national parks and three
national monuments stretching over 12 million acres of inland
Southern California bear witness to her 30 years of work to
preserve these rugged landscapes from plunder. … But as
any park ranger or biologist would caution, park designation is
not the ultimate safeguard. The underground water that
replenishes the pools at Big Morongo feeds other springs in the
Mojave. For more than 30 years, a major Mojave aquifer had
been targeted for pumping and piping out by a private
company, Cadiz Inc. It sought to drain the groundwater and sell
it off for profit. Standing in their way implacably was
Feinstein … -Written by Hans Johnson, president of
Progressive Victory. He helped pass California laws to ban
throwaway plastic bags and to protect desert water.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently reported that
changes to its “Waters of the United States” rule (otherwise
known as WOTUS) that regulates “navigable waters” under the
Clean Water Act became final September 8, 2023. Those changes
are based on the recent Sackett v EPA decision at the Supreme
Court. The decision provides “clarity for protecting our
nation’s waters consistent with the Supreme Court’s decision
while advancing infrastructure projects, economic
opportunities, and agricultural activities.” The Biden
Administration expressed disappointment with the court ruling,
but they recognized their obligation to change the rules.
Charles T. “Chuck” Gibson serves as an elected Director on
the Board of the Santa Margarita Water District (SMWD).
Let’s call it what it is – San Diego has a cost of water
crisis. All the things San Diego built to get water
and keep it here is pushing up the price of this key molecule
with little sign of it dropping. The Escondido City Council
just OK’d an 8 percent increase in January, triggering outrage
from locals, reports KPBS. The city of San Diego jacked up
rates almost 20 percent through 2025. The conductor of
this breakaway train is the San Diego County Water Authority,
which brings in water from big sources and sells it to places
like Escondido and San Diego. It recently passed on a 9.5
percent price mark-up to its 24 customer water districts. A
couple of those districts are so peeved, they’re hoping to
leave San Diego entirely for cheaper water elsewhere.
Due to low numbers of adult salmon returning to California’s
rivers because of previous droughts, officials this year banned
recreational and commercial salmon fishing for only the third
time in state history. So few Chinook salmon swam up their last
remaining strongholds in the Sacramento Valley — Butte, Deer
and Mill Creeks near Chico — that scientists this month began
capturing then bringing juvenile fish to an emergency hatchery
at University of California, Davis. Chuck Bonham, the director
of California’s Fish and Wildlife Department, oversaw the
effort with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
and called the hatchery a “Noah’s Ark.”
The Colorado River District is leading a coalition in what
would be a history-making purchase involving historic water
rights that are pivotal to Colorado River flows and water uses
in western Colorado. The district and others in the Western
Slope coalition are proposing spending potentially $98.5
million to acquire the rights from Xcel Energy for operation of
the Shoshone hydroelectric power plant in Glenwood Canyon.
According to the river district, Shoshone holds the most senior
major water rights on the river, dating back to the early 1900s
and totaling 1,408 cubic feet per second.
The California Department of Community Services and Development
is extending its program to help low-income residents pay their
current or past-due water and sewer bills. The federally funded
Low Income Household Water Assistance Program was originally
set to end in the fall, but will remain open through March 2024
— or until funds last. Here’s how to apply for one-time support
paying your water and sewer bill, and who qualifies …
On October 8, 2023, Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law
Senate Bill 389 (“SB 389”), which amended § 1051 of the Water
Code to expand the investigatory authority of the State Water
Resources Control Board (“Water Board”). The bill was
introduced by Senator Ben Allen of Santa Monica. While the bill
imbues the Water Board with additional investigatory authority
to ascertain whether or not a water right is valid, it does not
alter the statutory scheme for enforcement should the Water
Board determine as part of an investigation that a particular
diversion or use of water was not supported by a requisite
water right.
California is getting its first major water storage project in
a dozen years, expanding an existing reservoir through federal
funding. Friday, the Department of the Interior and San
Luis & Delta-Mendota Water Authority improved plans to
implement the B.F. Sisk Dam Raise and Reservoir Expansion
Project. The big picture: The project will create an
additional 130,000 acre-feet of storage space in the San Luis
Reservoir. Once completed, it is expected to deliver
additional water for two million people, over one million acres
of farmland and 135,000 acres of Pacific Flyway wetlands.
