William A. Bennett (1955-2024) was a top-notch
scientist/biologist who spent much of his career improving our
understanding of the ecology and management of native and
non-native fishes in the SF Estuary (SFE) especially delta
smelt and striped bass. Those of us who had the good
fortune to work with him knew Bill as an insightful biologist
who worked hard to retain his objectivity on controversial fish
management issues in the SFE.
Today, Rep. Harder called out Sacramento politicians and the
California Department of Water Resources for trying to ship the
Central Valley’s water south while causing “significant and
unavoidable” impacts on Delta communities. In a benefit-cost
analysis released yesterday, the state admits the cost of the
project has grown to over $20 billion and would devastate Delta
communities with $167 million in damages. The project would be
a disaster for Delta communities by destroying farmland and
worsening air quality. “This new analysis acknowledges what
we’ve known all along: the Delta Tunnel is meant to benefit
Beverly Hills and leave Delta communities out to dry,” said
Rep. Harder. “This $20 billion boondoggle project wouldn’t
create a single new gallon of water for anyone. I’m sick and
tired of politicians in Sacramento ignoring our Valley voices
and I will do everything in my power to stop them from stealing
our water.”
Gov. Spencer Cox said Thursday he is open to alternatives to
bring more Colorado River water to Southern Utah, including a
suggestion from the Utah Senate president to help California
fund desalination facilities in exchange for part of its water
share. … Earlier in the week, a report by Fox 13 News
and the Colorado River Collaborative journalism
initiative said that Utah Senate President J. Stuart Adams,
R-Layton, has put forward the idea of providing part of
the funds for California to construct desalination facilities
to remove salt and brine from Pacific Ocean water to convert it
to safe drinking water. In exchange, Utah would get a portion
of California’s share of the river’s water.
Jade Stevens stands at the edge of a snowy cliff and takes in
the jaw-dropping panorama of the Sierra. Peaks reaching more
than a mile high form the backdrop to Bear Valley, a
kaleidoscope of green pastures mixed with ponderosa pines,
firs, cedars and oak trees. Stevens, 34, is well aware that
some of her fellow Black Americans can’t picture themselves in
places like this. Camping, hiking, mountain biking, snow
sports, venturing to locales with wild animals in their names —
those are things white people do. As co-founder of the 40 Acre
Conservation League, California’s first Black-led land
conservancy, she’s determined to change that perception. Darryl
Lucien snowshoes near Lake Putt. The nonprofit recently secured
$3 million in funding from the state Wildlife Conservation
Board and the nonprofit Sierra Nevada Conservancy to purchase
650 acres of a former logging forest north of Lake Tahoe.
Almost the entire staff of a 43-year-old Bay Area environmental
group has resigned over a dispute about the publication of a
book and management of the nonprofit that runs it. Six out of
seven members of the staff of the Bay Institute, which does
research and advocacy work to protect the San Francisco Bay and
delta, announced their resignation last week to the board of
Bay.org, the umbrella organization that runs the Bay Institute
and also runs the Aquarium of the Bay in San Francisco and
several other entities. According to a May 16, statement
by the group that resigned, which included four senior staff
and two junior staff members, the action was prompted in part
by the decision by Bay.org CEO and President George Jacob to
publish a book authored by the staff before they had a chance
to finalize their own revisions and before it received a peer
review.
A nasty storm is brewing over the meteorological heart of Los
Angeles. A decision by government forecasters to relocate
downtown L.A.’s official weather observation station from USC
to Dodger Stadium is generating extreme heat and wind gusts
from some local climate experts. They insist the move will cast
fog on local efforts to document the effects of climate change.
“It contaminates the record,” said Jan Null, a veteran
California meteorologist who runs the Golden Gate Weather
Service. “It changes the ballgame.” The station — a curious
array of poles, metal boxes and shiny cylinders that weather
wonks know affectionately as “KCQT” — is slated to move from
USC to the Los Angeles Fire Department’s training center on the
south side of the stadium in Elysian Park on Monday. The last
time the key monitoring station moved was 25 years ago.
