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OPINION: Address State’s Drinking Water Crisis While Protecting Farming

/in , /by /Bakersfield.comby Nicholas Ortiz and Beatris Sanders

Several years ago, California farmers, including many in the Valley, began receiving threatening letters from the State Water Resources Control Board. The demand? Provide clean drinking water to local residents with nitrate contaminated private wells or face punitive legal action. The logic? Years of fertilizer application by farmers led to excess nitrates in the drinking water supply for some residents in California’s agricultural regions, including our Tulare Lake Basin.

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OPINION: More Water Storage Doesn’t Mean Build More Dams

/in , /by /San Francisco Chronicle

The California Water Commission has been meeting this week to discuss how to invest $2.7 billion in water storage funds approved by voters under Proposition 1. The commission — and all Californians — should bear in mind that water storage doesn’t necessarily mean a dam with water behind it. The commission’s charge is not to fund the biggest new dam but to fund projects with the greatest net benefits to California cities, farms and wildlife.

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Santa Clara Valley Water District Delays $650 Million Vote On Brown’s Delta Tunnels Project

/in , /by /The Mercury News (San Jose)by Paul Rogers

After a five-hour packed public hearing, the board of Silicon Valley’s largest water provider late Wednesday night put off a closely watched vote until next week on whether to provide up to $650 million to support Gov. Jerry Brown’s $17 billion plan to build two giant tunnels under the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to make it easier to move water south. Although it appeared there might be four votes on the seven-member Santa Clara Valley Water District board in favor of the project, which the Brown administration calls WaterFix, board members were divided and continued the issue until Tuesday at 9:30 a.m.

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Pressure Mounts To Solve California’s Toxic Farmland Drainage Problem

/in , /by /Water Deeply (New York)by Matt Weiser

Many Americans know the name Kesterson as the California site where thousands of birds and fish were discovered with gruesome deformities in 1983, a result of exposure to selenium-poisoned farm runoff. Thirty-five years later, it is one of the oldest unresolved water problems in the state. Selenium, a naturally occurring element, is essential to people and animals alike in small doses. But selenium continues pouring off many San Joaquin Valley farms in larger quantities, which can be toxic.

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To Manage California’s Groundwater, Think More About Surface Water

/in , /by /Water Deeply (New York)by Ian Evans

California’s 2014 legislation, the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) was significant in that it was the state’s first major groundwater regulation. But Michael Kiparsky the founding director of the Wheeler Water Institute at the University of California Berkeley School of Law, says that it was also significant in another way. “It breaks with what had been decades of a legal fiction that groundwater and surface water were not part of a single hydrologic system,” he says. While rivers, lakes and other surface waters are often thought of – and regulated – separately from the groundwater below, the two are connected.

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Arizona Utility Tries To End Multi-State Colorado River Feud

/in , /by /AP News (New York)by Dan Elliot

Arizona’s largest water provider tried Tuesday to defuse a multi-state dispute over the Colorado River, saying it regretted the belligerent-sounding words it used to describe its management strategy for the critical, over-used waterway. The Central Arizona Project, which provides water to about 5 million people, pledged to be more cooperative with other river users and promised “to have a more respectful and transparent dialogue in the future.” The river serves 40 million people in seven U.S. states and Mexico, and consumption is tightly regulated and closely monitored.

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Coast Line: ‘Stage 1’ Water Restrictions Begin Tuesday In Santa Cruz

/in , /by /Santa Cruz Sentinel News

In an effort to maintain water storage in the city’s only drinking water reservoir, Loch Lomond, the Santa Cruz City Council adopted a Stage 1 Water Shortage Alert, which takes effect Tuesday. Below normal rainfall and runoff, coupled with water supply needs for fish habitat, have reduced the amount of water available for city of Santa Cruz water customers. During water shortages, customers are restricted from landscape watering between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. from using a hose without a shut-off nozzle, washing down hard or paved surfaces and filling swimming pools.

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Where Water Is Scarce, Communities Turn To Reusing Wastewater

/in , /by /Yale Environment 360 (New Haven, Conn.)by Jacques Leslie

Then California’s Orange County Water District began distributing drinking water derived from sewage in the mid-1970s, it acted out of simple need. The aquifer it relied on for most of its drinking water had been so overdrawn that saltwater from the nearby Pacific Ocean was seeping into it, and allocation limits prevented increases in exports from the Colorado River and Sierra Nevada Mountains, sources of the rest of the district’s water. Orange County was then a bastion of political conservatism, not the sort of place associated with environmental innovation, but water scarcity is a powerful motivator.

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LA County Officials Considering Property Tax For Stormwater Measures

/in , /by /Los Angeles Timeby Nina Agrawal

At Los Amigos Park in Santa Monica, 11-year-old Pony League baseball players wearing Padres and Dodgers uniforms huddled with their coaches after a recent game. Standing atop a grassy area next to the baseball diamond, many may not have been aware of what lay underneath: a 53,000-gallon storage tank for stormwater runoff. Built in 2017, the project was designed to divert some 550,000 gallons of water from a nearby storm drain each year, reducing the pollution that flows into Santa Monica Bay.

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Resurrecting The Delta For Desirable Fishes

/in , /by /California Water Blogby Peter Moyle, Carson Jeffres, John Durand

The Delta is described in many ways. When extolling the Delta as a tourist destination, it is described as a place of bucolic beauty; islands of productive farmland are threaded by meandering channels of sparkling water, a place to boat, fish, view wildlife, and grow cherries and pears. But when its future is discussed, especially in relation to big water projects, this heavenly place is often portrayed as being on its way to an aquatic Hellscape. The Sacramento Bee recently (April 8, 2008) published a reasonable editorial advocating a holistic approach to solving Delta problems.

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