In most neighborhoods, houses are hugged by greenery – flowers
surround the front steps, large shrubs screen the windows. But
in wildfire-prone places, such as California, fire experts say
this typical suburban template needs to drastically change as
human-driven climate change makes intense wildfires more
frequent. California has long had the strongest defensible
space rules in the country. Now, it’s drafting rules that would
make it the first state to limit the vegetation directly next
to buildings. In areas at high risk of wildfire, plants within
five feet of a house would be strictly limited. The new rules
are not expected to go over well.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is issuing a
supplemental proposed rule to reduce the spread of invasive
species that occurs with normal operation of large marine
vessels. Following public input on EPA’s 2020 proposed
rule—including meetings with states, Tribes, and other
stakeholders—the agency is now issuing a Supplemental Notice to
share new data and control options raised by stakeholders. This
supplemental proposal will bolster the development of a final
rule to stem the spread of invasive species and better protect
our nation’s aquatic ecosystems.
As lawmakers around the world weigh bans of cancer-linked
“forever chemicals,” many manufacturers are pushing back,
saying there often is no substitute for the compounds.
Minnesota and Maine have passed legislation to effectively
outlaw the use of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS,
in nearly all products by the early 2030s. Dozens of other
states are also considering curbing their use. And the European
Union’s Chemical Agency has proposed a widespread ban. In
response, Ford Motor Co. warned Maine state officials in May
that “there is no commercially available technology that exists
in the world today” that can replace a PFAS-containing
thermoplastic used for electric vehicle batteries.
Denver Water is cutting down too many trees on federal land at
the major expansion of Gross Dam and Reservoir in Boulder
County, and must conduct more environmental impact work if it
wants to expand a quarry used for the project onto U.S. Forest
Service property, according to a notice from the agency. The
Forest Service letter dated Tuesday faults Denver Water for
“unauthorized timber removal,” and said the utility’s proposed
onsite quarry expansion “would require a new and separate
National Environmental Policy Act analysis.” Denver Water
hasn’t been giving the Forest Service, whose land surrounds
Gross Reservoir in western Boulder County, enough lead time to
evaluate change requests on cooperative agreements, the letter
said.
Commission staff prepared a draft supplemental Environmental
Impact Statement (SEIS) that supplements the final
Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), issued June 4, 2009, for
the proposed relicensing of South Feather Water and Power
Agency’s (South Feather) existing 117.3-megawatt South Feather
Power Project No. 2088 (project). On March 26, 2007,
South Feather filed an application for a new license to
continue to operate and maintain its water supply and power
project that consists of four hydroelectric developments:
Sly Creek, Woodleaf, Forbestown, and Kelly Ridge. The
project is located on the South Fork Feather River, Lost Creek,
and Slate Creek, in Butte, Yuba, and Plumas Counties,
California.
With the 2024 Chinook salmon season underway, lawmakers
including Senators Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden announced on
October 13 that the 2018-2020 Chinook salmon fishery has been
declared a disaster by the U.S. Department of Commerce. The
announcement allows local fishermen to apply for disaster
assistance funds to help recover from low fishing returns
during those years. … ”I might argue that it’s not
necessarily a decline on the salmon population period. It’s on
projected returns on two different rivers in California. One,
the Klamath River and the other the Sacramento River,” said
[Jeff Reeves, chairman of the Oregon Salmon Commission].
A new plan for water shortages in the Colorado River Basin will
take effect by 2027, replacing 20 year-old guidelines, the
Interior Department announced Thursday. A draft of an
environmental review of possible ways to manage the Colorado
River in 2027 and beyond will be published by the end of 2024,
the Bureau of Reclamation said. The review will be supported by
a scoping report published Thursday. The Colorado River, which
supplies water to 40 million people between Denver and Los
Angeles, had been severely drought-stricken for more than 20
years until heavy rain and snow dampened the dry …
This week, several lawmakers in the House of Representatives
lead by Representative Rick Larsen (WA-02) and Representative
Grace Napolitano (CA-31) introduced the Clean Water Act of
2023. This proposed legislation sends an important signal that
over 100 Democratic members of Congress recognize the grave
problems the Supreme Court created with its ruling in Sackett
v. EPA, and are urgently working towards a solution. This bill
is an important first step towards undoing the chaos and
environmental destruction unleashed upon our waters and
communities, when the right-wing Supreme Court radically
narrowed the scope of the Clean Water Act, gutting protections
for well over half of the country’s wetlands and likely a
significant number of rivers and streams.
Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill into law last week that
will incorporate environmental justice principles in legal
disputes that stands to impact future groundwater use decisions
across California’s agriculture dominated regions. The law, AB
779, will require state courts to consider water use by small
farmers and disadvantaged communities when settling those
disputes, which historically skew in favor of larger
agricultural businesses. California is implementing the
2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which aims to
address groundwater depletion across the state. Solving
disputes through adjudication in the courts costs millions of
dollars in legal fees and takes years.
Navajo Nation Speaker Crystalyne Curley told a U.S. Senate
committee that many Navajo citizens still struggle to find
clean drinking water, and joined other officials seeking help
to secure reliable supplies. … The hearing was a chance
to examine the ongoing challenge of clean water access for
tribal communities, said Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, the
committee’s chairperson. It also offered an opportunity to hear
testimony not only from Curley but from other tribal leaders,
experts and federal partners on how the investments made by the
bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act has
assisted in these communities.
For the first time in California history, all coastal cities,
including those in the Bay Area, must plan for sea-level rise,
a looming climate impact yet to be fully experienced. The new
law — SB 272 — requires big cities like San Francisco and small
towns like Strawberry along Richardson Bay to develop
strategies and recommend projects to address future sea-level
rise by 2034. While seas have risen only about 8 inches since
the 1880s, the ocean and the bay could rise by about a foot by
midcentury — thanks mainly to human-caused climate change. …
[The Bay Conservation Development Commission] plans to follow
up with all local governments around the region to ensure they
are on board so the Bay Area of tomorrow isn’t overwhelmed by
water.
As the Biden administration kicks off a years-long
negotiation process to divvy up the shrinking water
supply of the Colorado River, there are finally some signs
of optimism after several bleak
years. A record-breaking winter snowpack last
year halted a precipitous downward spiral on the river and
raised water levels at the nation’s two largest reservoirs,
Lakes Mead and Powell. But something else is also at play
this year – farmers, cities and Native tribes are simply using
less. Arizona, California and Nevada’s usage of Colorado
River water has hit new lows … On Thursday, the US
Bureau of Reclamation released a report detailing the
factors it will consider when negotiating with states, tribes
and other water users over exactly how much water the river can
provide to the ever-growing West in the coming decades.
California Forever’s previously promised “listening tour”
continued Monday afternoon in Fairfield, as Paradise Valley
Estates held a forum for its residents to ask questions of
community and business leaders on the proposed new city in
eastern Solano County. Jan Sramek, CEO of California
Forever, joined state Sen. Bill Dodd, Solano County Supervisor
Mitch Mashburn and retired Travis AFB pilot Steve Vancil for a
panel discussion regarding the company’s proposed developments
on the 50,000-plus acres they have purchased over the last five
years. … But Sramek pushed back, criticizing the state
of water quality that comes to Solano County from the North Bay
Aqueduct, which he said has some of the most polluted water in
the state, as well as other issues that face the county. He
also said the same polling mentioned above indicated that
almost half of the county thinks the proposed project is a good
idea.
On Tuesday night, the Redding City Council unanimously voted to
sign a letter of opposition regarding water regulations that
have been approved for the state of California. City council
voted to take a stand against “Making Conservation A Way Of
Life” a strategy approved by the State Water Board in early
2023 and now officially in effect. … The “Making
Conservation A Way Of Life“ main goal is to reduce urban water
use by more than 400,000 acres by 2030. … City officials
say this ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach doesn’t take varying
natural resources into account.
It was exactly the sort of deluge
California groundwater agencies have been counting on to
replenish their overworked aquifers.
