Major California water plan faces ‘huge mess’ as deadline looms

October 27, 2026 By Kurtis Alexander Leave a Comment

At the urging of Gov. Gavin Newsom, California water officials have been working with a group of agencies for years on a far-reaching plan to protect the rivers that nourish the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.

The Newsom administration is seeking an arrangement in which urban and agricultural suppliers across the state agree to take less water from California rivers, and help restore river habitat, in exchange for more flexibility using water and meeting regulations. The goal is to halt the ecological slide of the delta, a sprawling estuary and water supply hub for nearly 30 million people.

But even as the governor has made finalizing what’s called the Bay Delta Plan a priority before he leaves office in January, the state’s negotiations with the water agencies appear to have come up short. The State Water Resources Control Board is scheduled to adopt the plan this week, yet water providers up and down the state are taking issue with it, many saying it isn’t the collaborative deal they were promised. The Trump administration is also protesting.

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The division, after nearly a decade of private discussions, is not just a setback for the parties involved. It leaves the fate of the Bay Delta Plan and, importantly, the future of delta water management, in disarray.

Without appropriate action, the watery 1,100-square-mile region between the Bay Area and Sacramento will face a worsening crisis of dwindling freshwater, degraded habitat, rising pollution and perishing wildlife, notably salmon runs. Ultimately, delta water exports to some of California’s biggest cities and farms are at stake.

“This is a huge mess,” said Jennifer Pierre, general manager for the State Water Contractors, a group of water agencies that receive state water exports and a participant in the Bay Delta Plan negotiations. “It didn’t need to be this way. It’s very unfortunate that this is where we are now (with the plan). We’ve been working on it for a long time.”

Water suppliers, including such Bay Area giants as the East Bay Municipal Utility District and Santa Clara Valley Water District, cite a range of concerns. The common complaint is that state regulators aren’t giving the agencies enough operational leeway, undercutting the suppliers’ hope of managing rivers without rigid rules and with enough latitude to adjust as conditions change.

Click here to read the full article in the SF Chronicle

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Vital Central Valley flood control levees are poorly maintained, state watchdog finds

October 23, 2026 By Rachel Becker Leave a Comment

With California bracing for a wet winter, the state auditor warns that nearly a third of local agencies maintaining vital flood control levees in parts of the Central Valley have been performing “unacceptable routine maintenance” — some of them, for years.

The audit says the state’s Department of Water Resources “has not followed state law requiring it to take over the maintenance of levees” when local agencies fail to do so — and urged it to start.

But state water managers at the department pushed back, saying the audit “portrays a fundamental lack of understanding of the complexities of flood management” and draws too direct a link between routine maintenance and flood risk.

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Taking over maintenance can cost tens of millions of dollars up front “that must be weighed against other investments that may yield greater risk-reduction benefits,” the department said in a letter responding to the audit.

Others question whether the state is up to the job. “They can’t even take care of what they have now, and they want them to take over everybody else?” said Tom Engler with MBK Engineers, who works as the district engineer for a dozen Northern California reclamation districts responsible for levee systems.

The audit warns that inadequate maintenance increases the risk that these aging, earthen embankments fail, endangering more than a quarter-million people, 133,000 buildings worth nearly $40 billion dollars, as well as hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland. Historically underserved communities and socially vulnerable people are especially at risk.

Is the state up to the job?

California oversees 1,600 miles of levees and other flood control structures on the main stems and certain tributaries of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, as part of the State Plan of Flood Control.

But that responsibility is layered, built on federal requirements and topped by state oversight. Sandwiched in between are the levee and reclamation districts, private landowners and local governments that conduct maintenance under agreements with the state.

Some note that, in fact, the state already manages some of the levee systems in Butte and Sutter counties that are on the auditor’s list of local agencies performing unacceptable levels of maintenance.

“Tell me how that makes sense,” said Engler. “[I]t would take a lot more people, manpower and equipment to get it all done.”

