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.”
A family-owned landfill serving Napa County is facing a
$619,400 fine for allegedly polluting a nearby creek in 2019. A
proposed settlement agreement, announced by the San Francisco
Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board in late November, is
based on five alleged violations of Calistoga’s Clover Flat
Landfill’s use permit. The problems include allowing
tainted and acidic stormwater to flow into a nearby stream. The
company also allegedly failed to properly stabilize erodible
areas on the hillside facility and fix leaking equipment
quickly.
A coalition of agricultural associations and the Northern
California Water Association have launched the CA Drought Grant
Website – a portal for information on the CA Small Ag Business
Drought Relief Grant Program. The site,
agdroughtrelief.org, provides key information about the
$75 million program, grant eligibility and the ability to sign
up to receive instant program updates as it becomes available
in the upcoming months. When applications are available, they
can be accessed from the site as well.
The California State Water Resources Control Board (State Water
Board) adopted the Statewide Sanitary Sewer Systems General
Order (General Order) Reissuance at its December 6, 2022
meeting. As reported in a Somach Simmons & Dunn news alert in
May of 2022 (available here), the State Water Board released an
Informal Staff Draft of the revised General Order in February
of 2021 containing new requirements to address sanitary sewer
overflows, which significantly broadened the regulatory scope
of the existing General Order and raised concerns regarding the
substantial commitment of time and resources required for
compliance.
The Salton Sea, the body of water in Southern California’s
Coachella Valley and Imperial Valley, is shrinking over time as
the planet warms and exposing more lakebed and new sources of
dust in the process. High levels of dust already plague the
region, a situation likely to worsen as the sea continues to
shrink due to climate change. Not surprisingly, the communities
surrounding the Salton Sea have high rates of childhood asthma
(20–22.4%) — much higher than the California average of 14.5%.
A University of California, Riverside, mouse study, led by Dr.
David Lo, a distinguished professor of biomedical sciences in
the School of Medicine, has found that dust collected at sites
near the Salton Sea triggered lung neutrophil inflammation in
mice. Neutrophils are a type of white blood cells that help
fight infection.
Despite opposition from an impressive who’s-who list of water
districts and agencies and the Kings County Farm Bureau, the
Kings County Board of Supervisors on a 3-2 vote adopted a
groundwater export ordinance that will require a permit to move
groundwater out of the county. Leading the charge was
Supervisor and farmer Doug Verboon, who says the passage came
after 12 years of battling to adopt an ordinance here to
protect local groundwater, an ordinance that most counties
already have. The county’s aim is to preserve groundwater for
local use, critical for both domestic, city, military and
agricultural users.
Approximately 100 concerned Delta residents gathered at a
public forum in the community of Hood Tuesday to express
concern with the Delta Tunnel proposal. … The proposal
reduces the original two tunnel plan, proposed by former
Governor Jerry Brown, to a single tunnel by the Newsom
Administration and the Department of Water Resources. … The
new plan calls for a 40-foot wide concrete tunnel to draw
water from the Hood and Courtland areas approximately 45 miles
south to Bethany Reservoir. The current estimates are that it
would cost $16 billion dollars and take 13 years to
complete. The tunnel would draw 3,000 cubic feet of water
per second and would account for approximately 13% to 15% of
the overall water supply.
Arizona is preparing to enter for the first time into a Tier 2A
shortage for the lower Colorado River basin, with cuts
beginning at the start of the new year. For the state, this
means a reduction of 21% of Arizona’s Colorado river supply and
about 9% of the state’s total water use, according to the
Central Arizona Project. Cities that use the Colorado river
will see a 3% reduction while tribal supplies will be reduced
by 7%. And for the users of CAP water, there will no longer be
excess water and agriculture pools from the Colorado River.
According to the Agriculture & Water Council of Arizona, it
will have a big impact on farmers as they work out ways to
operate with less water.
Just because the rainy season has arrived doesn’t mean
California’s water cops are off the job. With a fourth year of
drought looming, some of the Bay Area’s biggest utilities
continue to crack down on excessive outdoor watering…. One
city, though, has gone as far as shutting off water service to
repeat offenders. State regulators, meanwhile, are expected
this week to enact a second straight year of California-wide
prohibitions on outdoor water waste, continuing the ban on such
actions as watering lawns to the point of creating runoff,
washing a car without a shut-off nozzle on the hose and filling
up decorative fountains. Violators could face $500-a-day fines.
When Sen. Dianne Feinstein weighed complex water policy
decisions that stood to impact the livelihood of farmers and
fish, she often dialed Tom Birmingham. On visits to Washington,
the longtime head of the state’s most influential farmland
water agency would meet in her office over glasses of chilled
California chardonnay. Cultivating relationships with power is
a hallmark of Birmingham’s 36-year career at the Westlands
Water District, the nation’s largest farm water utility that
serves a few hundred Central Valley families and corporations
growing nearly $2 billion in nuts, fruit, and vegetables a
year. Birmingham spearheaded the agency’s quest to keep
water flowing as its longest serving general manager, largely
through attempts to loosen environmental regulations.
Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) is leading a letter
signed by 14 other senators urging Agriculture
Secretary Tom Vilsack to help Western states survive
what they are calling a “22-year mega-drought” that is
threatening farms and ranches across the West. … The
letter is the latest sign of growing economic pressure posed by
the changing climate and the competition for federal money to
help communities across the country cope with severe weather.
… The senators argue that many existing Department of
Agriculture programs “do not translate well to the needs of
Western agriculture” and want the department to promote
projects to help basins such as Colorado River Basin, the Rio
Grande Basin, the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Basin and the
Columbia River Basin.
California’s water system uses energy to pump, convey, treat,
and heat water. Although agriculture uses roughly four times
more water than cities, cities account for most water-related
energy use. Water is also required for hydropower generation,
thermoelectric power plants, and oil and gas extraction.
Improving water use efficiency can reduce energy consumption;
conversely, improving energy efficiency can reduce impacts on
water supply and quality. … The water system
uses approximately 20% of the state’s electricity and 30%
of its natural gas for business and home use, according to data
from 2001—accounting for more than 5% of California’s
greenhouse gas emissions.
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A Tehama County project is among the Wildlife Conservation
Board’s (WCB) selection of approved projects to be funded
through $24.46 million in grants to help restore and protect
fish and wildlife habitat throughout California. Some of the 16
approved projects will benefit fish and wildlife – including
some endangered species, while others will provide public
access to important natural resources. Several projects will
also demonstrate the importance of protecting working
landscapes that integrate economic, social and environmental
stewardship practices beneficial to the environment, landowners
and the local community.
Anthem Country Club just replaced all 18 greens and fairways.
That effort is expected to save around 30,000,000 gallons of
water a year. … The course has been closed since last June to
make the changes and just reopened last Friday. The Southern
Nevada Water Authority is requiring golf courses to reduce
their water budgets by 2024 or face a significant penalty.
… A water savings of 30,000,000 gallons of water per
year is equivalent to filling up 600,000 50-gallon bathtubs. If
Anthem Country Club saved that much water a year for 30 years,
the Southern Nevada Water Authority says that would about fill
up the entire Luxor pyramid.
For the first time in almost three decades, the Bureau of Land
Management is preparing a new rule to guide its management of
cows and other livestock grazing on federal lands, a long
divisive issue that has only grown more contentious in the West
after two decades of drought. But advocates on both sides
expressed skepticism that BLM’s update, which is expected to be
released in draft form early next year, will include sweeping
changes to the current regulations in place since 1995. That
would be just fine with the livestock industry, ranchers and
some local government leaders who say BLM has begun reaching
out to them for input over the past several weeks.
Seems like most people are falling all over themselves
celebrating the “historic” deal between the Imperial Irrigation
District, Coachella Valley Water District, the U.S. Department
of Interior (Bureau of Reclamation), and the California Natural
Resources Agency that will supposedly bring up to a
quarter-billion dollars to the Salton Sea for restoration
projects. I certainly understand the need to conserve water and
help bolster the elevation at Lake Mead to try to restore some
kind of balance to the Colorado River, but at what cost to the
people of the Imperial Valley? The Imperial Valley is giving up
1 million acre-feet of water over four years for maybe $250
million and that just doesn’t seem like an even trade off; it
feels like a bad deal – like my friends over at Comite Civico
del Valle so aptly put it – “half-baked.” -Written by John Hernandez, a Brawley resident
and executive director of Our Roots Multicultural Center.
Fortunes are made and lost on the weather. In 1588 Spain went
to attack England and a storm wiped out its armada. The loss
was so devastating even with its New World holdings Spain never
again arose to its former place of prominence as the greatest
European power. From 1930 to 1936 a drought centered in the
Texas and Oklahoma panhandles caused 2.5 million people to
leave the center of the country for other parts. And while
bad weather can lead to major problems, what about the good
weather? California is blessed with a Mediterranean climate.
Hot summers, cool but not frozen winters, plenty of sunshine
and good soil. And due to the foresight of others since gone,
California’s fickle water supply has been harnessed for the
beneficial use of us all.
Zone 7 Water Agency staff are set to update the Pleasanton City
Council on Tuesday about its regional groundwater modeling and
PFAS contamination, which will serve as foundational
information in future council decision-making on water supply
issues. City staff will also seek approval from council to keep
the city’s wells 5 and 6 offline and to purchase replacement
water from Zone 7 until a water supply alternatives study is
completed and the council can decide what to do about the
city’s long-term water supply. According to the staff report,
“Zone 7 has indicated that it can provide the additional water,
initially through a short-term arrangement. This cost would be
funded by the Zone 7 pass-through to utility ratepayers.”
In the early hours of a cold fall morning, thousands of birds
would sit in the puddles of water in the empty rice fields just
outside the Sacramento Valley. At many of those fields
this year, there isn’t a single bird that can be seen. It’s
because there’s no water. There are no plants. The fields are
empty and bone dry. They’ve become fallowed. The streams of
water that once flowed to allow the beavers and deer feed and
drink are gone. The ground looks like slabs of cracked
concrete. Economists and farmers warn that there could be
severe environmental and economic consequences that stretch
beyond these dry fields that farmers are challenged
with. California is now experiencing the driest
three-year period since late 1800s.
California State Parks has full reopened of Brannan Island
State Recreation Area after moving to reduced operations
earlier this year. All areas of the park will opened to the
public Thursday. The public may begin booking camping
reservations starting Jan. 1. Park Delta Bay will operate the
state recreation area, which includes day-use areas, a boat
launch ramp and campground sites. Brannan Island is a maze of
waterways through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta located
northeast of the San Francisco Bay in the Suisun Marsh. The
park unit has countless islands and marshes with many wildlife
habitats and opportunities for recreation, including boating
and swimming.
The state Department of Water Resources (DWR) announced Dec. 1
that it would provide 5% of contracted amounts across the board
for agricultural and municipal customers in 2023. That may
sound bad, but the initial allocation announced for 2022 was 0%
for ag and only enough water for municipal contractors to
protect health and safety. At this early stage of the water
year, it’s hard to get too excited one way or another about the
initial allocation, said Ted Page, Chair of the Kern County
Water Agency Board of Directors. … With a La Niña
winter predicted this year, the state is preparing for a fourth
dry year, according to the DWR announcement reprinted below.
A coalition of asset managers is demanding the phaseout of
hazardous “forever” chemicals, the latest move by institutional
investors to expand their efforts to address environmental
risks beyond climate change to biodiversity and human health
concerns. Widely used in food packaging, cookware, clothing and
carpets, forever chemicals are a group of more than 9,000
compounds that do not break down in the environment and are
associated with human health problems including cancers and
reproductive abnormalities. … California’s
attorney-general, Rob Bonta, alleged in a lawsuit last month
that 18 chemical companies knew about the dangers associated
with PFAS and concealed the risks in many cases. The lawsuit
claims that PFAS have leached into at least 146 public water
systems, serving an estimated 16mn Californians.
A tiny Nevada toad at the center of a legal battle over a
geothermal power project has officially been declared an
endangered species, after U.S. wildlife officials temporarily
listed it on a rarely used emergency basis last spring. “This
ruling makes final the listing of the Dixie Valley toad,” the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said in a formal rule published
Friday in the Federal Register. The spectacled, quarter-sized
amphibian “is currently at risk of extinction throughout its
range primarily due to the approval and commencement of
geothermal development,” the service said. Other threats
to the toad include groundwater pumping, agriculture, climate
change, disease and predation from bullfrogs. The
temporary listing in April marked only the second
time in 20 years the agency had taken such emergency action.
In America’s rush to build the nuclear arsenal that won the
Cold War, safety was sacrificed for speed. Uranium mills that
helped fuel the weapons also dumped radioactive and toxic waste
into rivers like the Cheyenne in South Dakota and the Animas in
Colorado. … The U.S. government bankrolled the industry, and
mining companies rushed to profit, building more than 50 mills
and processing sites to refine uranium ore. But the
government didn’t have a plan for the toxic byproducts of this
nuclear assembly line. Some of the more than 250 million tons
of toxic and radioactive detritus, known as tailings, scattered
into nearby communities, some spilled into streams and some
leaked into aquifers. … But the government has fallen
down in addressing another lingering threat from the industry’s
byproducts: widespread water pollution.