The start of 2023 brought a parade of torrential Pacific storms
to bone dry California. Snow piled up across the Sierra Nevada at
a near-record pace while runoff from the foothills gushed into
the Central Valley, swelling rivers over their banks and filling
seasonal creeks for the first time in half a decade.
Suddenly, water managers and farmers toiling in one of the
state’s most groundwater-depleted regions had an opportunity to
capture stormwater and bank it underground. Enterprising agencies
diverted water from rushing rivers and creeks into manmade
recharge basins or intentionally flooded orchards and farmland.
Others snagged temporary permits from the state to pull from
streams they ordinarily couldn’t touch.
Managers of California’s most
overdrawn aquifers were given a monumental task under the state’s
landmark Sustainable Groundwater Management Act: Craft viable,
detailed plans on a 20-year timeline to bring their beleaguered
basins into balance. It was a task that required more than 250
newly formed local groundwater agencies – many of them in the
drought-stressed San Joaquin Valley – to set up shop, gather
data, hear from the public and collaborate with neighbors on
multiple complex plans, often covering just portions of a
groundwater basin.
This tour traveled along the San Joaquin River to learn firsthand
about one of the nation’s largest and most expensive river
restoration projects.
The San Joaquin River was the focus of one of the most
contentious legal battles in California water history,
ending in a 2006 settlement between the federal government,
Friant Water Users Authority and a coalition of environmental
groups.
Hampton Inn & Suites Fresno
327 E Fir Ave
Fresno, CA 93720
Martha Guzman recalls those awful
days working on water and other issues as a deputy legislative
secretary for then-Gov. Jerry Brown. California was mired in a
recession and the state’s finances were deep in the red. Parks
were cut, schools were cut, programs were cut to try to balance a
troubled state budget in what she remembers as “that terrible
time.”
She now finds herself in a strikingly different position: As
administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s
Region 9, she has a mandate to address water challenges across
California, Nevada, Arizona and Hawaii and $1 billion to help pay
for it. It is the kind of funding, she said, that is usually
spread out over a decade. Guzman called it the “absolutely
greatest opportunity.”
For more than 20 years, Tanya
Trujillo has been immersed in the many challenges of the Colorado
River, the drought-stressed lifeline for 40 million people from
Denver to Los Angeles and the source of irrigation water for more
than 5 million acres of winter lettuce, supermarket melons and
other crops.
Trujillo has experience working in both the Upper and Lower
Basins of the Colorado River, basins that split the river’s water
evenly but are sometimes at odds with each other. She was a
lawyer for the state of New Mexico, one of four states in the
Upper Colorado River Basin, when key operating guidelines for
sharing shortages on the river were negotiated in 2007. She later
worked as executive director for the Colorado River Board of
California, exposing her to the different perspectives and
challenges facing California and the other states in the river’s
Lower Basin.
On average, more than 60 percent of
California’s developed water supply originates in the Sierra
Nevada and the southern spur of the Cascade Range. Our water
supply is largely dependent on the health of our Sierra forests,
which are suffering from ecosystem degradation, drought,
wildfires and widespread tree mortality.
This tour ventured into the Sierra to examine water issues
that happen upstream but have dramatic impacts downstream and
throughout the state.
As California slowly emerges from
the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, one remnant left behind by
the statewide lockdown offers a sobering reminder of the economic
challenges still ahead for millions of the state’s residents and
the water agencies that serve them – a mountain of water debt.
Water affordability concerns, long an issue in a state where
millions of people struggle to make ends meet, jumped into
overdrive last year as the pandemic wrenched the economy. Jobs
were lost and household finances were upended. Even with federal
stimulus aid and unemployment checks, bills fell by the wayside.
As California’s seasons become
warmer and drier, state officials are pondering whether the water
rights permitting system needs revising to better reflect the
reality of climate change’s effect on the timing and volume of
the state’s water supply.
A report by the State Water Resources Control Board recommends
that new water rights permits be tailored to California’s
increasingly volatile hydrology and be adaptable enough to ensure
water exists to meet an applicant’s demand. And it warns
that the increasingly whiplash nature of California’s changing
climate could require existing rights holders to curtail
diversions more often and in more watersheds — or open
opportunities to grab more water in climate-induced floods.