California’s weather was made for demagogues. For as long as
records have been kept, the state has typically experienced a
series of dry years followed by a series of wet years. The
weather lines up conveniently with election cycles. A few years
of drought will prompt an excitable politician to declare that
projections clearly show the end of the world is upon us unless
California takes immediate action. Depending on the
circumstances, that action can be the election of that
politician to office, or re-election to office, or an
oppressive law that takes effect after the perpetrators are out
of office, or voter approval of borrowed money for an
overpriced project that might be a state-of-the-art boondoggle.
In 2018, as Gov. Jerry Brown prepared to head into the sunset
of his colorful political career, he signed two new laws that
imposed permanent drought-emergency restrictions on the people
of California. -Written by Susan Shelley, columnist with the LA Daily
News.
Reading strong local journalism is tied to greater support for
funding dams, sewers and other basic infrastructure vital to
climate resilience, according to new research from UCLA and
Duke University. The study, published this month in the journal
Political Behavior, found that reading fictionalized samples of
news coverage with specific local details about infrastructure
maintenance requirements led to as much as 10% more electoral
support for infrastructure spending compared to reading
bare-bones reporting. Just a few extra paragraphs of context in
the mock news stories not only increased support for spending,
but also increased voters’ willingness to hold politicians
accountable for infrastructure neglect by voting them out of
office.
Governor Gavin Newsom’s May Revision of the state budget plan
released on May 10, aims to address a “sizable deficit” of
roughly $56 billion into 2026. The multi-billion-dollar deficit
is in stark contrast to the $97.5 billion budget surplus that
Newsom projected in the 2022-23 state budget. Several budget
cuts, amounting to over $30 billion were announced, including a
$500 million cut to water storage projects. These discretionary
spending cuts delay certain funding sources for water-storage
projects such as the planned Sites Reservoir north of
Sacramento. While funding awarded under Proposition 1 — a
voter-approved 2014 ballot initiative to support various water
projects — will not be affected by the budget crisis, the
California Farm Bureau explained in a press release that $500
million in discretionary funding to support the project would
be cut.
Colorado lawmakers gave the thumbs-up to 10 water measures this
year that will bring millions of dollars in new funding to help
protect streams, bring oversight to construction activities in
wetlands and rivers, make commercial rainwater harvesting
easier and support efforts to restore the clarity of Grand
Lake. Money for water conservation, planning and projects was a
big winner, with some $50 million approved, including $20
million to purchase the Shoshone water rights on the Colorado
River. Sen. Dylan Roberts, D-Frisco, chair of the Senate
Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee, expressed
gratitude for the legislature’s focus on water issues and for
funding the Shoshone purchase.
During a surprise appearance at the 2024 ACWA Spring Conference
& Expo in Sacramento, Gov. Gavin Newsom addressed climate
change adaptation while expressing strong support for local
control of water resources. Newsom joins a long list of
California governors who have spoken at ACWA conferences
throughout the association’s history, including past Gov. Jerry
Brown. Gov. Newsom’s address highlighted several areas of
interest to ACWA member agencies. Water has remained a leading
issue during Newsom’s second term in office, and he made that
abundantly clear during his 15-minute address. California
Secretary for Natural Resources Wade Crowfoot introduced Newsom
during Crowfoot’s May 8 keynote speech, which also focused on
the critical role of California water management in an era
defined by climate extremes.
The U.S. government is dedicating $60 million over the next few
years to projects along the Rio Grande in southern New Mexico
and West Texas to make the river more resilient in the face of
climate change and growing demands. The funding announced
Friday by U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland marks the first
disbursement from the Inflation Reduction Act for a basin
outside of the Colorado River system. While pressures on the
Colorado River have dominated headlines, Haaland and others
acknowledged that other communities in the West — from Native
American reservations to growing cities and agricultural
strongholds — are experiencing the effects of unprecedented
drought.
What sparked your passion for exploring California’s outdoors
and how did you find yourself drawn to the world of
fly-fishing? Being born in British Columbia and growing up in
California, the forested coastal woodland environment is in my
DNA. My family lived in the foothills of Los Angeles and nature
has always been a place where I find strength, peace, and
wonder. It recharges me. When I was growing up in LA, the air
quality was terrible and there seemed to be a concrete jungle
all around me. The riding and hiking trails around my home were
my refuge. My mom also had a big influence on how I see nature.
She appreciated and observed the natural world so closely, and
I first saw nature through her eyes – so full of curiosity and
wonder.