California’s water supply crisis has hit a tipping point, with
impacts spreading far and wide, reaching local communities and
critical industries, putting us once again in jeopardy. This is
a pivotal moment in the state’s future – one in which bold
political leadership will emerge, or future generations will
suffer. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s recent announcement on his new
water supply plan, is encouraging that leadership is
materializing, but the proof is in the pudding. The new
plan, California’s Water Supply Strategy: Adapting to a
Hotter, Drier Future, underscores the significant challenges we
face as a result of a changing climate, the need to transform
the current water system, and the importance of significantly
investing in California water systems to secure the future of
California’s water supply and reliability. -Written by Gary Arant, General Manager at Valley
Center Municipal Water District; and Kimberly
Thorner, the General Manager at Olivenhain Municipal Water
District.
In drought-prone northern California, limited water resources,
private water rights allocations, and inefficient transport and
use of water resources causes tension between freshwater
conservation and private landownership (Garibaldi et al. 2020,
Vissers 2017). In the face of a changing climate, drought
curtailments will likely become more frequent, ratchetting
stress on all water users (Vissers 2017). From an engineering
perspective, efficiently managing water rights as arid
landscapes become drier and less predictable will be essential
to preservation of working landscapes and the environment.
Water purchases and leases are a common tool for securing water
rights for environmental purposes. California recently
considered a budget proposal to allocate $1.5 billion to
buy-back private agricultural water rights to mitigate drought
and support ecological uses (Bork et al. 2022).
A key state regulator on Thursday OK’d an agreement to have
California American Water Co. buy future water from the planned
Pure Water Monterey Expansion project. The agreement signals a
major new water supply for the Monterey Peninsula. Mike
McCullough, the director of external affairs for Monterey One
Water (M1W), said the authorization defines the terms and
conditions for the sale of water from the expansion project.
Monterey One Water is the public wastewater agency operating
the Pure Water Monterey recycled water project and which will
operate the Pure Water Monterey Expansion … The three
involved parties – Cal Am, the Monterey Peninsula Water
Management District and Monterey One Water reached an agreement
on the language of what’s called a Water Purchase Agreement
more than a year ago.
The Bureau of Reclamation is for the first time legally
signaling its intent to make major cutbacks in water deliveries
from Lake Powell to Lake Mead and the Lower River Basin to
protect the reservoirs that are on the edge of collapse. In
online presentations last week, the bureau said it’s working
through a formal process that could lead to cutting deliveries
from Powell by 2 million to 3 million acre-feet annually and
possibly more. That could happen if states in the Lower River
Basin — Arizona, California and Nevada — can’t reach agreement
by Jan. 31 on how to slice their take from the river, the
agency said. The bureau didn’t specify when cuts would begin or
how they would be divided among states, saying those questions
will be answered later. But “it means that we’re looking at
unprecedented reductions in supplies.”
On the surface, these would appear to be challenging times for
investors in San Dimas-based water utility holding company
American States Water Co. Its water utility subsidiary, Golden
State Water, has several systems along California’s Central
Coast, one of the regions hardest hit by the ongoing drought,
which in turn has forced the utility to pay more for imported
water. Even more challenging is a year-long delay in Golden
State Water’s rate case before the California Public Utilities
Commission. The case is supposed to set water rates for this
year through 2024. Yet as 2022 draws to a close, the case is
still lingering before the commission, and a decision is not
expected until the first quarter of next year.
Colorado River water was virtually free in the early 20th
Century when pioneers dug the valley’s first canals that would
later transform this desert landscape into a $2 billion
agricultural industry. Imperial Valley farmers now pay about
$20 an acre foot to transport Colorado River water to their
fields, a price unchanged since 2011. … Farmers next door in
San Diego County pay between $799 and $1,109 per acre foot.
Even the Coachella Valley Water District, just north of
Imperial Valley, charges farmers about $37 per acre foot,
nearly twice what the Imperial Irrigation District charges its
farmers…. Because water is so cheap, Imperial Irrigation
District doesn’t make enough selling it to cover expenses on
water revenues alone….
As water in the Western U.S. becomes an increasingly rare
commodity, the driest states are grasping at solutions for an
even drier future — investing heavily in technologies to
maximize the conservation, and creation, of the region’s most
precious resource. … With more than a thousand miles of
Pacific Ocean coastline, California appears to have access to a
wellspring that other arid states lack. The technology to
transform that unlimited sea supply into potable drinking water
has existed for decades, through a process called desalination.
Yet while two new desalination plants have received approvals
in the past couple months, California’s coast isn’t exactly
teeming with such facilities.
Today, during the 2022 White House Tribal Nations Summit, U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Michael S.
Regan announced a proposal to revise the federal water quality
standards regulations to better protect Tribal rights under the
Clean Water Act (CWA). With this action, EPA is working to
ensure that state and federal water quality standards will
protect tribal rights such as the right to fish or gather
aquatic plants—that are reserved through treaties, statutes,
executive orders, or other sources of federal law.
One of the most popular places to boat, fish and camp in the
Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta has finally reopened after
abruptly closing last spring. Brannan Island State Park, a
336-acre jut of scrubby land across the water from Antioch,
shut down in April nearly overnight after its longtime
concessionaire ended its month-to-month lease with the state
Department of Parks and Recreation to operate the park. Brannan
Island, in Isleton, reopened fully on Thursday after the
department announced it had secured an agreement with a new
concessionaire.
As the nation learned that the midterm election led to a change
in the balance of power in the next U.S. Congress, a delegation
of California Farm Bureau leaders met with representatives
during an advocacy trip to Washington, D.C., to discuss
pressing issues affecting agriculture. … Farm Bureau
executives, the organization’s Leadership Farm Bureau class and
county leaders were joined by the organization’s federal policy
team and met face to face with lawmakers Nov. 14-17 in the
nation’s capital. Discussions focused on issues including
California’s ongoing drought, water, labor and trade, as well
as the next federal farm bill.
The Colorado River Compact is 100 years old. A University of
Arizona conference and the upcoming Colorado River Water Users
Association will mark the anniversary. But there’s no reason to
celebrate. Twenty-two years into a drought and with reservoirs
at all-time lows, the federal government may soon intervene in
the states’ management of the river. The Compact has failed.
Don’t blame the river. We need a new system that manages with
the river and provides all users with fair shares. In 1922, the
seven Colorado Basin states used an optimistic estimate of the
river’s annual flow to allocate the waters. The states chose
the biggest estimate because that made it easy to agree.
Everyone could pretend the river could satisfy all anticipated
demands. That was the first mistake. -Written by Karl Flessa, an Arizona resident since
1977 and an emeritus professor of geosciences at the
University of Arizona.
California water agencies that serve 27 million people will get
just 5% of what they requested from the state to start 2023,
water officials announced Thursday. The news of limited
water comes as California concludes its driest three-year
stretch on record and as water managers brace for a fourth
year with below-average precipitation. But if the winter is
wetter than expected, the state could boost how much supply it
plans to give out — as it did last year when allocations
started at 0% and ended the winter at 5%. Absent an end to
the drought, water-saving measures are poised to continue,
including calls for people to rip up decorative grass, limit
outdoor watering, take shorter showers and run dishwashers only
when full.
As California confronts another extended drought and its
impacts, it is more obvious than ever that the state has failed
to address its water supply and management challenges for far
too long. The immediate fallout of the unprecedented
situation we find ourselves in is frightening: local residents
with wells running dry; urban water rationing and critical
shortages; massive fallowing of some of the nation’s most
productive agricultural land and the resulting impacts on food
prices; and significant uncertainty about our ability to adapt
to the future. The long-term effects are even more
dire. The viability of California’s $3.4 trillion economy
is at stake. -Written by Tom Coleman, General Manager at Rowland
Water District; and Federico Barajas, Executive Director
of the San Luis & Delta-Mendota Water Authority.
The Bureau of Land Management on Nov. 15 called for its state
offices to work with state wildlife agencies and tribes to
preserve and improve habitat connectivity – the ability of fish
and wildlife to move freely across landscapes and seasonal
ranges. The agency says this guidance will translate to
activities like removing unnecessary fencing and other
barriers, installing signs to prevent vehicle-wildlife
collisions, and pursuing landscape restoration projects.
Russell Kuhlman, executive director of the Nevada Wildlife
Federation, said this kind of work is increasingly urgent
across the drought-stricken West.
A handful of small valley communities will be able to move more
rapidly on water projects thanks to millions in funding
recently allocated by the state Department of Water Resources
(DWR) as part of its water resilience program. DWR awarded $86
million throughout the state. About $44 million of that will go
to small communities facing water insecurity through the
department’s Small Community Drought Relief Program. The
announcement of DWR’s ninth, and final, round of funding under
this program comes as more than 1,400 wells have gone dry
throughout the state this year, 369 of those in the San Joaquin
Valley, according to the state’s dry well reporting system. The
recently announced funding will help support five projects in
the San Joaquin Valley.
Several public interest groups sued the City of Bakersfield
Nov. 30 alleging the city has been derelict in its operation of
the Kern River by diverting most of its flows to agriculture
and other uses leaving a dry riverbed through the heart of
town. … Even though the city operates the river per a century
of agreements and judicial decrees, the lawsuit states, the
city still has an obligation to study the harm those diversions
may cause to the environment, fisheries and even the
recreational value of a flowing river. The case hinges on a
concept known as the “public trust,” under which the state
holds all natural resources, including water, in trust for the
most “beneficial use” for the public. That includes water
covered by 100-year-old rights, which includes most of the
rights to waters on the Kern.
California’s Governor Newsom signed into law two bills
prohibiting PFAS in cosmetics (AB 2771) and in textiles (AB
1817), respectively. The bills define PFAS broadly as “a class
of fluorinated organic chemicals containing at least one fully
fluorinated carbon atom.” The cosmetics bill is specifically
limited to intentionally-added PFAS: “Beginning January 1,
2025, no person or entity shall manufacture, sell, deliver,
hold, or offer for sale in commerce any cosmetic product that
contains intentionally added perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl
substances (PFAS).” The textile bill, however, contains more
exceptions and complexity.
The use of smart meters to enforce water restrictions could
encourage widespread conservation — but not without local
backlash, a new study has found. Amid California’s
ongoing drought, researchers partnered with the city of Fresno
in summer 2018 to access and identify water violations via
household meter data. While a resulting surge in fines
brought a dramatic reduction in both water use and violations,
a barrage of complaints thwarted the program’s survival,
according to the study, released on Wednesday by the
University of Chicago’s Energy & Environment Lab.
It is imperative more now than ever for residents of Sonoma
County to be aware of exactly how our groundwater resources are
being used. Understanding how much water is being pumped will
enable actual protections for our residential users that are
increasingly experiencing dry wells. In addition, knowledge of
groundwater pumping from wells will also ensure that the
important public trust resources we all hold dear are not
adversely impacted. It is time for these harmful practices to
come to an end. By challenging the County to fulfill their
public trust obligations in a robust and transparent way, we
can begin to rectify some of these past and ongoing harms, and
bring our groundwater use in line with the increasing realities
of climate change.
Four small Bay Area drinking water systems will receive
millions of dollars as part of California’s effort to protect
water deliveries as the drought drags into its fourth year. On
Tuesday, the California Department of Water Resources announced
$44 million in statewide Small Community Drought Relief Program
grants about $6.5 million of which is earmarked for four water
systems in Santa Clara, Solano and Sonoma counties. The
program is aimed at small systems with fewer than 3,000 service
connections that are most likely to suffer from aging
infrastructure and often rely on a single source of water.
“Small communities are the most vulnerable to the impacts of
our new hotter, drier climate and lack the resources to
immediately deal with these challenges,” DWR Director Karla
Nemeth said in a news release.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti is backing a new salary package
for the Department of Water and Power that includes a
significant hike in pay for hundreds of workers. The Los
Angeles City Council approved the labor deal Tuesday in a vote
of 11-0. Under the agreement with the International Brotherhood
of Electrical Workers Local 18, roughly 10,000 workers will
receive four “cost of living” pay increases totaling at least
10% and as much as 24% by October 2025, depending on inflation.
All workers will also get a one-time cash bonus of 3% of their
salary in December.
Following recent rains, the city of San Diego started releasing
water from Lake Hodges this week. The move, mandated by state
safety officials, is part of ongoing maintenance at the
reservoir’s deteriorating century-old dam. About 250 million
gallons of water will flow into the San Dieguito River using
valves in the dam, according to city officials. Residents
living along the banks of the river should be aware of the
situation, although officials said they don’t expect flooding.