Groundwater provides about 40
percent of the water in California for urban, rural and
agricultural needs in typical years, and as much as 60 percent in
dry years when surface water supplies are low. But in many areas
of the state, groundwater is being extracted faster than it can
be replenished through natural or artificial means.
Voluntary agreements in California
have been touted as an innovative and flexible way to improve
environmental conditions in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta
and the rivers that feed it. The goal is to provide river flows
and habitat for fish while still allowing enough water to be
diverted for farms and cities in a way that satisfies state
regulators.
Our Water 101 Workshop, one of our most popular events, offered attendees the opportunity to deepen their understanding of California’s water history, laws, geography and politics.
Taught by some of the leading policy and legal experts in the state, the workshop was held as an engaging online event on the afternoons of Thursday, April 22 and Friday, April 23.
Shortly after taking office in 2019,
Gov. Gavin Newsom called on state agencies to deliver a Water
Resilience Portfolio to meet California’s urgent challenges —
unsafe drinking water, flood and drought risks from a changing
climate, severely depleted groundwater aquifers and native fish
populations threatened with extinction.
Within days, he appointed Nancy Vogel, a former journalist and
veteran water communicator, as director of the Governor’s Water
Portfolio Program to help shepherd the monumental task of
compiling all the information necessary for the portfolio. The
three state agencies tasked with preparing the document delivered
the draft Water Resilience Portfolio Jan. 3. The document, which
Vogel said will help guide policy and investment decisions
related to water resilience, is nearing the end of its comment
period, which goes through Friday, Feb. 7.
It’s been a year since two devastating wildfires on opposite ends
of California underscored the harsh new realities facing water
districts and cities serving communities in or adjacent to the
state’s fire-prone wildlands. Fire doesn’t just level homes, it
can contaminate water, scorch watersheds, damage delivery systems
and upend an agency’s finances.
The Water Education Foundation’s Water 101 Workshop, one of our most popular events, offered attendees the opportunity to deepen their understanding of California’s water history, laws, geography and politics.
Taught by some of the leading policy and legal experts in the state, the one-day workshop held on Feb. 20, 2020 covered the latest on the most compelling issues in California water.
McGeorge School of Law
3327 5th Ave.
Sacramento, CA 95817
To survive the next drought and meet
the looming demands of the state’s groundwater sustainability
law, California is going to have to put more water back in the
ground. But as other Western states have found, recharging
overpumped aquifers is no easy task.
Successfully recharging aquifers could bring multiple benefits
for farms and wildlife and help restore the vital interconnection
between groundwater and rivers or streams. As local areas around
California draft their groundwater sustainability plans, though,
landowners in the hardest hit regions of the state know they will
have to reduce pumping to address the chronic overdraft in which
millions of acre-feet more are withdrawn than are naturally
recharged.
Dates are now set for two key
Foundation events to kick off 2020 — our popular Water 101
Workshop, scheduled for Feb. 20 at McGeorge School of Law in
Sacramento, and our Lower Colorado River Tour, which will run
from March 11-13.
In addition, applications will be available by the first week of
October for our 2020 class of Water Leaders, our competitive
yearlong program for early to mid-career up-and-coming water
professionals. To learn more about the program, check out our
Water Leaders program
page.
Californians have been doing an
exceptional job
reducing their indoor water use, helping the state survive
the most recent drought when water districts were required to
meet conservation targets. With more droughts inevitable,
Californians are likely to face even greater calls to save water
in the future.
Bruce Babbitt, the former Arizona
governor and secretary of the Interior, has been a thoughtful,
provocative and sometimes forceful voice in some of the most
high-profile water conflicts over the last 40 years, including
groundwater management in Arizona and the reduction of
California’s take of the Colorado River. In 2016, former
California Gov. Jerry Brown named Babbitt as a special adviser to
work on matters relating to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and
the Delta tunnels plan.