Department of Water Resources spokesman Jason Ince said this highlights the audit’s overreliance on maintenance inspections to assess risk. According to Ince, of the three levee systems under the responsibility of DWR’s Sutter Maintenance Yard on the list:

  • One standalone levee within the floodplain of the Feather River channel “is entirely surrounded by water when the Sutter Bypass experiences high flows,” and doesn’t function as a critical flood control structure.
  • Another includes a segment likely made redundant by the 1968 construction of the Thermalito Afterbay near Lake Oroville. The state began petitioning the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to de-authorize it in 1984, Ince said.
  • Problems with the third, along the Wadsworth Canal, stem from its original construction and require working through environmental regulations protecting the threatened giant garter snake, California’s official state snake.

The department told the state auditor that levee risk depends on the threat, the levee’s performance, and what it protects. It also disputes the auditor’s count of people and properties at risk because it “misses critical context on other flood infrastructure in the region and that location’s hydrology,” Ince said.

“Maintenance contributes to performance,” the department said in its letter, “but it is not the only or always the most effective action for reducing risk.”

Engler, whose districts include some on the list, had mixed reactions to the audit, which he said he was still reviewing.

“It has some things that I would definitely agree with, and it has a lot of things that I just go, ‘Who did they talk to about that? That’s totally off base,’” he said.

He echoed state water managers that most threatening issues for levees aren’t maintenance deficiencies, but long-term structural problems dating back to their construction generations ago.

Click here to read the full article in CalMatters

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Gov Newsom Signs CA Disaster Preparedness Bill – But Protects Water Agencies From Liability

October 5, 2026 By Katy Grimes 1 Comment

The governor just conflated wildfire safety for Californians with indemnity for water agencies

California Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 1153 into law on September 29, 2026. Why is this notable, you ask?

SB 1153 by Senator Anna Caballero (D-Merced), “requires all urban retail water suppliers that serve a high or very-high fire hazard severity zone to include incident-specific response procedures for wildfires as part of their disaster preparedness plans beginning on January 1, 2028,” according to the Governor’s Department of Finance.

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“This bill also clarifies that urban retail water suppliers are not responsible for maintaining water supply for wildfire defense.”

Boom. The governor just conflated wildfire safety for Californians with indemnity for water agencies, because no one can sue water agencies if there isn’t any water to fight fires with.

Remember that the Santa Ynez Reservoir was empty when fire fighters tried to fight the Palisades fires with nearby water? Today, Palisades residents have many lawsuits against the LADWP.

From the “You can’t make this sh*t up” file, the 117-million-gallon Santa Ynez Reservoir, the main local storage for Pacific Palisades, was offline and empty when the fire started on January 7, 2025. Los Angeles Department of Water and Power had drained it in early 2024 after a large tear was found in its floating cover, which officials said risked contaminating the drinking-water supply. State drinking-water rules required the shutdown. Repair contracting and work were slow: a relatively small contract was awarded in mid-2024, and work did not start until after the fire. Emergency repairs brought it back online in June 2025; further leaks later forced another drain, and a full liner-and-cover replacement was finished in September 2026. LADWP began refilling it again October 1st, aiming to return it to service by the end of the year.

The ostensible “California disaster-preparedness bill” by Democrat Senator Anna Caballero (D-Merced), passed both Houses of the California Legislature unanimously: 40–0 in the Senate and 77–0 in the Assembly.

It was sponsored by the Association of California Water Agencies, who have an interest in indemnity, and came after lawsuits over dry hydrants in the January 2025 Palisades fire, and Eaton fire claims, against the City of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

Here is the mind-blowing caveat: The bill adds Government Code section 8607.3 and states that nothing, including any other law, imposes a duty on public water systems, including wholesale systems, to design, construct, or maintain a water system for wildfire defense or suppression.

It also provides that:

  • Failure of an urban retail water supplier to implement or comply with the new incident-specific procedures is not a “substantial cause” of wildfire damages.
  • Inability of any public water system to maintain water supply or pressure during a wildfire is not a “substantial cause” of those damages.
  • Spread of wildfire is not an inherent risk of the deliberate design, construction, or maintenance of a public water system.