Kings County Supervisors took a crack at a long-promised push
to restrict the ability of swashbuckling Kings County farming
giants to sell their groundwater to far-flung southern
California locales. Tuesday, the Kings County Board of
Supervisors approved the Groundwater Export Ordinance, which
was initially conceived to reign-in major water players in the
area, including water maven John Vidovich. Instead, based
on lingering commentary from local farmers, it may only create
additional red tape with the lack of teeth necessary to stop
outsiders from buying up water rights for the express purpose
of selling the resources to Southern California water agencies.
It’s not easy enforcing water regulations in the West. Just ask
the officials in California who have been trying for almost a
decade to penalize a man who took water from the river system
that feeds San Francisco and bottled it for sale to stores like
Starbucks. It sounds like a tall tale, but it’s
illustrative of just how hard it is to stop scofflaws from
using water the rest of the state needs during a water crisis.
In 2015, at the height of a severe drought, California’s state
water agency received a series of complaints about water theft
on a small tributary of the Tuolumne River, the source of the
Hetch Hetchy reservoir that supplies most of San Francisco’s
water. G. Scott Fahey, the owner of a water bottling
company called Sugar Pine Spring Water, was siphoning water
from the spring and loading it on trucks, the complainants
said.
Most of California’s urban water agencies believe they have
enough supplies to last through another seven months of
drought, but nearly 20% of them — including many in Southern
California — say they could be facing significant shortages,
according to a new state report. The California Department of
Water Resource’s first annual water supply and demand
assessment surveyed the state’s urban water agencies to see how
they are managing tight supplies through conservation efforts
and improved drought planning. … [Metropolitan Water District
of Southern California] spokeswoman Rebecca Kimitch added
that deteriorating conditions on the Colorado
River mean the rest of Southern California could also see
calls for increased conservation in the coming months.
Rumors sometimes lead to news stories and sometimes not. In the
case of Slippery Rock Ranch — TV mogul Dick Wolf’s property in
the Goleta foothills — the gossip was that Montecito residents
were filling their swimming pools with water from the ranch’s
aquifers. While a publicist with the ranch stated last
week that Slippery Rock was not selling water or filling
Montecito swimming pools, the Goleta Water District
confirmed that they quietly settled a long-simmering
water dispute with the Law & Order creator in
the sum of $10 million. In Santa Barbara Superior Court,
Slippery Rock Ranch and the Goleta Water District had disputed
since 2015 over possession of the rainwater sluicing off and
infiltrating down under the ranch. The Water District pointed
out that the ranch — 740 acres above the border of Los Padres
National Forest — was in a watershed that contributed to the
district’s Goleta Groundwater Basin.
The Colorado River has long been regarded as the “lifeline of
the Southwest.” It supplies water to 40 million people in
seven states, 29 Native American tribes and parts of
Mexico. Farmers use it to irrigate nearly 5.5 million acres of
agricultural land. One hundred years ago this month, the
signing of the Colorado River Compact laid the foundation for
how water from the river is used today. But the signers of the
1922 agreement had no way of knowing what the future would
bring. Decades of overuse because of faulty science and
population growth—along with climate change—have all reduced
the river’s flow and the water levels in the nation’s largest
reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell. Now, the basin is facing
a crisis.
Today on Giving Tuesday, a global day of philanthropy, you can
support impartial education and informed decision-making on
water resources in California and the West by making a tax-deductible donation to the
Water Education Foundation. Your support ensures that our
45-year legacy of producing in-depth news, educational
workshops and accessible information on water reaches new
heights in 2023.
As directed by 2018 legislation, the Department of Water
Resources (DWR) today submitted a first report to the State
Water Resources Control Board summarizing how urban water
districts assess the adequacy of their supplies over the next
seven months. Broadly, the assessments show the
importance of conservation by individual Californians to help
suppliers meet demands through June 30, 2023. In this
year’s assessments, urban water suppliers indicate that they
will rely on either continued conservation or more aggressive
actions to meet demand through June 30, 2023, if dry conditions
persist. They report that they can ensure adequate water
supplies through water-saving strategies, such as requiring
customers to limit outdoor water and providing leak detection
and repair services.
After three years of virtual events, the PPIC Water Policy
Center’s annual fall conference made a welcome return to an
in-person format in Sacramento on Friday, November 18. The
half-day event began with a welcome from PPIC Water Policy
Center assistant director Caity Peterson and a presentation by
senior fellow Jeffrey Mount. “The elephant in the room is that
conditions have changed,” said Mount. “We’re no longer talking
about some future existential threat….we have now moved into
the era of the hot drought.” Hotter droughts, he said, coupled
with a thirstier atmosphere, are testing California’s water
system as never before.
Looking down at the coast from a hill above the historic L
Ranch at Point Reyes National Seashore, rolling swells appear
on the ocean surface like blue corduroy. The peninsula that
stretches south toward the horizon is almost entirely taken up
by ranchland and weathered buildings. Among them, coyotes stalk
gophers on the dun hillsides, red-tailed hawks perch on fence
posts and a skunk waddles along the road’s asphalt margin.
Those beef and dairy ranches are the focus of a recent water
quality report showing high levels of fecal bacteria downstream
from the cattle, and their manure, in lagoons and beaches
popular with park visitors. The report, which was commissioned
by an environmental group and is disputed by the ranching
industry, is the latest flareup in a decades-long debate over
the ranching that occupies more than one-third of the national
seashore.
Federal water managers on Monday warned California cities and
industrial users receiving water from the Central Valley
Project to prepare for a fourth year of drought and possibly
“extremely limited water supply” during 2023. The U.S. Bureau
of Reclamation, an agency of the Interior
Department that oversees water resource management, said
drought conditions in California have persisted despite early
storms this month, and warned of looming water conservation
actions. … The agency said water storage is near
historic lows in the reservoirs it oversees in the state, which
irrigate more than 3 million acres of land in central
California and supply major urban centers in the Greater
Sacramento and San Francisco Bay areas. The project’s water
provides supplies for approximately 2.5 million people per
year.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has made a
radical but logical decision: The utility will no longer shut
off service when low-income residents and seniors can’t pay
their bills. Instead, those customers will be put on payment
plans that can stretch over several years, offered incentives
to help lower their water and power use and, if they qualify,
be enrolled in federal programs to help households in poverty
pay for utilities. It’s an important change, recognizing
that water and power are essential services. It’s cruel to cut
people off if they fall behind on their bills due to financial
hardship.
As California prepares for a fourth consecutive year of drought
and farmland across the Golden State increasingly goes idle,
growers continue to face mounting economic challenges. In a new
report about the financial toll of the state’s extreme drought
conditions, researchers estimated that the state’s irrigated
farmland dropped by 752,000 acres, or nearly 10%, from 2019 to
2022. Fields meant to harvest rice, almonds and other crops are
instead going unplanted, causing the level of fallowed land
across California to surpass the prior peak seen during the
state’s last drought that ran from 2012 to 2016. As a result,
the researchers found, California crop revenues fell by $1.7
billion, or 4.6%, during that time …
Conservationists have notified U.S. wildlife officials that
they will sue over delinquent decisions related to protections
for two rare fish species that are threatened by groundwater
pumping in the drought-stricken West. The Center for Biological
Diversity sent a formal notice of intent to sue the Fish and
Wildlife Service last week over the Fish Lake Valley tui chub
near the California-Nevada line and the least chub in southwest
Utah. Utah and Nevada are the driest states in the country, and
the planned lawsuits are among the many fronts on which
conservationists are battling water districts and the users
they cater to over plans to siphon water to either maintain or
expand consumption.
Thomas Birmingham, general manager of the massive Westlands
Water District since 2000, Wednesday announced plans to step
down at the end of 2022. His announcement follows the election
of four new members to the Westlands Board of Directors on Nov.
8 who would give a so-called “change coalition” a solid
majority of six seats on the nine-member board. The top
priority for the coalition is “a change in leadership,”
according to Sarah Woolf, who along with Jon Reiter helped
coordinate a group of increasingly frustrated Westlands farmers
to run the slate of change candidates, SJV Water
reported.
As Colorado River water users prepare to meet in Las Vegas next
month, the reality they face is one of growing uncertainty with
few simple options left on the negotiating table. The math is
well understood: There are more demands for the river than
there is water coming into its reservoirs. But cutting
back at the scale necessary — and on a voluntary basis — has
proven painstakingly difficult this year as top officials from
across the Colorado River watershed have failed to reach a
settlement. If the cuts are inevitable based on physical
realities, questions remain about what form they will take.
Will they be voluntary? Mandatory? Both? And how would they be
enforced?
The promise of job security and work-life balance drew Fernando
Gonzalez to become a water operator. Now that he’s worked as
one for a few years, he sees his job as much more than fining
people for using too much water. On a given day, he’s
patrolling neighborhoods spanning from farmland to Malibu
mansions, looking for evidence that residents are wasting
water. He hands out notices of leaky sprinklers or when
residents run sprinklers right after a rainstorm, sure, but the
most rewarding part of his job is interacting with customers
about how they can save water, and why it’s so
important. … Here’s how Gonzalez earns $70,000 a
year, or nearly $100,000 with overtime, as a water operator in
Calabasas, Calif.
More cities have pledged to join Las Vegas in eliminating
unnecessary grass in a cooperative effort to use less precious
water from the Colorado River on lawns. A “Memorandum of
Understanding” with support from municipal governments
including Phoenix, San Diego and Denver, along with the water
agency that supplies 19 million people in the Los Angeles area,
is a sign that a more unified effort to conserve water has
support. Letters in support of better conservation efforts
provided a platform for governments to trumpet their success so
far — but there’s much more to do, according to John
Entsminger, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water
Authority.
Abortion opponents and their allies in elected office are
seizing on an unusual strategy after suffering a wave of
election defeats — using environmental laws to try to block the
distribution of abortion pills. … It claims without
direct evidence that trace amounts of the drug in wastewater
could threaten livestock and wildlife as well as humans, citing
some studies in which the drug was given directly to animals
rather than ingested from groundwater, and others where drugs
flushed directly down the toilet contaminated the water supply.
On Friday, November 18, 2022, the Court of Appeal for the Sixth
Appellate District (Sixth District Court) reversed the Santa
Clara County Superior Court’s denial of an attorneys’ fees
award in favor of a group of California irrigation districts
and water agencies (Districts) that successfully challenged the
State Water Resources Control Board’s (State Board) decision to
issue certain water right curtailment notices during the 2015
drought. The Sixth District Court held that the Districts are
entitled to attorneys’ fees incurred prosecuting the Superior
Court litigation against the State Board. The full Opinion is
here.
Federal wildlife officials have declared the boom-or-bust
lesser prairie chicken a threatened species in Colorado, and
endangered in states to the south, a goal of a long
environmental campaign but a disappointment to farmers who fear
new restrictions. … Wildlife scientists and advocates
say the bird is a leading indicator of healthy continuous
grassland and prairies, and the species once ranged across
nearly 100 million acres in the Southwest with a population
possibly in the millions. It’s now limited to a range of a few
million acres broken up by row crops, overgrazing and oil and
gas development, with aerial surveys putting the population at
32,000 across five states. … With a threatened
designation, farmers and ranchers are able to continue most
land uses but face new reviews on significant changes.
The fierce struggle for water in a drought-stricken West
continues to roil politics — and embroil a host of tribal water
claims. The decades-long drought has dried up reservoirs and
forced federal water cutbacks for the 40 million people in
seven states who rely on the Colorado River for water. But it
has also dramatically increased the stakes for the region in
decades-old water claims by a host of tribes — including the
Navajo and the White Mountain Apache. The Tonto Apache Tribe
also has a decades-old claim to water from the Colorado River.
Efforts to settle that claim with water from the C.C. Cragin
Reservoir with a payment from the federal government to buy
into Payson’s pipeline have been stalled for years — and missed
out on a gush of federal pandemic and infrastructure aid to
tribes. -Written by contributor Peter Aleshire.
OPB and ProPublica purchased 50 salmon from Native fishermen
along the Columbia River and paid to have them tested at a
certified lab for 13 metals and two classes of chemicals known
to be present in the Columbia. We then showed the results to
two state health departments, U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency officials and tribal fisheries scientists. The
testing showed concentrations of [mercury and polychlorinated
biphenyls, or PCBs]… EPA documents obtained under the
Freedom of Information Act show that even with minimal
data available, agency staff members have flagged the potential
for exposure to chemicals in salmon caught not just in the
Columbia but also Washington’s Puget Sound, British Columbia’s
Skeena and Fraser rivers, and California’s Sacramento and San
Joaquin rivers.
California water policy is often discussed and depicted as
being impossibly complex. In its essentials, it can be
seen much more simply, as in the flow chart below.