Groundwater helped make Kern County
the king of California agricultural production, with a $7 billion
annual array of crops that help feed the nation. That success has
come at a price, however. Decades of unchecked groundwater
pumping in the county and elsewhere across the state have left
some aquifers severely depleted. Now, the county’s water managers
have less than a year left to devise a plan that manages and
protects groundwater for the long term, yet ensures that Kern
County’s economy can continue to thrive, even with less water.
The growing leadership of women in water. The Colorado River’s persistent drought and efforts to sign off on a plan to avert worse shortfalls of water from the river. And in California’s Central Valley, promising solutions to vexing water resource challenges.
These were among the topics that Western Water news explored in 2018.
We’re already planning a full slate of stories for 2019. You can sign up here to be alerted when new stories are published. In the meantime, take a look at what we dove into in 2018:
In 1983, a landmark California Supreme Court ruling extended the public trust doctrine to tributary creeks that feed Mono Lake, which is a navigable water body even though the creeks themselves were not. The ruling marked a dramatic shift in water law and forced Los Angeles to cut back its take of water from those creeks in the Eastern Sierra to preserve the lake.
Now, a state appellate court has for the first time extended that same public trust doctrine to groundwater that feeds a navigable river, in this case the Scott River flowing through a picturesque valley of farms and alfalfa in Siskiyou County in the northern reaches of California.
One of our most popular events, our annual Water 101 Workshop
details the history, geography, legal and political facets
of water in California as well as hot topics currently facing the
state.
Taught by some of the leading policy and legal experts in the
state, the one-day workshop on Feb. 7 gave attendees a
deeper understanding of the state’s most precious natural
resources.
Optional Groundwater Tour
On Feb. 8, we jumped aboard a bus to explore groundwater, a key
resource in California. Led by Foundation staff and groundwater
experts Thomas
Harter and Carl Hauge, retired DWR chief hydrogeologist, the
tour visited cities and farms using groundwater, examined a
subsidence measuring station and provided the latest updates
on the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act.
McGeorge School of Law
3327 5th Ave.
Sacramento, CA 95817
There’s going to be a new governor
in California next year – and a host of challenges both old and
new involving the state’s most vital natural resource, water.
So what should be the next governor’s water priorities?
That was one of the questions put to more than 150 participants
during a wrap-up session at the end of the Water Education
Foundation’s Sept. 20 Water Summit in Sacramento.
Sixty percent of California’s developed water supply
originates high in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Our water
supply is largely dependent on the health of our Sierra forests,
which are suffering from ecosystem degradation, drought,
wildfires and widespread tree mortality.
We headed into the foothills and the mountains to examine
water issues that happen upstream but have dramatic impacts
downstream and throughout the state.
GEI (Tour Starting Point)
2868 Prospect Park Dr.
Rancho Cordova, CA 95670.
Spurred by drought and a major
policy shift, groundwater management has assumed an unprecedented
mantle of importance in California. Local agencies in the
hardest-hit areas of groundwater depletion are drawing plans to
halt overdraft and bring stressed aquifers to the road of
recovery.
Along the way, an army of experts has been enlisted to help
characterize the extent of the problem and how the Sustainable
Groundwater Management Act of 2014 is implemented in a manner
that reflects its original intent.
For decades, cannabis has been grown
in California – hidden away in forested groves or surreptitiously
harvested under the glare of high-intensity indoor lamps in
suburban tract homes.
In the past 20 years, however, cannabis — known more widely as
marijuana – has been moving from being a criminal activity to
gaining legitimacy as one of the hundreds of cash crops in the
state’s $46 billion-dollar agriculture industry, first legalized
for medicinal purposes and this year for recreational use.
As we continue forging ahead in 2018
with our online version of Western Water after 40 years
as a print magazine, we turned our attention to a topic that also
got its start this year: recreational marijuana as a legal use.
State regulators, in the last few years, already had been beefing
up their workforce to tackle the glut in marijuana crops and
combat their impacts to water quality and supply for people, fish
and farming downstream. Thus, even if these impacts were perhaps
unbeknownst to the majority of Californians who approved
Proposition 64 in 2016, we thought it important to see if
anything new had evolved from a water perspective now that
marijuana was legal.