The Colorado River provides water to more than 40 million
people. The Basin includes 30 federally recognized Indian
tribes and seven states (Colorado, Wyoming, California,
Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada). Tribal nations in Colorado,
New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming have been left out of key
agreements involving the Colorado River for well over a century
now. In April, the Upper Colorado River Commission – that’s an
agency at the nexus of many Colorado River discussions in the
Upper Basin – voted to back a new proposed agreement that would
make regular meetings with tribes be mandatory for the first
time in the group’s 76-year history. Mira Barney is a
Diné (Navajo) woman working at the National Wildlife
Federation. She is also pursuing a graduate certificate in
Environmental Justice at CU Boulder, and works as Program
Assistance with Indigenous Women’s Leadership Network.
Flooding is a natural phenomenon that we humans keep assuming
can be controlled with enough effort and engineering. But
this simply is not possible, as floods across the globe
repeatedly demonstrate. People continue to be surprised when
landscapes become waterscapes. This brings loss of life and
enormous costs of repairing damaged infrastructure and
constructing bigger levees and dams for flood control. As Tim
Palmer says in his new book (2024) local to global
failures of current flood management practices: “The age
of denial is over. The time has come to take a different
path (p 140)”.
A team of researchers has been hard at work in the Rocky
Mountains to solve a mystery. Snow is vanishing into thin air.
Now, for the first time, a new study explains how much is
getting lost, and when, exactly, it’s disappearing. Their
findings have to do with snow sublimation, a process that
happens when snow evaporates before it has a chance to melt.
Perhaps most critical in the new findings is the fact that most
snow evaporation happen s in the spring, after snow totals have
reached their peak. This could help water managers around the
West know when to make changes to the amount of water they take
from rivers and reservoirs.
Fresno State students can now learn more about one of
California’s most precious resources – water. There’s a new
educational offering at Fresno State. The interdisciplinary
program is designed to teach students all about water systems
in California. Political Science Professor Thomas Holyoke says
it’s different than other minors. “This would require students
to take a variety of classes from different areas of the
university,” Holyoke said. That includes classes in geology,
geography, agriculture, political science and beyond.
The Association of California Water Agencies (ACWA) today
presented its 2024 Excellence in Water Leadership Award to
Placer County Water Agency (PCWA) General Manager Andy Fecko
for his leadership and commitment to water resource issues,
especially in reducing fuel load in our National Forest system
lands. At PCWA, Fecko manages several billion dollars of
infrastructure that must be operational at all times, including
during and after wildfires that have become more common and
destructive in the past decade. In response to the devastating
Kings Fire in 2014, Fecko led the region’s creation of the
French Meadows Forest Restoration Project – a public/private
forest health partnership. The project consists of 30,000 acres
of ecological thinning within the Tahoe National Forest. This
is a first-of-its-kind project that established the formula for
success in California forest management, which is based on
collaboration.
Over the past decade, a signature California program that
charges polluters for their planet-heating emissions has
generated billions of dollars for state initiatives, and Gov.
Gavin Newsom said Wednesday that these revenues are effectively
helping to reduce pollution and combat climate change.
… The program has also supported projects intended to
reduce wildfire risk by thinning vegetation and restoring
degraded forests. … Another issue that
has generated criticism is the fact that about 65% of
the annual cap-and-trade revenues must be dedicated each year
to several programs, with 25% going to high-speed rail and the
remainder split between affordable housing, transit and rail,
low-carbon transit operations, and safe drinking water.
Subsidence has reared its head again as a key factor cited by
state Water Resources Control Board staff for recommending that
the Kaweah groundwater subbasin be placed on probation – the
first step toward possible state takeover of groundwater
pumping. The recommendation was contained in a draft report
released May 6, which set Nov. 5 for Kaweah’s hearing before
the Water Board. Subsidence was listed as a major factor in
similar staff reports for the Tulare Lake and Tule subbasins.
Tulare Lake was, indeed, placed on probation by the Water Board
April 16 and the Tule subbasin comes before the board Sept. 17.
The Kaweah report identified additional challenges
for water managers in the subbasin, which covers the northern
half of Tulare County’s valley portion into the eastern fringes
of Kings County.