Former LA Mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt, offered his analysis to this sham bill:

Buried in this bill Gavin signed is a big “fuck you” to the Palisades. We are suing LADWP for draining our reservoir (which was built for fire protection), and leaving us with dry hydrants. This bill now says LADWP doesn’t have to provide water for firefighting AT ALL. And when their negligence leaves us with no water to fight fire, Gavin is prohibiting any accountability for the water utility for leaving people to die, precluding fire victims from recovering losses from a catastrophic wildfire. At EVERY turn, this scumbag finds ways to block fire victims from being made whole by incompetent, negligent, and corrupt bureaucrats and big utility providers when they routinely destroy entire towns.

Click here to read the full article in the California Globe

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Trump is winning his water tug-of-war with Newsom

January 30, 2026 By Camille von Kaenel 1 Comment

President Donald Trump and Gov. Gavin Newsom are in a race to capture as much water as possible in California — possibly even at each other’s expense.

SACRAMENTO, California — President Donald Trump and California Gov. Gavin Newsom are so in sync on California water that they’re in a race to capture as much of it as possible — even at each other’s expense.

Trump and Newsom’s relative alignment on water issues has been good news all around for farmers and cities that draw from both sides of the state’s main water hub: the federally run Central Valley Project, and the aptly named State Water Project, which is state-run.

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Water deliveries have ticked up, mostly as a result of back-to-back wet years but also as a result of loosened environmental rules on both sides, much to the chagrin of environmental groups concerned about the collapse of endangered fish populations in the sensitive Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

But the feds have been steadily squeezing out more water over the course of the past year — to the point where state customers are getting worried that their own supplies could be in jeopardy.

“It’s on my radar,” said Jennifer Pierre, general manager of the State Water Contractors, which represents the 27 water agencies and 27 million people getting state supplies.

Karla Nemeth, California’s director of water resources, has already played out the scenario in which the state would have to reduce its own pumping to keep enough water flowing through the Delta for endangered fish if the feds took a lot of water: “We talk in real time about whether or not that has the potential to happen and how to avoid that happening,” she said.

“It gets tricky,” she added. “That’s where we have an actual harm to the State Water Project.”

In pre-Trump times, the state and federal sides of the projects operated in tandem, obeying the same pumping limits meant to protect endangered fish. But federal and state water managers have been following diverging rules since Trump’s first administration, when the Interior Department loosened its protections and the state sued. (Newsom has since ordered his own regulators to maximize water supplies, too.)

The situation worsened a year ago when federal officials ordered large releases from two Central Valley dams against established operating norms in an attempt to send water south for the Los Angeles fires, raising the prospect of chaos in the usually closely coordinated joint system of pumps, reservoirs and canals across the state.

Last month saw more divergence: Both state and feds gave their water managers more leeway over pumping, but the state still has to follow stricter environmental limits. The federal government’s more lenient rules allowed it to export roughly 24,000 more acre-feet of water than the state government during the first major storm of the water year in December, according to both state and federal water officials.

Click here to read the full article in Politico

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Colorado River talks hit crunch time. What’s at stake for California water?

November 12, 2025 By Rachel Becker 1 Comment

In summary -Western states in the Colorado River basin are racing a federal deadline to hash out the beginnings of an agreement governing the overtapped river. As the clock ticks down, two questions loom large: Just how real is this deadline, and what does it mean for California?

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The clock is ticking down to a federal deadline Tuesday for California and six other Western states to reach the broad strokes of a deal portioning out supplies from the parched Colorado River. 

Officials at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the federal stewards for the river under the Department of the Interior, have threatened to impose their own plan if the states can’t agree how to manage the river after 2026, when the river’s current rulebook expires. 

Dire projections that another dry year could send the basin’s major reservoirs plummeting to alarmingly low levels have ramped up the urgency, and the tensions. 

But, after two years of fraught negotiations, the states remain at an impasse. Those in the river’s lower basin — California, Arizona, and Nevada — are clashing with Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico upstream. A key point of contention is how much each basin must scale back their use of the overtapped river as climate change further squeezes supplies. 

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“We’ve been in a holding pattern, and we need to land this plane by Tuesday,” J.B. Hamby, California’s chief negotiator as chairman of the Colorado River Board of California, told CalMatters. 

California’s dependence on the Colorado River raises the stakes. The state takes more than half of the power generated at Lake Mead’s Hoover Dam, and more water from the main stem than any other in the basin. Half a million acres of alfalfa, winter vegetables and other crops in the Imperial Valley all rely on the Colorado River, which also supplies urban Southern California via the Metropolitan Water District. 