Joaquin Esquivel learned that life is
what happens when you make plans. Esquivel, who holds the public
member slot at the State Water Resources Control Board in
Sacramento, had just closed purchase on a house in Washington
D.C. with his partner when he was tapped by Gov. Jerry Brown a
year ago to fill the Board vacancy.
Esquivel, 35, had spent a decade in Washington, first in several
capacities with then Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and then as
assistant secretary for federal water policy at the California
Natural Resources Agency. As a member of the State Water Board,
he shares with four other members the difficult task of
ensuring balance to all the uses of California’s water.
One of our most popular events, Water 101 details the history,
geography, legal and political facets of water in California
as well as hot topics currently facing the state.
Taught by some of the leading policy and legal experts in the
state, the one-day workshop gives attendees a deeper
understanding of the state’s most precious natural resource.
McGeorge School of Law
3285 5th Ave, Classroom C
Sacramento, CA 95817
Sixty percent of California’s developed water supply
originates high in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Our water
supply is largely dependent on the health of our Sierra forests,
which are suffering from ecosystem degradation, drought,
wildfires and widespread tree mortality.
Participants of this tour snaked along the San Joaquin River to
learn firsthand about one of the nation’s largest and most
expensive river restoration projects.
The San Joaquin River was the focus of one of the most
contentious legal battles in California water history,
ending in a 2006 settlement between the federal government,
Friant Water Users Authority and a coalition of environmental
groups.
Water conservation has become a way of life throughout the West
with a growing recognition that the supply of water is not
unlimited.
Drought is the most common motivator of increased water
conservation but the gradual drying of the West as a result of
climate change means the amount of fresh water available for
drinking, irrigation, industry and other uses must be used as
efficiently as possible.
Wastewater management in California centers on the collection,
conveyance,
treatment, reuse and disposal of wastewater. This process is
conducted largely by public agencies, though there are also
private systems in places where a publicly owned treatment plant
is not feasible.
In California, wastewater treatment takes place through 100,000
miles of sanitary sewer lines and at more than 900 wastewater
treatment plants that manage the roughly 4 billion gallons of
wastewater generated in the state each day.
As part of the historic Colorado
River Delta, the Salton Sea regularly filled and dried for
thousands of years due to its elevation of 237 feet below
sea level.
The federal Safe Drinking Water Act sets standards for drinking
water quality in the United States.
Launched in 1974 and administered by the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency, the Safe Drinking Water Act oversees states,
communities, and water suppliers who implement the drinking water
standards at the local level.
The act’s regulations apply to every public water system in the
United States but do not include private wells serving less than
25 people.
According to the EPA, there are more than 160,000 public water
systems in the United States.
Dams have allowed Californians and others across the West to
harness and control water dating back to pre-European settlement
days when Native Americans had erected simple dams for catching
salmon.
This printed issue of Western Water looks at some of
the pieces of the 2009 water legislation, including the Delta
Stewardship Council, the new requirements for groundwater
monitoring and the proposed water bond.
This issue of Western Water looks at the political
landscape in Washington, D.C., and Sacramento as it relates to
water issues in 2007. Several issues are under consideration,
including the means to deal with impending climate change, the
fate of the San Joaquin River, the prospects for new surface
storage in California and the Delta.
2002 marks the 30th anniversary of one of the most significant
environmental laws in American history, the Clean Water Act
(CWA). The CWA has had remarkable success, reversing years of
neglect and outright abuse of the nation’s waters. But challenges
remain as attention turns to the thorny issue of cleaning up
nonpoint sources of pollution.
This printed issue of Western Water, based on presentations
at the November 3-4, 2010 Water Quality Conference in Ontario,
Calif., looks at constituents of emerging concerns (CECs) – what
is known, what is yet to be determined and the potential
regulatory impacts on drinking water quality.
This printed issue of Western Water discusses low
impact development and stormwater capture – two areas of emerging
interest that are viewed as important components of California’s
future water supply and management scenario.
This printed issue of Western Water examines the issues
associated with the State Water Board’s proposed revision of the
water quality Bay-Delta Plan, most notably the question of
whether additional flows are needed for the system, and how they
might be provided.
