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If you drive Highway 99 through California’s Central Valley, you’ll pass through the heart of farm country, where the state’s bounty blooms with hundreds of crops – everything from peaches to pistachios, from tangerines to tomatoes. You’ll also pass through dozens of communities, large and small, whose water systems are tainted by a newly regulated contaminant, 1,2,3-trichloropropane (TCP), which for decades was used in agricultural fumigants injected into farmland across the Valley.

A California congressman is questioning the degree to which state officials want to draw down Lake Oroville this winter, but the officials say it’s necessary to accommodate continued work on the dam. Rep. Doug LaMalfa, R-Calif., whose district includes the Oroville area, argues it would be unnecessary for officials to drain the lake to as low as 640 feet of elevation by Dec. 31, as one Department of Water Resources scenario outlines.

More than 6 million Southern Californian households could pay $3 more a month to help cover the costs of Gov. Jerry Brown’s controversial plan to bore two huge tunnels under the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. But that’s cheaper than the $5 a month that households in the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California’s service area were expected to pay under projections released four years ago, Jeffrey Kightlinger, the water district’s general manager, said Thursday.

The number of retired public employees in the CalPERS system with annual pensions of $100,000 or more grew 63 percent since 2012, according to a report released Wednesday. Riverside County, Long Beach, Anaheim, Torrance and Riverside made the list of the 25 public agencies with the most pensioners receiving six-figure retirement pay, Transparent California reported. Almost 23,000 CalPERS retirees collected pensions of at least $100,000 in 2016, the government watchdog group found. The rise in $100,000 pensions underscores the importance of making public employee pension data public, Robert Fellner, Transparent California’s research director, said in a news release.

At a hearing last month, Bernhardt testified that he stopped lobbying for Westlands on Nov. 18, 2016, at a time when he was serving on the Trump transition team. But since then, Bernhardt had helped draft two major California water bills and wrote a proposed executive order for Trump on water issues – all at Westland’s behest. Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting’s stories on the issue were based on a trove of Bernhardt’s emails first obtained by the Planning and Conservation League, an environmental group.