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Deshmukh took over last month as general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, a sprawling, aging system that pipes water hundreds of miles to 19 million people in Los Angeles, Orange County, the Inland Empire and San Diego.

Roughly 20 percent of Met’s water comes from the dwindling Colorado River, over which negotiators from seven Western states are haggling in a race to strike a new deal before water-sharing rules expire at the end of the year.

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.