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California’s water supply challenges increasingly pose risks not only to the state’s economy, but to national food production, interstate commerce, international trade, and national economic stability and security. While seawater desalination is a proven technology used worldwide to expand reliable water supplies, large-scale projects along California’s coast have faced significant regulatory barriers at the state level.

In the report, Creating Opportunities to Bring Seawater Desalination to Coastal Federal Lands in California, authors Edward Ring, Director of Water and Energy Policy at California Policy Center, and Tim Paone, Partner at Cox, Castle & Nicholson LLP, outline practical actions the federal government can take using existing authority or targeted legislative action to enable the development of seawater desalination facilities on federal coastal lands in California.

A National City woman is sharing her story after a nearly $4,000 door-to-door water filter purchase led to a dispute — and a refund — with help from NBC 7 and Telemundo 20 Responds. Olegaria Herrera said a salesperson knocked on her door and described a water filtration system that immediately caught her interest.

“Truth is, I never saw the product,” Herrera said in Spanish. “He described it and how it would work, and it interested me.”

An agreement announced late last week in San Diego could be the start of a new kind of water solution for Las Vegas and other cities in the desert Southwest.

A desalination plant in San Diego County is working, but it’s only running at about half-capacity because the process is expensive. The “memorandum of understanding” signed last week would start the exploration of an interstate water transfer and exchange pilot program.

With desert cities like Phoenix and Tucson bracing for their allotments of Colorado River water to be slashed dramatically, San Diego County’s water agency could for the first time sell some of its water to other states by drawing on its ample supplies from the nation’s largest desalination plant.

The San Diego County Water Authority’s board unanimously approved an initial agreement last week to consider selling some of its water to Arizona and Nevada, where cities that depend on the over-tapped Colorado River are expected to face substantial cuts in water supplies.

The Colorado River may be running dry, but the Pacific Ocean is not — and on Thursday, San Diego took a first formal step to turn that into a business opportunity.

The San Diego County Water Authority voted to sign a memorandum of understanding with federal, Arizona and Nevada water managers to explore selling desalinated Pacific Ocean water across state lines. The pilot, if formalized, would turn ultra-expensive water and underused capacity at the Western Hemisphere’s largest desalination plant, in Carlsbad, into a resource for fast-growing neighboring states as they absorb potentially-economy-shattering cuts on the Colorado River.