You are now in California and the U.S. Media Coverage category.

California doesn’t have a water scarcity problem. It has a distribution problem, according to Nícola Ulibarrí, whose new research is reshaping how policymakers think about one of the state’s most pressing challenges.

In a report commissioned by UC Berkeley’s Possibility Lab, Ulibarrí argues that California’s existing water infrastructure already collects enough water to sustain all state residents. The real crisis, says the UC Irvine associate professor of urban planning and public policy, is that thousands of Californians remain disconnected from that abundant supply.

The mountains of the western United States are looking remarkably brown this winter. The region is facing one of its worst snow droughts in decades, and while the snowsport industry is already feeling the effects, the impacts this summer could be far worse.

Although much of the region received plenty of precipitation in fall and early winter, most of it fell as rain due to unusually warm temperatures. Then, a lengthy dry spell took hold in January, which certainly didn’t help. The lack of snow isn’t just bad news for skiers and snowboarders—it’s also a major concern for the West’s water supply, which is far more reliant on a healthy snowpack than rainfall.

According to a Feb. 4 press release, Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., has introduced two bills aimed at addressing long-term water supply challenges in California and across the American West.

Padilla, a member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, introduced the Making Our Communities Resilient through Enhancing Water for Agriculture, Technology, the Environment, and Residences Act, known as the MORE WATER Act, and the Growing Resilient Operations from Water Savings and Municipal-Agricultural Reciprocally Beneficial Transactions Act, known as the GROW SMART Act.

Federal water managers and the local agencies they serve usually gather every January in Reno, Nevada, to swap wish lists, from higher dams to new reservoirs to changes to endangered species rules. This year, at the Mid-Pacific Water Users Conference, the focus was more basic: whether the federal water system has enough people left to keep it running.

“We’re left with so many holes, there’s no way we can do business the way we used to,” Adam Nickels, acting regional director for the Bureau of Reclamation’s California region, told the gathering last week.