Without extreme events (such as floods and droughts), the
policy process would be simpler, but ironically less effective,
and less well funded. … California’s remarkable water
history shows that frequent extreme events have activated
enough innovation and preparations over 170 years such that
floods, droughts, and earthquakes are now much less threatening
to California’s population and economy. However, frequent
failures have not yet motivated adequate preparation and
management for ecosystems and rural water supplies.
Utah is often ribbed and, at times, outright rebuked for the
amount of water its residents use. But some of the state’s
resources managers claim the data used to make comparisons
across states is flawed and unfair, making Utahns’ water habits
look much worse than they really are. A draft bill dropped last
week during legislative interim hearings that supporters say
would collect data about per-person water use that’s more
comparable to other arid states in the West. … Utah typically
estimates water use by totaling up the amount of water
diverted, whether from surface water streams or groundwater
wells, then dividing it by the population.
Plans are advancing for importing water into the Indian Wells
Valley. At its Nov. 9 board meeting, the Indian Wells Valley
Groundwater Authority heard a presentation on three proposed
pipeline paths to get that water into IWV. The presentation was
given by Provost & Pritchard, a consulting group IWVGA
contracted to perform this imported water pipeline alignment
study. Jeff Davis–principal engineer with Provost &
Pritchard–presented the study to the IWVGA board. Davis told
the board that while there were many paths they investigated
for the pipeline, they’ve narrowed it down to three proposed
paths which each carry their own positive and negative aspects.
These three paths cross different regions of IWV, and are
therefore titled the West Alignment, the Central Alignment, and
the East Alignment.
After more than a decade in the trying, a major desalination
plant to serve the Monterey Peninsula has cleared a significant
hurdle—in theory, at least. In a 13-hour meeting that adjourned
just after 10pm on Thursday, Nov. 17, the California Coastal
Commission approved a conditional coastal development permit
for California American Water, the private water utility that
serves the greater Monterey Peninsula, to build a desalination
project in neighboring Marina, a city whose residents are
vehemently opposed to it, and who would not be served by
it. One thing that was continually brought up during the
meeting, and that was acknowledged in the Coastal Commission’s
staff report that recommended approval (with many conditions,
some potentially insurmountable), is that the project is rife
with complexity, both from technical and environmental justice
standpoints. … One question that remained unanswered was
who would pay for the project.
The Tule River Tribe Chairman presented his case in Washington
D.C. on Wednesday, continuing the decades long effort to enact
federal legislation to provide water rights for the Tule River
Reservation that would address a dire need. Tule River Tribe
Chairman Neil Peyron testified in front of the Senate Committee
on Indian Affairs concerning the proposed Tule River Tribe
Reserved Water Rights Settlement Act of 2022. On September 15,
California’s two Democratic U.S. Senators, Alex Padilla and
Dianne Feinstein introduced the Tule River Tribe Reserved
Rights Settlement Act. The legislation is a product of an
effort that has lasted more than 50 years made by the Tule
River Tribe to obtain recognition of their federal reserved
Indian water rights.
Noemi Barrera has spent four months without running water for
herself and her four children, and is among many people in
California living without it as wells across the state run
dry. … Tooleville sits on a well that is now
nearly unusable due to contamination from groundwater
overdrilling. The state stepped in last year after the
neighboring town Exeter refused to connect municipal water to
the community’s residents. … Barrera grew up in the
citrus-covered community but never faced this lack of running
water until she brought Ruby home from the hospital and could
not take a shower. And she is aware that many communities
across the state’s vital Central Valley are staring down the
same daily life, as their basins are depleted by
unprecedented drought and ongoing groundwater pumping.
A lawsuit over groundwater plans in the northern end of the San
Joaquin Valley is being closely watched as it could have
implications for how the state’s groundwater mandate moves
forward, according to a recent briefing on the issue at the
Kern Groundwater Authority. At the Nov. 16 meeting, authority
attorney Valerie Kincaid explained that the lawsuit, filed in
2020, seeks to have a court invalidate six groundwater plans in
the Delta-Mendota Subbasin, which runs along the western edge
of the valley from west of Fresno north to west of Modesto. The
Department of Water Resources filed an amicus brief in the
suit, which was bought by the California Sportfishing
Protection Alliance, Kincaid explained. An amicus, or friend of
the court brief, can be filed by a group that has a strong
interest in a case.
The Board of Supervisors this week will consider the analysis
used for proposed new rates for Middletown sewer customers.
… In a discussion timed for 10:15 a.m., the board,
sitting as the Lake County Sanitation District Board of
Directors, will consider a proposed resolution to receive,
approve and adopt the financial planning, revenue requirements
and rate setting analysis for Lake County Sanitation District’s
Middletown sewer system. In their report to the board,
Special Districts Administrator Scott Harter and Special
Districts Deputy Administrator Jesus Salmeron said that the
rate structure hasn’t been adjusted since sewer rates were
adopted in 1995 for the district.
Remember a couple weeks ago when it rained half an inch in
Fresno and snowed in the Sierra? Sure was nice while it lasted.
But with nothing but sunny skies in the short-term forecast and
La Niña ocean conditions expected once again this winter, all
signs point to a fourth consecutive year of California drought.
… Because the San Joaquin Valley is experiencing
California’s worst drought conditions as well as our economic
dependence on agriculture, those of us living here should be
extra diligent about conserving water. Especially when
instructed to do so by Gov. Gavin Newsom, who in July 2021
called for a 15% voluntary reduction in water use rather than
impose mandatory restrictions similar to those implemented in
2015 by former Gov. Jerry Brown. -Written by Fresno Bee columnist Marek Warszawski.
Last year, a group of Washington researchers pinpointed the
cause of these mass fish kills [in Pacific Northwest
streams]: 6PPD, a chemical added to tires to prevent them from
breaking down. When 6PPD, which has been used in tires since
the 1970s according to the U.S. Tire Manufacturers Association,
reacts with ozone in the atmosphere, it creates 6PPD-quinone
(6PPD-q), a compound that leaches into urban stormwater and
watersheds. This derivative chemical has proven difficult to
identify and study and is even harder to regulate given that
the chemicals in tires are proprietary and not disclosed by
tire manufacturers. However, new research led by NOAA
scientists found 6PPD-q harms other species in the salmonid
family besides coho, including steelhead trout.
100 years ago, Wyoming signed onto a deal to divide the water
that flows through the Colorado River basin among seven
states. It’s based on a formula — one likely based on
mistaken beliefs about the river itself — that did not award
extra credit for living in the mountains where the snow piles
up. Instead, the states signed a compact allocating the
water where it would readily be put to work. It meant the
more populated states of California, Colorado and
Arizona would get the biggest shares.
… But more than two decades into a punishing
drought that climate scientists say will likely intensify with
more warming, the system can no longer supply everything
that some 40 million people in a warming and drying region
desire from it, or that grocers nationwide sell from its
verdant fields.
Could San Luis Obispo’s wastewater help save Edna Valley
agriculture? That was the question of the night on Nov. 15 for
the SLO City Council, which took a deep dive into the future of
its recycled water program—including whether it wants to sell
any “extra” water to Edna Valley to help neighboring farmers
reduce their draw on groundwater. By a 4-1 consensus (with
Councilmember Jan Marx dissenting), the City Council agreed
that it’d be a good use of city resources to explore short-term
sales of recycled water to the Edna Valley region.
A new lawsuit from the state of California alleges that 3M,
DuPont, and a host of other chemical companies caused
widespread damage to public health and the natural world by
producing and selling PFAS, a class of hazardous chemicals that
have been linked to cancer, immune system disorders, birth
defects, and other health problems. As a result of a
decades-long campaign of deception, PFAS are in our waters, our
clothing, our houses, and even our bodies,” California’s
attorney general, Rob Bonta, said in a statement. He said
PFAS manufacturers knowingly violated state consumer protection
and environmental laws and vowed to hold them accountable.
A Claremont friend of ours recently confessed, she is depressed
if she sees a brown lawn, and she is depressed if she sees a
green lawn. We think of our friend as reasonably well-adjusted,
so lawns do seem to be the culprits here. Indeed, out for one
of our walks on a Thursday evening — not a permissible
sprinkler day — my wife and I see homes in our neighborhood
with the sprinklers going full blast, with a steady flow of
water running into the street. The L.A. Times recently
interviewed Max Gomberg, who resigned as a senior manager with
the California State Water Board out of his frustration over
inaction in Sacramento on water. He described participants in
the water market as playing a game of chicken, waiting to see
who would blink first, taking us down an unsustainable
path. -Written by Stephen Marks, the Elden Smith
Professor of Economics at Pomona College.
According to the National Center for Environmental Information,
about 51 percent of the continental United States has been
experiencing drought conditions in the summer of 2022. More
than 70 percent of the western U.S. faces severe drought. The
Colorado River basin supply is rapidly declining, and Lake Mead
and Lake Powell are at critically low levels. Because of this,
the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has declared a Tier 2 water
shortage on the Colorado River impacting seven western states
that depend on water from the river. … In the U.S., more
than 40 percent of the population relies on groundwater for its
drinking water. Groundwater is also used for irrigation,
domestic use, public use, and industrial and mining activities.
A group of 30 agencies that supply water to homes and
businesses throughout the western United States has pledged to
rip up lots of decorative grass to help keep water in the
over-tapped Colorado River. The agreement signed Tuesday by
water agencies in Southern California, Phoenix and Salt Lake
City and elsewhere illustrates an accelerating shift in the
American West away from well-manicured grass that has long been
a totem of suburban life, having taken root alongside streets,
around fountains and between office park walkways. The
grass-removal pledge targets turf that people don’t work on,
like in front of strip malls, in street medians or at the
entrance to neighborhoods.
A trio of bills affecting water rights and infrastructure for
Arizona tribes took a step closer to becoming law Wednesday, a
move one official said his tribe has been waiting for since
being forced onto the reservation. The Senate Indian Affairs
Committee, without debate, approved bills granting water rights
to the Hualapai, letting the Colorado River Indian Tribes lease
their water, and adding funding and extending the deadline for
review of a water system for the White Mountain Apache. Tribal
leaders welcomed the votes, which they called the culmination
of hard-fought struggles by their tribes.
The driest grounds California ever experienced were perfectly
fertile for conspiracy theories. The state was in the
midst of its worst water crisis in over 1,200 years
… Fear, anger and conspiracy beliefs were flowing in
California when water wasn’t. The debunked “chemtrail”
conspiracy theory was searched more in the state,
and the nation as a whole, during the midst of the water
cuts when compared to any other time before or after, Google
Trends data shows. Arizona may be headed in the same
direction. Researchers who study conspiracy theories said
the state is ripe for new water-based misinformation to spread
as the Southwest U.S. water crisis worsens. Those researchers
also said understanding three reasons behind why the beliefs
spread may be the key to preventing them.
Some residents in Planada are calling on county officials to
block a proposed expansion of a dairy. Merced County is
currently in the process of deciding whether to allow the
Hillcrest Dairy just north of the town to expand its herd from
8,050 cows to 9,750 cows. Some residents are saying that the
expansion would make current problems with bad smells and flies
worse, as well as threaten the community’s supply of
groundwater. … The matter is still in the process of review,
and has yet to come before the Board of Supervisors. But it
will ultimately be their call as to whether or not the
expansion with the dairy moves forward.
The California Coastal Commission [Thursday night] approved
another desalination plant, despite citing its high costs,
risks to Monterey Bay’s environment and “the most significant
environmental justice issues” the commission has faced in
recent years. The commission’s divided, 8-to-2 vote came
after 13 hours of debate at a Salinas public hearing packed
with several hundred people, plus more crammed into overflow
space. Many of the 375 who signed up to speak opposed the
project — some in tears. Much of the debate focused on the
fairness of locating a for-profit company’s facility in the
Monterey County city of Marina — which does not need the water
and is home to designated disadvantaged neighborhoods. The
expensive supply will flow to other communities, including the
whiter, wealthy enclaves of Carmel-by-the-Sea, Pacific Grove
and Pebble Beach.
What is the cost of defying California’s environmental laws?
Less than $50. That’s all Northern California farmers will pay
for blatantly draining the Shasta River in defiance of the
state’s drought regulations last summer, likely killing
protected salmon. The Shasta River Water Association is an
irrigation district serving about 100 farmers and ranchers in
Siskiyou County. Over eight days, its members drained nearly
two-thirds of the river to fill livestock ponds in the
area. This was the primary finding of a Bee investigation
that suggests California is unable to stop farmers from
draining water as they wish — no matter how much damage is done
to the environment.
The biggest dam-removal project in history moved one step
closer to reality Thursday after the federal government cleared
a key regulatory hurdle that would allow demolition to begin on
four hydroelectric dams along California’s border with Oregon.
The decision Thursday by the Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission allows PacifiCorp, a utility company controlled by
financier Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, to surrender the
dams’ license to a nonprofit organization backed by California
and Oregon. Demolition on the Klamath River dams — three in
California and one in Oregon — could begin as quickly as a few
months from now.