But California has also been relatively impervious to shortages on the river, with senior water rights long seen as bulletproof. Now, the questions hanging over the last days of negotiations are — how real is the threat of missing the deadline? And what exactly would the consequences be for California?

Blown deadlines on the Colorado River

For decades, federal officials have threatened to intervene if states in the Colorado River basin fail to reach agreement. The threat — and the inevitable lawsuits water suppliers fear would follow — have motivated major deals that now govern the river’s operations. 

Click here to read the full article in CalMatters

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Newsom issues order to ‘maximize’ stormwater capture

February 3, 2025 By Ian James 4 Comments

Environmental critics say mandate echoes Trump’s, which they call an ‘attack’ on fish and the ecosystem.

By Ian James

Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed an executive order that he says is intended to “maximize” the capture of water during winter storms.

Newsom issued the order Friday, saying it will make it easier to divert and store water as storms bring rain and snow in the coming days.

“It is more important than ever that we maximize every opportunity to recharge our groundwater supplies,” Newsom said. “As we anticipate rain and snow in Northern California, we are also preparing to use every last drop to boost our water supply for communities and farms throughout the state.”

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Environmental and fishing groups, however, denounced Newsom’s order as being alarmingly similar to federal directives from President Trump, saying the governor’s approach threatens to harm vulnerable fish species and the deteriorating ecosystem of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.

“This order reads as though it was written by President Trump,” said Barry Nelson, a policy representative for the fishing group Golden State Salmon Assn.

He said Newsom’s measure appears to mimic an executive order that Trump announced five days earlier in which he directed federal agencies to “maximize” water deliveries in California and “override” state policies if necessary.

“This reads as almost a carbon copy of that order,” Nelson said. “We call on the governor to stand up to protect California’s environment, not to assist in federal attacks.”

Representatives of water suppliers supported Newsom’s order.

The measures “empower California water managers to blunt the destructive impact of flooding while quickly diverting excess water to recharge groundwater supplies,” said Cathy Green, president of the Assn. of California Water Agencies.

Green said the order underlines the need to modernize “our permitting process to better reflect the state’s ability to remain flexible in the face of climate change.”

Newsom announced the order as the first of three atmospheric river storms reached the state, bringing rain and snow after an unusually dry January.

Newsom ordered the state Department of Water Resources to “maximize diversions of excess flows” during winter storms to store more water in reservoirs such as San Luis Reservoir, located south of the Delta near Los Banos. The order also calls for state agencies to “identify any obstacles that would hinder efforts to maximize diversions” and to promptly report on any “statutory or regulatory barriers that should be considered for suspension.”

State officials said Newsom’s order will make it easier for local agencies to capture more storm runoff to recharge groundwater, which has been depleted by overpumping in many areas. They said the order builds on previous directives by the governor in 2023 that helped increase the amount of water used to replenish groundwater.

By capturing more stormwater, Newsom said, “we are creating a literal rainy day fund to help us recover from a multiyear drought and prepare for our hotter, drier future.” His administration’s water supply strategy calls for preparing for a projected 10% decrease in the state’s supplies by 2040 because of climate change.

Trump has criticized California for what he calls “disastrous” policies and water “mismanagement.”

Conservation advocates said Newsom’s order reveals a similar approach to the president’s directives that they fear could lead to weaker protections for fish and clean water in the Delta and San Francisco Bay.

“This is a capitulation by Gov. Newsom to Donald Trump’s lawlessness and disdain for California, Californians and our environment,” said Jon Rosenfield, science director for the group San Francisco Baykeeper.

While Trump’s order sought to eviscerate federal environmental protections and undermine state law, Rosenfield said, Newsom similarly chose to “waive state laws that require protection of the Bay’s clean water and fish. As a result, we can expect the Bay’s fish and wildlife to continue to spiral towards oblivion.”

California’s two main water delivery systems in the Delta, the State Water Project and the Central Valley Project, deliver water to farmlands and about 30 million people.

Pumping has contributed to the ecological degradation of the Delta, where the fish species that are listed as threatened or endangered include steelhead trout, two types of Chinook salmon, longfin smelt, Delta smelt and green sturgeon.

