A strong, early-season winter storm will dump as much as 3 feet of snow in the high-elevation parts of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains this week, which could eventually supplement the water levels of many reservoirs in the area.
Newsweek reached out to the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) by email for comment.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has vetoed legislation that would have required data centers to report how much water they use.
New data centers have been rapidly proliferating in California and other western states as the rise of artificial intelligence and growing investments in cloud computing drive a construction boom. The centers, full of equipment, generate lots of heat and can use large quantities of water to cool their servers and interiors. Many companies don’t reveal how much they use.
California is experiencing its first widespread soaking of the season, which will also include the heaviest Sierra snowfall so far this fall. This storm system is currently diving southward along the California coast, with rain from the Central Valley into parts of Southern California, and snow falling in the Sierra.
There’s even a severe thunderstorm watch until 6 a.m. PDT for parts of Southern California, including L.A., Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties. According to the National Weather Service, this is the first severe thunderstorm watch issued for the L.A. Basin in over 17 years, since Jan. 27, 2008.
The city of Antioch has opened its new brackish water desalination plant, a $116 million facility designed to improve the reliability of local drinking water supplies by treating water from the San Joaquin River.
The project was celebrated in a ceremony attended by representatives from the State Water Resources Control Board, the Department of Water Resources (DWR), the Contra Costa Water District, the city of Brentwood, and other local and state officials.
California Governor Gavin Newsom has vetoed legislation requiring data centers to disclose their water consumption, even as he champions efforts to address the state’s water scarcity challenges.
Assembly Bill 93 would have mandated that data center operators provide water suppliers with estimates of expected usage before obtaining business licenses, followed by annual reports of actual consumption when renewing permits. However, in an October 11 letter to the California State Assembly, Newsom declined to sign the bill.
The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is a massive, unresponsive, and insular bureaucracy that lacks transparency and accountability to the ultimate end users, the Ratepayers. This includes homeowners, renters (through pass through rent increases), and commercial and industrial establishments. Rather, as a wholesaler to 26 agencies and another 251 subagencies, MWD and its directors are pressured to limit its rate increase so that these public facing entities do not have to raise rates to a level that reflects the true cost of water, fearing pushback from Ratepayers. MWD and its politically appointed board accommodate these agencies by dumping the increased costs onto property owners by levying a Special Property Tax that is buried in our Secured Property Tax Bill that only comes once a year. This may be in violation of Prop 13.
A recent CityWatch article, Metropolitan Water District’s Billion Dollar Property Tax, indicated that MWD was proposing to increase this tax to $180 for a million dollar home (0.0018% of assessed value), a more than fivefold increase from the 2024 level of $35 (0.0035%).
Arizona and California’s chief water negotiators are coming for Colorado in a blistering public pressure campaign aimed at getting upper basin states to capitulate.
In an interview with the L.A. Times, the negotiator for California accused the upper basin states of Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico of clinging to “their most aggressive and rigid dreamland legal positions.”
Appellate court justices heard arguments Tuesday in the highly watched dispute over whether the state exceeded its authority when it placed the Tulare Lake subbasin on probation last year for failing to come up with an adequate plan to protect the region’s groundwater.
Or, whether a Kings County judge erred by refusing to dismiss the case and issuing a preliminary injunction that has held probationary sanctions at bay all this time. A ruling by the 5th District Court of Appeal is expected “soon,” which could mean two months or longer.
A bill with unanimous support is basically a unicorn in today’s divided politics, so California just saw the return of a water-planning unicorn in the form of SB 72 that Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law Oct. 1.
Prior to being signed, the bill — effectively an update to the California Water Plan that enforces the need for quantifiable water needs reports and water goals — passed through the state’s legislature without any “no” votes.
The results are in. California’s 446 urban water suppliers have conducted their supply and demand assessments, and 95.5% say they will have ample supplies to meet projected demand in the coming year, even if it is dry. The remaining 4.5% who project some level of shortage have identified response actions to address and mitigate the potential shortage.
The Annual Shortage Report is a yearly stress test for water suppliers and serves as an important tool for successful and effective local water shortage contingency planning, ensuring water supply reliability and drought resiliency. This year’s Annual Shortage Reports cover projections for the 12 months from July 1, 2025, to June 30, 2026. The Department of Water Resources prepares a report summarizing the findings by September 30 and submits it to the State Water Resources Control Board.