Maricopa County’s population has more than doubled over the
past 30 years, making it one of the fastest growing regions in
the country. But meanwhile, Arizona’s water supply has become
more and more depleted. So as growth continues, can the state
sustain even more residents? In most areas of central
Arizona, a developer can’t build a new home without first
proving that there’s enough water to last that property 100
years. But there are loopholes for larger lots in rural areas,
like many homes in Rio Verde Foothills. And as water becomes
scarcer, some worry even properties with those 100-year plans
might not all be sustainable.
The San Diego City Council unanimously approved Tuesday a new
funding source to pay for upgrades to the San Diego River,
which officials say could become a regional attraction with
recreational amenities and riverfront dining. The council
voted to create an enhanced infrastructure financing district,
which would generate money any time a parcel within half a mile
of the river sees its property tax go up in the next 45
years. Combined with a separate EIFD the county
government approved in September, the river is expected to get
somewhere between $380 million and $750 million for a wide
variety of projects.
The Department of Water Resources (DWR) today announced
awarding $5 million in funding for seven emergency response
agencies within the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to increase
their ability to respond to flood emergencies. This funding
will help to improve the emergency response efforts for first
responders and help these communities prepare for threats of
flooding in the Delta, which is increasingly vulnerable to
flooding from storm events and sea level rise.
It’s an October morning at Point Reyes National Seashore and
I’m scooting under barbed wire fences, wary of sliding into cow
pies. My guide on this safari is Jocelyn Knight, wildlife
photographer. We’re stalking a toxic waste dump hidden from
public view behind a hill at “Historic E Ranch, established
circa 1859” land lorded by the National Park Service. Park
regulations require Seashore pastures to remain open to the
public, but the dump is inside the E Ranch “core” of barns and
dwellings, and the public is disallowed. … According to
EHS investigators, a septic tank was installed without the
required permit; its sewage level exceeded the operational
limit; they could not locate a leach field. The ranch land
drains into the Pacific.
Oscar-nominated actor and star of “Succession” spoke in support
of lawsuits aiming to stop a project that plans to bulldoze the
Ballona Wetlands on Sunday. More than 200 residents of Venice,
Culver City, Santa Monica, Marina del Rey and Playa del Rey
attended an event held by Defend Ballona Wetlands where
Cromwell spoke about his support and involvement with the
organization. Cromwell said Marcia Hanscom, Executive Director
of the Ballona Institute, approached him 25 years ago asking
him to visit the wetlands. When he did, Cromwell said it was
moving and he knew he wanted to do whatever it took to support
efforts to protect it.
This developing story has been
updated: US regulators approved a major milestone
Thursday in a plan to demolish four dams on a California river
and open up hundreds of miles of salmon habitat that would be
the largest dam removal and river restoration project in the
world when it goes forward. The Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission vote on the lower Klamath River dams is the last
major regulatory hurdle and the biggest milestone for a $500
million demolition proposal championed by Native American
tribes and environmentalists for years. The project would
return the lower half of California’s second-largest river to a
free-flowing state for the first time in more than a century.
San Luis Obispo County has been restricting new groundwater
wells in the Paso Robles subbasin for nearly a decade. Now
county supervisors are hoping to tack on a carbon sequestration
mandate.
Low-income residents, senior citizens and other eligible
customers of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power will
no longer face shutoffs if they are unable to pay their utility
bills, the agency announced Wednesday. Under a motion adopted
unanimously by the Los Angeles Board of Water and Power
Commissioners, the DWP must halt the practice of water and
power shutoffs as a debt collection tool for residents enrolled
in its EZ-SAVE program, which offers discounts for
income-qualified residents, as well as those enrolled in the
Senior Citizen Lifeline Discount Program.
With the federal government calling for major cuts in water use
to address the historic shortage on the Colorado River, the
leaders of 30 agencies that supply cities from the Rocky
Mountains to Southern California have signed an agreement
committing to boost conservation, in part by pledging to target
the removal of one especially thirsty mainstay of suburban
landscapes: decorative grass. The water agencies, which supply
Denver, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Santa Monica, Burbank, San Diego
and other cities, have committed to a nonbinding list of
actions, including creating a program to remove 30% of
“nonfunctional” grass and replace it with “drought- and
climate-resilient landscaping, while maintaining vital urban
landscapes and tree canopies.”
A Ninth Circuit panel on Tuesday heard arguments on whether
federal judges can vacate a rule by the Trump-era U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency without finding the rule
unlawful. In July 2020, the Trump administration revised the
“Clean Water Act 401 Certification Rule,” which narrowed what
issues state and tribal governments can consider when
determining whether a project, particularly one discharging
pollution into a waterway, complies with state water quality
standards. The rule affected the permitting and relicensing
process for thousands of industrial projects, including natural
gas pipelines, hydroelectric plants, wastewater treatment
facilities and construction sites near sensitive
wetlands.
In just a few months this year, abnormally low water levels in
rivers led China to shut down factories and to floods in
one-third of Pakistan, killing around 1,500 people and grinding
the country to a halt. A dried-up Rhine River threatened to tip
Germany’s economy into recession, because cargo ships could not
carry standard loads. And the Las Vegas strip turned into a
river and flooded casinos, chasing customers away. … With
mounting climate-fuelled weather disasters, social inequality,
species extinctions and resource scarcity, some corporations
have adopted sustainability programmes. One term in this realm
is ‘circular economy’, in which practitioners aim to increase
the efficiency and reuse of resources, including water —
ideally making more goods (and more money) in the process.
Fishing for white sturgeon has been relatively productive on
the West Delta and Suisun Bay over the past two weeks, but some
anglers and prominent scientists are supporting changes in
fishing regulations to preserve the prehistoric fish for the
future. Hundreds of white sturgeon and some green sturgeon
perished in San Francisco and San Pablo bays in late August in
a massive fish kill spurred by a red tide algae bloom, but the
exact number of fish killed is unknown. Captain Zack Medinas of
Gatecrasher Fishing Adventures reported “very good” sturgeon
fishing on his latest few trips, but ponders how long this
fishery will last at current rates of harvest.
[On Thursday, Nov. 17 at 9am the Public Utilities Commission]
will consider whether to grant a permit to Cal Am to build a
4.8 million-gallons per day (mgd) desalination project that
would draw its source water through subsurface slant wells from
under the beach in Marina, on property owned by Cemex, whose
sand mine on the property has now been shut down. One
elephant in the room, which is completely omitted from the
Coastal Commission’s staff report—which recommends that the
commission approve the project, with conditions—is that it
doesn’t address who would pay for the unused capacity of the
desal plant. Right now, if Pure Water Monterey expansion is
approved, there is no projected demand for more water for at
least 20 years. -Written by David Schmalz, Monterey County Weekly
columnist.
Alfalfa is often the target of critics of irrigated agriculture
who frequently rely upon simplistic explanations to heap scorn
upon growing a forage crop in the West during times of drought.
Two Democratic congressmen from Arizona — Ruben Gallego and
Raúl Grijalva — last month introduced the “Domestic Water
Protection Act of 2022” (H.R. 9194), which would impose an
excise tax on the sale of a “water-intensive” crop. The tax is
300% of the price for which the crop is sold and is paid by the
manufacturer, producer, or importer of the crop. The bill
defines water-intensive crop as a crop grown in an area
experiencing prolonged drought at the time such crop is grown,
and by a manufacturer, producer, or importer that is a foreign
corporation or foreign government. -Written by Dan Keppen, executive director of Family
Farm Alliance.
Already grappling with drought, lower commodity prices and
higher production costs, more farmers are feeling the added
pinch of groundwater regulations as local agencies implement
plans that include pumping limits and new fees to balance
long-term groundwater resources as required by the
state. … Regulations and fees by local agencies as
part of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, or SGMA,
affect farmers more directly this year, including farmers in
Madera County. Madera County farmer Jay Mahil said
groundwater sustainability agency fees that are part of his
county property tax bill are “coming at a time when growers are
receiving all-time low returns on commodity prices, and farm
input costs have doubled.”
Modesto Irrigation District, Turlock Irrigation District and
the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission have signed a
memorandum of understanding with the state to advance a
voluntary agreement for the Tuolumne River. MID and TID, which
jointly operate the Don Pedro Reservoir on the Tuolumne River,
joined dozens of other California water agencies in committing
to collaborate with the state to finalize agreements that will
provide water supply reliability to communities, while
enhancing river ecosystems. Contra Costa Water District signed
onto the agreement in September. … The action by the
districts signals momentum towards an alternative to
regulations adopted by the State Water Resources Control Board
in 2018, as part of the first phase of the state’s Bay-Delta
water quality control plan.
On November 10, 2022, California Attorney General Rob Bonta
announced that he had filed a lawsuit against 3M, DuPont, and
sixteen other companies for their roles in manufacturing per-
and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). The lawsuit seeks money
damages, which could reach hundreds of millions of dollars, for
damages, penalties, and restitution, as well as injunctive
relief and abatement. Some consider the lawsuit the broadest of
its kind brought by any state. PFAS is an umbrella term
that covers dozens of types of man-made chemicals. PFAS were
used for a variety of purposes, including in nonstick cookware
and firefighting foam, although their usage has been phased out
voluntarily by companies in the United States over the past
20-25 years.
A slate of candidates aiming to reform the powerful Westlands
Water District swept into victory on Monday night, cementing a
new board majority and likely spelling the end of the line for
the district’s general manager. The four candidates –
Justin Diener, Ernie Costamagna, Jeremy Hughes, and Ross
Franson – captured the four available seats in preliminary
results. In the process, they are primed to boot the lone
incumbent running for re-election from his seat – current
Westlands board president Ryan Ferguson.
Salvador Polanco-Gamez is a “water waste investigator” for
the Las Vegas Valley Water District. It’s a government job
where they are tasked with finding and enforcing violations of
water waste under Nevada’s strict conservation laws. Those
strict laws regulating water waste are working — southern
Nevada recorded a 26% drop in water use since 2002 — and could
become one possible path forward for Utah’s own efforts to save
water and preserve the Great Salt Lake. Gamez and his fellow
investigators are part of that water-saving success. “We look
for water waste which is prohibited in southern Nevada,” he
said. … Technically, any water that hits a gutter is
considered “wasted.” The Southern Nevada Water Authority has
mandatory restrictions on time of day, day of week and length
of watering.
For the second time since the Delta Stewardship Council’s
establishment in 2010, its regulatory authority has been upheld
by California’s judicial branch, clearing the way for the
Council to continue to apply its expertise and exercise its
broad authority in determining how to accomplish the goals and
objectives of the Delta Reform Act. On November 4, the Superior
Court of California ruled in favor of the Council regarding
lawsuits filed by 17 parties challenging two amendments to the
Delta Plan and the Programmatic Environmental Impact Report
(PEIR) prepared pursuant to the California Environmental
Quality Act (CEQA).
With Governor Newsom’s recent pledge to invest $8 billion in
water infrastructure, carbon-friendly concrete is increasingly
in the mix in Department of Water Resources’ (DWR)
infrastructure projects. This includes efforts to modernize
California’s largest water delivery system, the State Water
Project (SWP). … The cement industry produces about 7%
of carbon emissions globally (about double the emissions from
global air travel.) Over half of these emissions are from the
chemical alteration of materials during production. The
remaining emissions are from the burning of fossil fuels to
generate the high temperatures needed to make concrete.
To the Ute Mountain Ute, grappling with its water supply is an
ongoing challenge. Despite having senior water rights dating
back to 1868, when the Kit Carson Treaty created the
reservation, the tribe received none of its rightful water for
decades as non-Native settlers dammed rivers and diverted
flows. And like many tribes across the Southwest, it still
struggles to properly quantify and settle some of the water
claims already validated by a long stream of court decisions.
Even when tribes have been able to secure their water rights,
they have often lacked the expensive infrastructure for getting
it to their reservations, which means their water gets used,
without payment, by non-native groups.
With California butting up against 840 miles of
ocean, desalination seems an obvious solution to the
state’s water woes. However, the cost, energy demands and
environmental impacts have made the technology largely
unworkable. Three years of drought may be
changing the calculus. The latest push for desalination is
on the Monterey Peninsula, where a plan for a plant, which has
faced more than a decade of hurdles, is poised to win approval
this week from the California Coastal Commission. The $300
million-plus proposal calls for pumping seawater from wells
beneath Monterey Bay, near the city of Marina, and piping it
ashore to the popular tourist region to help relieve a longtime
water shortage… the Monterey Peninsula Water Management
District, which works with Cal Am to ensure water for the area,
said the new supply could run as much as $7,000 per acre
foot.