Because of declining salmon populations, fisheries authorities have shut down the salmon fishing season on the California coast for the last two years, leaving commercial fishermen and charter boat captains out of work.

Click here to read the full article in the LA Times

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California’s top environmental official: federal and state water managers are working together closely, for now

February 2, 2025 By Ashley Zavala 1 Comment

SACRAMENTO, Calif. —After President Donald Trump posted on social media earlier this week that the United States Military came into California and under emergency powers “turned on the water,” California’s top environmental official, Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot is speaking out.

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Crowfoot and the state’s Department of Water Resources said the President may have been referring to the completion of routine maintenance at the Jones Pumping Plant in Tracy, which is part of the Central Valley water project.

However, the federal government has yet to explain exactly what action it took. The Bureau of Reclamation, which oversees federal water infrastructure, has yet to respond to KCRA 3’s repeated requests for comment.

Below, Crowfoot weighs in on the claim, the future of the relationship between the state and federal water systems and the potential impacts of a federal funding freeze.

Have you gotten any direct clarity from the administration about what the President meant when he said he “turned the water on” earlier this week?

It has been a bit of a headscratcher to understand just what their talking about from the White House. We are ready to collaborate, whether that’s on wildfire or water, but I have to admit, there’s been a significant amount of confusion as it relates to messages coming from D.C.

I know some Democratic elected officials have asked and we continue to ask about the use of the military to turn on the pumps in Tracy. Would the Army Corps of Engineers be involved in a project like that as the White House suggested earlier this week?

Important to clarify, the Army Corps of Engineers, which is in the Department of Defense, are our civil engineers primarily focused on our flood protection system, so they operate a lot of reservoirs, protecting a lot of downriver communities from flood.

They, however, do not control the infrastructure in the Delta that pumps or exports water. That’s a separate federal agency that’s the Bureau of Reclamation that’s not associated with our Department of Defense.

When people hear the United States military is involved in something, some might interpret that as the use of force to get the state to do something. Has the administration made any kind of threat to the state on the state water project or is there any kind of negotiation happening between the Trump administration and Gov. Newsom’s administration on these water issues?

It’s been quite a frenetic week with a lot of directives coming out of Washington D.C. so I can say it remains unclear for us how that’s being described. I can tell you generally we work really closely with the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers, week to week throughout a winter like this winter. We’re working really closely together with those partners and that work has continued.

I think it remains to be seen how these directives from Washington D.C. could impact that, but our focus remains to protect people from the floods when storms come this winter and maximize water supplies for the incoming dry season all while incorporating environmental safeguards that we hold in California.

With the federal funding freeze executive order—which I know is on hold right now because a judge blocked it—is there anything in the Natural Resources that you’re flagging right now in the state that could be impacted by that executive order?

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Trump takes step to overhaul Delta water deliveries to farms, cities

January 23, 2025 By Alastair Bland 2 Comments

President Donald Trump lost no time Monday in advancing his agenda for California’s water supply with a “presidential action” intended to send more Delta water south to millions of Southern Californians and San Joaquin Valley farms.

The memo calls on the Secretary of Commerce and the Secretary of the Interior to develop a new plan within 90 days “to route more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to other parts of the state for use by the people there who desperately need a reliable water supply.” 

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Entitled “Putting People Over Fish: Stopping Radical Environmentalism to Provide Water to Southern California,” Trump’s order calls for reinstating 2019 regulations drafted by his first administration.

At stake are the rules that guide operation of the federal Central Valley Project and State Water Project, the two systems that deliver water from Northern California rivers to San Joaquin Valley farmers, Southern California residents and other water users in the southern half of the state.

Because the two systems harm salmon and other protected fish, the regulations have been highly contentious and debated among federal and state officials, environmentalists, farm groups, tribes and scientists for decades. 

Trump apparently is asking his agencies to override the latest version, years in the making, that the Biden administration, with the support of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration, announced in December.

Karla Nemeth, director of the state Department of Water Resources, said returning to the earlier Trump rules “has the potential to harm Central Valley farms and Southern California communities that depend upon water delivered from the Delta, and it will do nothing to improve current water supplies in the Los Angeles basin.”