Gov. Spencer Cox announced this month that all new water rights
in the Great Salt Lake Basin are on pause, given the lake’s
crisis situation. The move sounds big, sweeping and dramatic —
it applies to the lake’s main tributaries that drain nearly
10,000 square miles in Utah. Still, it’s hard to say how much
of a difference it will make for the Great Salt Lake, which has
continued to shrink after hitting another record low over the
summer, almost entirely due to Utah’s water diversions. The
governor’s current suspension only applies to new water right
applications and does not interfere with existing ones. New
water rights would be the most junior with the lowest priority
anyway. And in periods of drought, junior water right holders
sometimes don’t get to divert any water at all.
The last time San Luis Obispo ran critically short of water,
the city pumped heavily from wells along Los Osos Valley Road.
The aquifer was so overtaxed by residents and farmers that the
ground sank, resulting multi-million dollar lawsuit settlements
over damaged businesses and homes. Since the 1990s, the city
has adopted a series of water measures — including rebates for
more efficient fixtures, upgrading the sewer plant to deliver
treated water to landscaping, and building a pipeline
delivering water from Lake Nacimiento…. The city is
currently leading the Groundwater Enhancement Project, which it
described as “an initiative to to ensure responsible use of
groundwater in the San Luis Obispo Valley Groundwater Basin.”
Three of California’s biggest water suppliers, including the
city of San Francisco, have reached a deal with the state that
calls for reducing their immense consumption of river water but
not as much as the state had initially demanded. The
compromise, announced Thursday, is the latest breakthrough in a
years-long effort by state regulators to protect flows in
California’s once-grand but increasingly overdrawn rivers. The
toll on the waterways, where as much as 90% of the water is
pumped to cities and farms, has been exacerbated by drought,
leaving fabled runs of salmon and other plants and animals at
risk of perishing. … But whether Thursday’s deal, known
as “voluntary agreements,” will meaningfully increase river
flows — and protect fish and wildlife — remains uncertain.
Metropolitan Water District of Southern California Vice Chair
Cynthia Kurtz told a City committee she predicted the
implementation of more mandatory water reductions by next year
as the region faces the challenges of climate change
and extended drought. Kurtz knows Pasadena’s water
situation well. She served as Pasadena City Manager twice, most
recently stepping down as Interim City
Manager in August. According to the U.S. Drought
Monitor, the first three months of 2022 have seen record dry
weather, and pushed nearly 94% of California into
severe drought conditions.
Lake Mead relies on inflow – mostly, water released from the
upstream Lake Powell. Until recently, Lake Mead typically
would get at least 8.23 million acre-feet of water annually
from Lake Powell – enough to cover the state of Maryland
in more than a foot of water. We began this year expecting
to get a lower 7.48 million acre-feet release from Lake Powell.
But the federal Bureau of Reclamation, for the first
time, trimmed that mid-year to 7 million acre-feet
because of how dangerously close Powell was to something called
“minimum power pool.” -Written by Arizona Republic columnist Joanna
Allhands.
As a society, what do we do when too little water has been
promised to too many people? What should we be doing
differently? In the United States, there is perhaps no
better to place to turn for answers to these questions than the
Klamath Basin. The Klamath Basin watershed is considered one of
the most complicated areas for water governance in the United
States owing to its transboundary location (the basin crosses
the Oregon-California border), its history of complex
litigation and persistent inter-institutional (and
interpersonal) conflict, and more than 60 different groups of
people who have an interest in the basin’s water
allocation.
If challenger Eric Averett maintains his lead over incumbent
Phil Cerro for a seat on the powerful Kern County Water Agency
board, it may prove just how effective a campaign statement can
be. Averett said he tried to withdraw his name from the ballot
after belatedly learning Cerro would run. But he missed the
deadline to have his name removed, Averett told SJV Water in
September. He vowed not to campaign – dropping out of the race
in spirit – and said he would support Cerro. But when Averett
filed his paperwork to run, he did one thing Cerro didn’t, he
submitted a campaign statement.
The state of California on Thursday sued the manufacturers of a
class of chemicals known as “forever chemicals” that are found
in a variety of consumer items including food packaging and
cookware and are linked to cancer and other illnesses. The
chemicals at the heart of the lawsuit are perfluoroalkyl and
polyfluoroalkyl substances, commonly referred to as
PFAS. They are resistant to environmental degradation,
according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
the Environmental Protection Agency, and hundreds of scientific
studies. They have also been found in the bloodstreams of
98% of people tested, as well as in wildlife, fish, water
— including rivers, lakes and nearshore waters — and soil.
Monday morning, the San Luis Obispo County Service Area 23 –
Santa Margarita water system operator discovered a break-in at
the Santa Margarita water storage facility, according to the
San Luis Obispo County Health Department. The storage facility
fence was vandalized and the lock accessing one of the water
storage tanks was cut providing access to the drinking water
supply. Because it is unknown whether perpetrators tampered
with the water, as a precautionary measure, the tank was taken
out of service and is being drained. It held about 100,000
gallons of water at the time of the incident.
A dozen independent fish scientists are calling for urgent
changes to sport fishing rules to save California’s largest
freshwater fish after an unprecedented red tide this summer
left hundreds of them dead in the estuary on Sacramento’s
doorstep. The fish is the white sturgeon — an ancient species
native to the West Coast. … But this summer’s deadly red
tide has independent scientists worried about the future of
this species. They’re calling on the state to change fishing
rules to require anglers release any sturgeon they catch — a
move that would likely be controversial for the state’s 46,000
sturgeon anglers.
For eight straight days this summer, farmers in far Northern
California drained almost all of the water out of a river in
defiance of the state’s drought regulations. The move
infuriated environmentalists and salmon-dependent Native
American tribes downstream. California now knows the cost of
the farmers’ blatant defiance: Less than $50 per farmer. It’s
the latest example of California’s lax water-use enforcement
process — problems that were first exposed in a sweeping
Sacramento Bee investigation published online last week.
It’s been more than two years since Cambria applied to turn its
emergency water system into a more permanent fixture, but
there’s been little progress since then. According to Cambria
Community Services District (CCSD) board member Harry Farmer,
the permit application was submitted to the county in July
2020. … Cambria’s water issues have been ongoing for
more than a decade, but the problems with the now-proposed
water reclamation facility started in 2014, after the district
declared a water supply emergency. Due to a dire water shortage
situation, SLO County proceeded to grant the CCSD an emergency
permit to build a water supply project, bypassing the typical
requirements needed to obtain an operating permit.
Hundreds of thousands of acres of San Joaquin Valley farmland
may come out of irrigated production in the coming decades to
help balance overdrafted groundwater basins under the
Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. At the same time,
California needs to ramp up clean energy development to meet
the goals of SB 100—and the valley has high solar potential. At
a virtual event last week, PPIC Water Policy Center research
fellow Andrew Ayres moderated a panel of experts and local
stakeholders; they explored how solar development could help
California meet multiple objectives while overcoming some
challenges and delivering lasting benefits to the region.
Thursday, Nov. 17 is shaping up to be a momentous day for the
future of the Monterey Peninsula’s water supply, as two major
state boards – the California Coastal Commission and the
California Public Utilities Commission – are set to weigh in on
two separate projects that aim to add supply to the local
portfolio. Arguably, the more weighty of the two hearings is
the Coastal Commission’s, which is meeting for three days in
the Board of Supervisors chambers in Salinas. In those chambers
on Nov. 17, the commissioners will consider whether to grant a
coastal development permit to California American Water for its
proposed desalination project in Marina, which has been a
lightning rod for controversy since first being proposed nearly
a decade ago.
The Coachella Valley Water District’s board of directors voted
Tuesday to cut back on groundwater replenishment over the next
few years to reduce the district’s Colorado River water use
amid historic drought conditions. Groundwater
replenishment adds water to the local aquifer, which provides
nearly all of the drinking water and domestic water sources in
the Coachella Valley. Earlier this year, the Bureau of
Reclamation called for the seven states that rely on the
Colorado River — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada,
New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — to use at least 15% less water
next year from the drought-stricken river system, or between 2
million and 4 million acre-feet less. An acre-foot, about
326,000 gallons of water, is enough to supply about two
households for a year.
Every month, millions of low-income Californians struggle to
pay their water and utility bills. A survey on COVID-19‘s
financial effect on water systems and customers found that 12%
of California households were behind on their water bills, and
that statewide, customers owe $1 billion in water debt.
… [State law] prohibits most water companies from
shutting off your water unless your payment is overdue by 60
days. Water utilities are also required to notify you at least
seven business days before a shut-off, and they must have their
shut-off policy on their website. (DWP’s policies can be found
on its website: Click on “Residential Customers,” then
“Customer Service,” and on the lefthand side at the bottom of
the page, click “Water Service Disconnection Policy.” You can
download the complete policy in six languages.)
Balancing the state’s groundwater supplies for a sustainable
future may not be easy due to severe drought and ongoing
economic challenges facing farmers. “We’ve got the lowest
prices and highest production costs and the least-reliable
water supply that we’ve had since I’ve been farming,” said Bill
Diedrich of Firebaugh, who farms row crops and permanent crops
on the west side in Madera and Fresno counties…. Diedrich,
who relies on groundwater for irrigating farmland in Madera
County and surface water for ground in Fresno County, said
farming at this time “is very difficult.” He said the 2014
Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which tasks local
agencies to balance groundwater supplies in affected basins by
2040 and 2042, means farmland must come out of production.
A Los Angeles County judge on Monday advanced LA’s lawsuit
against Monsanto over chemicals the city says have contaminated
its water supply. Monsanto filed a demurrer — essentially a
series of objections to the city’s complaint — arguing,
among other things, that the city filed a public nuisance claim
“for property located outside the city’s jurisdictional
boundaries.” … The city sued Monsanto in March
over polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, which the U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency classifies as a “probable”
human carcinogen, and which were banned in 1979 but have
nonetheless lingered in a variety of older products like
paints, sealants and electrical equipment. According to LA’s
complaint, and similar complaints filed by other California
cities, rain causes those chemicals to seep into rivers, lakes
and streams.
From water infrastructure failures in Jackson, Mississippi, to
a political and financing puzzle in California, water
affordability is an emerging policy concern for an industry
already facing huge challenges. Tune is as Brownstein’s Jessica
Diaz speaks to industry experts Jennifer Capitolo and April
Ballou about how the issue of water affordability and
fragmentation is playing out among providers, the potential and
pitfalls that come with federal assistance programs and the
critical balance of providing affordable water without
sacrificing safety or reliability.
The state awarded $300,000 to the Allensworth Progressive
Association, a local nonprofit, to “implement
neighborhood-level projects that reduce greenhouse gas
emissions, improve public health and the environment and expand
economic opportunity for residents,” according to a press
release from the Governor’s office. The money will be
used, in part, for planning flood control and infrastructure
for wastewater management. … Funding comes from the
state’s Transformative Climate Communities program, which
awarded $96 million to 10 disadvantaged communities throughout
the state last month. The projects aim to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions by 64,000 metric tons, according to the press
release.
Incumbent John Allen is leading two challengers in his quest
for a third term representing Long Beach on the Water
Replenishment District Board of Directors. With mail-in ballots
counted, Allen had 52% of the vote, while challengers Mike
Murchison has 23% and Gerrie Schipske has 25% in the race for
the Area 3 board seat. The Area 3 seat represents 800,000
residents in seven cities: Long Beach, Signal Hill, San Pedro,
Lakewood, Hawaiian Gardens, Artesia and Cerritos.
As the summer of 2022 began, 90 percent of New Mexico was in a
severe drought. The largest wildfire in New Mexico’s history
raged in the northern part of the state. Snowpack melted weeks
early, leaving reservoirs throughout the Southwest running low.
In late May, the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District
(MRGCD), the authority that manages water for agriculture in
the Albuquerque Basin, announced that it would not be able to
guarantee farmers any water past June. The outlook for farmers
was dire. The conservation district had, over the previous two
years, piloted programs to pay some farmers and landowners to
stop farming and fallow their fields.
A move is afoot in Congress to increase the annual “rent” the
City of San Francisco pays for the privilege of flooding Hetch
Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park from $30,000 to at
least $2 million. The bill by Rep. Connie Conway, who
represents much of the southern San Joaquin Valley, is designed
to require the City of San Francisco to not only pay fair
market for renting the only land ever flooded for a reservoir
in a national park, but also to force the city to comply to
terms they agreed to in the 1913 Raker Act.
Even as worsening drought and aridification force Los Angeles
to end its overwhelming dependence on imported water, Angelenos
may soon realize that weaning themselves off supplies from the
rugged eastern Sierra Nevada doesn’t mean they will stop paying
for the city’s long, complicated history there. That’s because,
even if the city is able to make good on a pledge by Mayor Eric
Garcetti to recycle 100% of its water by 2035 and increase its
ability to capture storm water, Los Angeles will still have to
pay millions of dollars to control the region’s hazardous dust
pollution — an environmental consequence of L.A.’s draining of
Owens Lake more than a century ago, as well as recent
diversions that have lowered the level of Mono Lake farther
north.
Five years ago, when ExxonMobil came calling, city officials
eagerly signed over a large portion of their water supply so
the oil giant could build a $10 billion plant to make plastics
out of methane gas. A year later, they did the same for
Steel Dynamics to build a rolled-steel factory. Never
mind that Corpus Christi, a mid-sized city on the semi-arid
South Texas coast, had just raced through its 50-year water
plan 13 years ahead of schedule. Planners believed they had a
solution: large-scale seawater desalination. According to the
plan in 2019, the state’s first plant needed to be running by
early 2023 to safely meet industrial water demands that were
scheduled to come online. But Corpus Christi never got it done.
Thirty years ago, President George H.W. Bush signed an
ambitious California water reform known as the Central Valley
Project Improvement Act, or the CVPIA. The bill responded to a
drought, crashing salmon runs, threats to Central Valley
wetlands and antiquated water policies. California is again
suffering from drought and low fish counts. The CVPIA’s
successes and failures provide lessons to help ensure a healthy
environment and more reliable water supplies. It is time
to take the next steps. … Although the CVPIA funded
habitat restoration, it failed to provide the river flows
salmon needed. This was partly because the law applied to the
federal Central Valley Project, not other diverters. -Written by U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman and former
Democratic U.S. Rep. George Miller, who coauthored the
Central Valley Project Improvement Act.
Southern California’s first significant winter storm is
expected to usher in three days of rain, mountain snow and
gusty winds before tapering off Wednesday. The storm that
originated in the Gulf of Alaska moved into the region Monday,
with the first band of rain reaching San Luis Obispo County by
the afternoon before moving south the rest of the day,
according to the National Weather Service. Showers are light to
moderate for most of Monday. Snow could fall Tuesday at
elevations of at least 7,000 feet and Wednesday at 4,000 feet.
… The storm is expected to peak Tuesday before winding
down Wednesday morning to scattered showers. Los Angeles County
is expected to see 1 to 3 inches of rain in the lower
elevations; mountains will get between 2 to 3 inches.
California’s water officials plan to impose a $4,000 fine on
Siskiyou County ranchers for violating orders to cut back their
water use during a weeklong standoff last summer. State
officials and the ranchers agree: A $4,000 fine isn’t much of a
deterrent to prevent illegal water diversions during
California’s droughts. The proposed fine would amount to about
$50 per rancher. A rural water association serving about
80 ranchers and farmers — facing mounting costs from hauling
water and purchasing hay to replace dried out pasture — turned
on their pumps for eight days in August to divert water from
the Shasta River. State and federal officials said the pumping,
which violated an emergency state order, threatened the river’s
water quality and its salmon and other rare species.
Water in California is complicated…and governing water use is
arguably even more complicated. Local water agencies are as
diverse as the communities and landscapes of California. There
are thousands of agencies across the state, both public and
private, that provide water. They range from a system serving a
single mobile home park to huge agencies serving millions of
people and businesses and thousands of acres of farmland. Some
water agencies’ governing boards are appointed by a county
board of supervisors or city council. The five-member board
that oversees the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is
appointed by the L.A. mayor and serve for five-year terms, for
example. Others are directly elected by voters. Those are the
ones you’ll see on your ballot.
Both sides of a controversial proposed Central Valley dam
hailed a Nov. 3 court ruling kicking back the project’s
environmental documents as a success. A Stanislaus County
Superior Court Judge ruled there was insufficient information
about a road relocation that is part of the proposed Del Puerto
Canyon Reservoir project, which would sit just above the town
of Patterson in the Diablo Range on the west side of the San
Joaquin Valley. More definitive information on the
proposed realignment of Del Puerto Canyon Road will have to be
provided in the Environmental Impact Report by project
proponents, the Del Puerto Water District and the San Joaquin
River Exchange Contractor Authority.
The Butte County Board of Supervisors will be unveiling,
discussing and likely approving its 2023 Infrastructure Master
Plan as compiled by its Public Works Department at its meeting
Tuesday. Each year the board goes through this process to
determine infrastructure needs. … Presentations will be
provided regarding the California drought as well as an update
on activities by Groundwater Sustainability Agencies.
Over and over again, drought launches California into a
familiar scramble to provide enough water. Cities and towns
call for conservation and brace for shortages. Growers fallow
fields and ranchers sell cows. And thousands of people discover
that they can’t squeeze another drop from their wells. So where
can California get enough water to survive the latest dry
stretch — and the next one, and the next? Can it pump more
water from the salty Pacific Ocean? Treat waste flushed down
toilets and washed down drains? Capture runoff that flows off
streets into storm drains? Tow Antarctic icebergs to Los
Angeles? The Newsom administration unveiled a roadmap
for bolstering the state water supply.
Department of the Interior Assistant Secretary for Water and
Science Tanya Trujillo today wrapped a visit to California
where she highlighted historic investments being made through
President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to boost water
infrastructure and tackle western drought. On Thursday,
Assistant Secretary Trujillo joined state and local partners to
commemorate the Water Replenishment District (WRD)’s 60 years
of using recycled water for groundwater replenishment and to
celebrate a $15.4 million investment from the Bipartisan
Infrastructure Law for WRD’s Groundwater Reliability
Improvement Program to help protect groundwater resources for 4
million people in the region.
A California tribe has renewed its lawsuit accusing the U.S.
Bureau of Reclamation of violating its sovereignty and fishing
rights in California’s Trinity River after settlement talks
with the Biden Administration collapsed.
The general manager of the West Slope’s Colorado River District
is calling out California for its meager water conservation
plan, and he is right on. Andy Mueller made his comments in a
memo to his district’s board of directors and during the
board’s meeting earlier this month, according to reporting by
The Daily Sentinel’s Dennis Webb. This was in response to an
Oct. 5 letter by officials with California water entities using
Colorado River water, which proposed conserving up to an
additional 400,000 acre-feet of water in Lake Mead
annually.
With California and the Southwest facing a historic drought,
the Supreme Court agreed Friday to review a 9th Circuit Court
decision that held the Navajo Nation has a right to take more
water from the Colorado River. The appeals court had pointed to
the 1868 treaty in which the U.S. government agreed the Navajos
would have a “permanent home” on their reservation, ruling the
treaty “necessarily implied rights” to an adequate amount of
water to live and farm. … The 3-0 ruling did not say how
much extra water the Navajos were entitled to. The sprawling
reservation previously used water from the San Juan River in
Utah, a tributary of the Colorado, but the 9th Circuit panel
said the Navajos were entitled to bring a claim for more water
from the lower part of the main river.
Nearly a decade ago, a California law required manufacturers of
plastic bags to make their bags recyclable. The state’s top cop
says this doesn’t appear to be happening. On Wednesday,
Attorney General Rob Bonta sent letters to seven plastic bag
producers that supply the bulk of California’s grocery stories,
demanding they provide proof that their bags can really be
recycled. The move is among the strictest enforcement actions
yet for a major state recycling law aimed at tackling the
scourge of plastic pollution in oceans, soils and skies.
San Francisco-based water reuse technology company Epic
Cleantec announced that a luxury residential building in San
Francisco now hosts the city’s first approved and operational
onsite greywater reuse system. The system can recycle up to
7,500 gallons of greywater per day, or 2.5 million gallons per
year. The building, Fifteen Fifty, is owned by Related
California, an affiliate of Related Companies. … The Fifteen
Fifty installation captures, filters, and disinfects the
greywater from showers, laundry, and rainwater. It then
purifies the water and reuses it for toilet flushing. Greywater
reuse can help reuse up to 95 percent of a building’s water
use. For a state like California, grappling with an extended
drought, this conservation can be key.
The City of Paso Robles is proposing to gradually phase in
water rate increases over the next five years to support water
system operating and maintenance expenses, fund the city’s
share of debt service for the Nacimiento Water Project, and
provide funding for capital improvements needed to support safe
and reliable service. All city water customers are receiving
notices in the mail to announce a public hearing that will be
held on the proposed water rate increases on Dec. 20, at 6:30
p.m., at Paso Robles City Hall.
Former U.S. Reclamation Commissioner Brenda Burman will take
over as general manager of the Central Arizona Project in the
new year, one that promises to include pivotal interstate
negotiations over conserving the Colorado River water that
supplies the CAP canal. Burman led the Bureau of Reclamation
during the Trump administration, a period in which the agency
managing Colorado River water and dams helped broker a Drought
Contingency Plan. In that plan, Arizona agreed to take
less water from the system to prevent catastrophic losses
later. Continued poor weather and overuse have since set off
new talks about conserving more in an attempt to halt Lake
Mead’s slide toward the point that the river no longer flows
past it.
Los Angeles residents, now is a great time to pull out your
lawn. With water supplies continuing to tighten, L.A. Mayor
Eric Garcetti announced Thursday that the city’s Department of
Water and Power will pay homeowners and businesses
significantly more to remove their grassy turf. Approved
applications will receive $5 per square foot, a 67% increase
from the previous $3-per-square-foot incentive. The
payment is capped at $25,000 per residential
property. Removing your lawn is just half the process; in
order to get the rebate, you must have an approved plan
for replacing the grass with drought-tolerant
plants.
For years, scientists and State officials have warned of the
need to prepare for a hotter, drier future as a result of
climate change. Earlier this year, Governor Newsom
released his water supply strategy for the State needs to adapt
to a hotter, drier future with climate change, explaining that
“DWR estimates a 10% reduction in water supply by 2040 …
consider[ing] increased temperatures and decreased runoff due
to a thirstier atmosphere, plants, and soil.” Despite
these public statements, the California Department of Water
Resources’ publicly available modeling predicts that by 2040,
climate change will increase runoff and make
California wetter.
The latest drought in California has been costly to
agriculture. Twelve-thousand people have lost their jobs and
economic losses total three billion dollars. Josue
Medellin-Azuara is one of four educators from U.C. Merced who
sized up California’s drought on agriculture for the past two
years. … California agriculture generates 50-billion
dollars in revenue and employs more than 420,000
people. The 2020-21 water years account for the second
driest two year period since records began in 1895. Little
or no water cost growers $1.3 billion in 2021 and $1.7 billion
in 2022. 752-thousand acres of farmland was fallowed and 12,000
people lost their jobs.
Rachel Becker, who covers water resource issues for the
nonprofit news website CalMatters, is the first recipient of
the Water Education Foundation’s Rita Schmidt Sudman Award for
Excellence in Water Journalism honoring outstanding work that
illuminates complicated water issues in California and the
West. Foundation Executive Director Jenn Bowles announced the
award Oct. 27 at the Foundation’s Water Summit in Sacramento.
Joining Bowles for the presentation was her predecessor,
Sudman, a former radio and television reporter who led the
Foundation for nearly 35 years.
Jim Scala needed the water. So he took it. As the third
devastating summer of drought dragged on, the Siskiyou County
rancher knew his irrigation district could be fined up to
$10,000 a day if he and his neighbors defied a state cutback
order and pumped water from the Shasta River onto their lands
east of Yreka. … While the Shasta River rebellion might have
been the most brazen, a Sacramento Bee investigation reveals
that farmers and other water users frequently ignore state
drought regulations…. The Bee’s findings reveal a state
regulatory system dramatically unprepared to address chronic
water shortages and an ecosystem collapse.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced
funding to the State of California for water infrastructure
improvements under the Biden-Harris Administration’s historic
Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL). California has been
awarded more than $609 million in capitalization grants through
the State Revolving Funds (SRFs) to supplement the state’s
annual base SRF funding of $144 million. The announcement was
made at the Keyes Community Services District (Keyes CSD), a
community water system that was recently awarded $10.4 million
in SRF loan forgiveness funding, to improve drinking water
quality and compliance at four groundwater wells serving
several small, disadvantaged communities in the area.
A controversial water quality regulation is levying a
disproportionate burden on California’s smallest growers, who
are often low-income and non-English speakers, according to
advocates. Yet, others push for an even faster adoption
timeline.
Amador County, Calif., has standing to sue a state prison for
allegedly violating the Clean Water Act by discharging
pollutants from prison labor operations into the local water
supply, a federal trial court said. The Mule Creek State Prison
uses inmate labor to conduct meat packing, coffee roasting and
packing, and textile manufacturing operations. The CWA
prohibits the discharge of pollutants into navigable waters
unless the discharge complies with delineated standards. The
county’s suit was consolidated with a suit by the California
Sportfishing Protection Alliance, and the US District Court for
the Eastern District of California previously ruled that the
…
Defenders of Wildlife applauded a decision by the U.S. Bureau
of Reclamation to request a renegotiation of a decades-old use
contract for the San Joaquin River that could spark stronger
protection for wildlife and drought management. Defenders and
the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) urged the Bureau
of Reclamation to reform its water supply contract with the San
Joaquin River Exchange Contractors Water Authority before the
conclusion of the renegotiation period. On Oct. 14, the Bureau
sent a letter to the Exchange Contractors, four days before the
deadline, with its intent to renegotiate. Though the contract
may be reviewed every five years, it has not been reviewed
since 1968.