She said the rules from the Biden and Newsom administrations are the product of a three-year, labor-intensive process “to balance the needs of tens of millions of Californians, businesses, and agriculture while protecting the environment.”

Click here to read the full article in CalMatters

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How years of corruption and mismanagement led to LA running out of water in the middle of the Palisades wildfire

January 10, 2025 By Staff 1 Comment

As Los Angeles firefighters faced down the most destructive blaze in the city’s history, they ran out of water.

“The hydrants are down,” a firefighter said over the radio, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Another chipped in: “Water supply just dropped.”

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Fire crews were forced to watch as entire blocks of the Pacific Palisades — one of the most scenic and celeb-packed neighborhoods in LA — were incinerated in a matter of hours late Tuesday and early Wednesday.

“There’s no water in the fire hydrants,” Rick Caruso, who owns the Palisades Village mall in the heart of the devastated area, fumed to local media. “The firefighters are there, and there’s nothing they can do — we’ve got neighborhoods burning, homes burning, and businesses burning. … It should never happen.”

The water shortage was the result of years of mismanagement of LA’s water system — including a federal indictment of a leader and high-profile resignations — as well as major operational problems that drained reserves too quickly.

The Pacific Palisades fire, whipped up by hurricane-force Santa Ana winds, destroyed more than 1,000 homes and businesses. By Wednesday night, it had spread to 16,000 acres (25 square miles), bigger than the island of Manhattan in New York — and crews had not managed to contain any of it.

LA residents voiced their outrage over the conditions that allowed the fire — and two other blazes in Los Angeles County — to rage out of control. Five people had died as of Wednesday night, several others were injured and at least 70,000 were told to evacuate their homes across the LA area.

Adding insult, Democratic Mayor Karen Bass was 7,400 miles away in Africa, and months earlier she had approved an $18 million cut to the fire department.

“RESIGN! WHY ARE YOU IN GHANA?!,” one person commented on an X post by Bass’ office giving an update on the wildfires.

Click here to read the full article in the NY Post

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With negligible rain in 8 months, Southern California swings toward drought

January 6, 2025 By Grace Toohey 1 Comment

California is entering the fourth month of what is typically the rainy season, but in the Southland, the landscape is beginning to show signs of drought.

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The last time Los Angeles recorded rainfall over a tenth of an inch — the threshold that officials typically consider helpful for thirsty plants and the reduction of wildfire risk — was May 5, when downtown received just 0.13 inches of rain.

“It’s safe to say this is [one of] the top ten driest starts to our rainy season on record,” said Ryan Kittell, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Oxnard. “Basically, all the plants are as dry as they normally are in October.”

California’s wet season can run from October to April, although most of the precipitation occurs from December to February.

Current forecasts show little hope that a needed storm could develop in the next few weeks, and the Southern California landscape — ripe for wildfire and never far from chronic water shortages — is paying the price.

Much of the region, including the majority of Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Riverside, Orange and San Diego counties, has fallen into moderate drought conditions, according to a U.S. Drought Monitor map released this week. The last time the Southland saw similarly dry conditions was in early 2023, as the state was exiting a punishing, years-long drought thanks to an exceptional kickoff to the wet season.

Prior to the recent drought report, conditions in Southern California were considered to be “abnormally dry” for the last few weeks. Much of the Central Valley remains in that category.

“Above-normal temperatures and below-normal precipitation resulted in expansion of drought in Arizona, California and Nevada,” the new report said.

The latest long-range forecasts show Southern California remaining in a below-average rainfall pattern for the entire month of January, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center. And drier conditions appear to be in store statewide beginning next week through mid-January, marking a shift for Northern California in particular, where the season started with bouts of heavy rain and snow.

“Southern California remains dry,” said Michael Anderson, state climatologist for the Department of Water Resources. “We’re being watchful right now. The [snowpack] numbers in the Central and Southern Sierra aren’t where we want them, and certainly the outlooks are not favoring much growth here in January.”

That lack of rain is likely to coincide next week with another offshore wind event in Southern California, Kittell said, which could be potentially damaging.

Click here to read that the full article in the LA Times

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