Congressman Raul Ruiz is calling on the U.S. Department of the
Interior to uphold its commitments to the Salton Sea, including
millions in federal funds from the Inflation Reduction Act.
According to Ruiz’s office, the Inflation Reduction Act
includes $4 billion in funding specifically for water
management and conservation efforts in the Colorado River Basin
and other areas experiencing similar levels of drought. The
funding includes $12.5 million to mitigate the effect of
drought on Tribes. Last week, U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly,
an Arizona Democrat, wrote a letter calling for the federal
government to withhold money for environmental cleanup at the
Salton Sea until California agrees to use less of its
share of the Colorado River.
Running out of time and options to save water along the drying
Colorado River, federal officials said they’re considering
whether to release less water from the country’s two largest
reservoirs downstream to Arizona, California and Nevada.
Without enough snow this winter, the water level at Lake Powell
— the country’s second-largest reservoir — will drop below a
critical level by next November, according to a new report from
the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Below that point, the Glen
Canyon Dam will no longer be able to generate electricity and
… no longer be able to send water downstream at all.
Conditions on the Colorado River are worsening quicker than
expected. … Colorado is heading into its third La Niña winter
in a row, likely indicating below-average snowpack.
The City of Ripon’s new watering schedule went into effect on
Tuesday. The winter schedule calls for a once-a-week schedule,
from Nov. 1 to Feb. 28. Manteca, by contrast, still allows
watering twice a week in the winter as California enters its
fourth year of drought. Places within city limits with
addresses ending in odd numbers may water on Sundays while
those with even addresses may do so on Saturdays.
California’s water police struggle to track where water is
flowing and whether someone is taking more than they’re
supposed to. A criminal case unfolding in the San Joaquin
Valley underscores how the federal government seems to have
similar problems. Prosecutors say they uncovered a massive
water theft that went on for 23 years without anyone noticing.
… According to prosecutors, Falaschi engineered a brazen
scheme to steal $25 million worth of water from the U.S. Bureau
of Reclamation, operator of the Central Valley Project. More
specifically, Falaschi stands accused of having his underlings
siphon water from the Delta-Mendota Canal, the main conduit for
delivering federal water to farms along the west side of the
San Joaquin Valley and part of Silicon Valley. He then billed
Panoche customers for this stolen water …
Colorado River managers looking to protect critical
infrastructure at Lake Powell’s Glen Canyon Dam are seeking the
ability to release less water from Powell next year as they
work to rebalance demand on the troubled
river. … The water level is low enough that another
significantly dry year combined with a 7 million acre-foot
release could lead to the Utah reservoir falling below a
critical elevation, threatening the dam’s infrastructure and
its ability to generate hydropower. … “It’s a big deal
that they’re trying to figure out how they can change
operations in 2023 to release less than 7 million acre-feet
from Powell. That’s never been done before,” said John
Berggren, a water policy analyst with Western Resource
Advocates. … The notice also says the bureau will
consider releasing less water to the Lower Basin out of Hoover
Dam.
A California federal judge found new scientific reports warrant
proceeding with a stalled lawsuit from green groups seeking to
force the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to ban the
addition of fluoride to …
In the 1960s and early 1970s, Congress passed a series of
laws that profoundly affected Western ecosystems and human
relationships to them. The Clean Air Act, designed to reduce
air pollution, led the way in 1963, and in 1970, the National
Environmental Policy Act, sometimes called the Magna Carta of
environmental protection, created a review process for federal
projects. In 1972, the Clean Water Act established requirements
for the restoration and maintenance of waterways, and one year
later, the Endangered Species Act created protections and
required recovery plans for fish, wildlife and plants deemed
threatened or endangered. Conservation finally seemed to have a
solid legal foundation. Six decades later, that foundation
is in serious need of retrofitting.
Outdoor irrigation in San Marcos and nearby communities will be
restricted to two days a week starting Tuesday, according to
the Vallecitos Water District. The agency — which also serves
parts of Carlsbad, Escondido and Vista, as well as the Lake San
Marcos and other unincorporated communities — had limited
watering of lawns and other landscaping to three days a week
from June through October. Residents can choose the days they
would like to water. The restrictions don’t apply to farmers
with agricultural water accounts or nurseries.
Coalinga usually gets its water through an aqueduct which runs
from the San Luis Reservoir, about 70 miles northwest of the
city. But as the West’s megadrought pushes reservoir
levels to precarious new lows, the US Bureau of Reclamation
this year reduced the amount of water Coalinga could take from
the reservoir by 80%, city officials told CNN. The
restriction left Coalinga short about 600-acre feet of water
through March 2023 … With the city on track to run out
of water by mid- to late November, officials turned to the
increasingly expensive open market to make up the difference.
They finalized a purchase from a California public irrigation
district last week. The city’s price tag for life’s most
basic necessity was roughly $1.1 million dollars. … [T]he
same amount of water used to cost $114,000.
Voters in Maricopa, Pima and Pinal counties on Nov. 8 will
select new board members for the Central Arizona Water
Conservation District, which oversees how Colorado River water
is delivered through the Central Arizona Project. … The
Southwest is experiencing its worst drought in 1,200 years. On
top of that, Lake Mead sits at 1,046 feet above sea level, only
150 feet above the “dead zone” – the level where the Hoover Dam
doesn’t have enough water to produce electricity. Central
Arizona farmers already have endured steep cuts in water
deliveries, and more pain is coming. The Central Arizona Water
Conservation District election features 14 candidates competing
for five seats on the CAWCD board.
Facing another drought year and the reality that inadequate
groundwater management is leading to a race to the bottom, on
Oct. 4, the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors took a critical
step toward sustainable water management by placing a temporary
pause on issuance of new well permits. … Over the next six
months, while the pause is in place, the county will develop
science-based rules to govern groundwater well permits to
ensure impacts of pumping on neighboring streams and downstream
users are accounted for and addressed. All Sonoma County
residents have a stake in improving groundwater management.
This is the county’s chance to change course and ensure we are
better prepared for a warmer future. -Written by Sean Bothwell, executive director for
California Coastkeeper Alliance; and Don
McEnhill, executive director of Russian Riverkeeper.
A decade ago, California became the first state to
“legislatively recognize the human right to water.” Part of
that right is a guarantee to keep water affordable. That’s
proving to be a challenge in the Golden State as drought years
and utility bills stack up. Since the beginning of 2022, the
cost of water in California has shot up 40%, further straining
those who’ve struggled through a pandemic and now record
inflation to keep up with their service bills. Already, a 2021
survey found state households had amassed $1 billion in unpaid
water bills. An estimated 12% of Californians had overdue
payments —$500 on average — with the most debt
disproportionately accumulated in Black and Latinx
neighborhoods.
A local environmental group is suing the county in order to get
it to better regulate groundwater in the lower Eel River.
Friends of the Eel River filed a civil suit against Humboldt
County on Thursday in Humboldt County Superior Court “to secure
protection for the public trust values at risk when groundwater
pumping depletes surface flows in the Lower Eel River,”
according to a release from the group. … Friends of the
Eel River sent the county a letter in mid-August threatening
legal action if it failed to take the public trust doctrine
into account when deciding how to allocate water from the Eel
River.
The streaks of white on the rock ringing the nation’s largest
reservoir show how far its water levels have dropped since it
was last full. Lake Mead and nearby Lake Powell, which send
water to 40 million people in the Southwest, are at their
lowest levels since they were filled in the 1930s as part of
the Hoover Dam’s construction on the Colorado River. The
lake actually overflowed in 1983 and nearly hit capacity in
1999. Now, it’s at only 26% of its capacity — and losing
altitude monthly as a decades-long drought brought on by a
changing climate keeps it from replenishing the
supply. Yet in a crucial U.S. Senate campaign primarily
being waged a short drive away that could sway control of the
chamber, the candidates are barely mentioning the disappearing
water levels and the drought that’s causing it.
For centuries people from across the region have observed
Camarguaise bull festivities in the Rhone delta, where the
Rhone river and the Mediterranean Sea meet. But now the
tradition is under threat by rising sea levels, heat waves and
droughts which are making water sources salty and lands
infertile. At the same time, there are efforts by authorities
to preserve more land, leaving less for bulls to graze.
… During summers plagued by high temperatures and
diminished rainfall, the sea water can reach up to 20
kilometers (12 miles) into the Rhone river. During a heat wave
in August this year, the Raynaud family’s water pump in the
Petite Rhone, an offshoot of the main river, began pumping salt
water.
After about a decade of grinding its way through the federal
permitting process, Ormat, a geothermal company, was building a
new power plant in Dixie Valley to produce renewable energy.
… But soon came another legal snag. The company
halted construction in August while federal agencies meet to
discuss whether the project should move forward. The
rugged, remote corner of Nevada’s Great Basin region found
itself at the epicenter of a confrontation between some of
President Biden’s, and the nation’s, most pressing priorities:
renewable energy, wildlife conservation and Indigenous
rights…. environmentalists and tribes are pressing the
Biden administration to begin land and water protections at
Dixie Valley and elsewhere. The administration’s decision could
affect not just Ormat’s plans and this patch of Nevada but also
projects and landscapes across the country.
The Southern Nevada Water Authority wants other western water
districts to conserve resources in the face of the region’s
20-year drought, saying it’s wasteful to grow certain
water-intensive crops in parched desert landscapes. But records
show the agency is not heeding its own advice. … The
Imperial Irrigation District gets more Colorado River water
than the entirety of Nevada and Arizona combined. This is why
Nevada water officials have urged changes in how water from the
troubled river is used. … The Great Basin Ranch, as it’s
known, is owned and operated by a public agency — the Southern
Nevada Water Authority. And the only crop that is grown on that
land? Alfalfa. 8,600 tons of it last year alone.
With the nation’s two largest reservoirs continuing to
decline, federal officials announced plans Friday to revise
their current rules for dealing with Colorado River shortages
and pursue a new agreement to achieve larger reductions in
water use throughout the Southwest. The Biden
administration announcement represents a renewed push to scale
back water use along a river that has shrunk significantly in
the face of a 23-year megadrought worsened by global
warming. With water levels dropping at Lake Powell, the
Interior Department said operators of Glen Canyon Dam may need
to release less water, which would affect flows in the Grand
Canyon and accelerate the decline of Lake Mead.
An Oregon ranch is seeking $1.5 million from the state
government, claiming water regulators have effectively seized
its irrigation water supply without paying just compensation.
The Sprague River Cattle Co. in Klamath County has filed a
lawsuit arguing that its water rights would normally be worth
$1.5 million but the “value has been entirely destroyed” by
flow restrictions that render them “no longer marketable.”
According to the complaint against the State of Oregon, the
ranch property was originally part of the Klamath Indian
Reservation, which was established in 1864, setting the
priority date for the water rights.
Local agricultural groups continue to speak out against a new
proposed county ordinance regulating water use from the Paso
Robles Groundwater Basin, which will go before the SLO County
Planning Commission on Oct. 28. The new ordinance, championed
by a majority of the Board of Supervisors, would lift a
basinwide moratorium on groundwater pumping by giving all
property owners up to 25 acre-feet per year of exempted water
use. The current exemption is 5 acre-feet per year. After
months of negotiating with county officials and dissecting its
environmental impact report, SLO County farming groups remain
adamantly opposed to the ordinance, claiming that it will
exacerbate the basin’s overdraft and add “cumbersome” new
layers of regulation on agriculture.
The makeup of the Westlands Water District board will change
this election – shifting power to a coalition of growers with a
list of new actions, at the top of which appears to be ousting
longtime General Manager Tom Birmingham. “There needs to be a
change of leadership, that’s a foundational issue,” said Sarah
Woolf, a member of a Westlands farming family, who helped
organize the coalition. … Woolf applauded the district’s
recharge efforts, but noted the Sustainable Groundwater
Management Act, which requires subbasins to bring aquifers into
balance by 2040, was passed eight years ago and recharge
efforts at Westlands have languished behind other
districts.
Save the Redwoods League has secured an opportunity to purchase
a conservation easement on Mendocino County’s 3,862-acre Weger
Ranch, in a deal that would be the “cornerstone of the
Montgomery Woods Initiative.” Weger Ranch has
historically been managed with timber harvest every 12 years,
ensuring a “multi-aged, diverse forest structure” meant to
enhance wildlife and riparian habitat while continuing to allow
productivity. Save the Redwood League hopes to further
cultivate those habitats with new restrictions.
A San Diego committee has approved a series of agreements
between the city and a planned water recycling project in East
County, potentially heading off a court fight over a plant that
could help hundreds of thousands of people. The documents pave
the way for San Diego to hand over a pump station to the
Advanced Water Purification Project, and for the construction
of a pipeline so waste generated by East County can be diverted
from the city. The agreements were accepted Thursday in a 4-0
vote by the San Diego City Council’s environment
committee.
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.
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.
