The majority of bills churning through this legislative session have to pass the Assembly and Senate by midnight Saturday, Aug. 31, or they die. And there are a slew of water bills racing toward that deadline.
While some may make it to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk, no one can say with certainty whether he will sign them, veto them, or ignore them.
Gov. Gavin Newsom is making moves to keep control of California’s water — and protect the state’s endangered species from a potential second Trump administration.
With federal and state officials in the midst of renegotiating how they manage a 400-mile system of reservoirs, pumps and canals that moves water out of the San Joaquin-Sacramento River Delta to deliver it to taps and farms across the state, California water officials are taking steps to adopt guidelines from the state’s own wildlife officials rather than federal ones.
California’s plan to build the state’s first new major reservoir in decades is advancing after a court rejected a challenge by environmental groups.
In the ruling last week, a Yolo County Superior Court judge sided against environmental advocates who had argued Sites Reservoir would harm the Sacramento River’s ecosystem and threaten imperiled fish species.
California continues to make waves on climate. In some cases literally.
Over the weekend, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed dozens of bills dealing with renewable energy, landscape conservation and water use — and vetoed many others.
Up against an Oct. 14 deadline and with more than 700 bills on his desk heading into the weekend, Gov. Gavin Newsom decided the fate of bills — a lot of bills.
The governor’s office put out a big batch of nearly 150 actions on Saturday, a second one on Sunday of about 130 and a third one late Sunday night of about 190 more. That unusual volume for a weekend means he still has some 260 bills to go.
For climate advocates, the growing state deficit unveiled in the revised 2023-24 state budget offers some bad news, some good news and a great deal of uncertainty.
The bad news in the budget presented Friday morning by Gov. Gavin Newsom is that, despite lobbying efforts and environmentalists pitching at least two alternative proposals, the $6 billion in cuts to climate spending that Newsom proposed in January are still included.
As California confronts another extended drought and its impacts, it is more obvious than ever that the state has failed to address its water supply and management challenges for far too long. The immediate fallout of the unprecedented situation we find ourselves in is frightening: local residents with wells running dry; urban water rationing and critical shortages; massive fallowing of some of the nation’s most productive agricultural land and the resulting impacts on food prices; and significant uncertainty about our ability to adapt to the future.
As the state experiences its second-driest year on record and Gov. Gavin Newsom declares a statewide drought emergency, some Californians may be wondering: How will this shortage impact the Sacramento region and what does it mean for our everyday lives and water supply?
The declaration comes after a summer of record-high temperatures alongside plummeting water levels in reservoirs. With his announcement, Newsom cited these factors as more reason to “redouble our efforts” toward water conservation.
A national environmental organization on Monday threatened to sue Gov. Gavin Newsom to halt all new permits for gas and oil wells in the state, saying the governor has failed to protect Californians and the environment from hazards and pollutants released by the state’s billion-dollar petroleum industry.
Water is central to nearly everything we value in California. Healthy communities, economies, farms, ecosystems and cultural traditions depend on steady supplies of safe water. Those values are increasingly at risk as California confronts more extreme droughts and floods, rising temperatures, overdrafted groundwater basins, aging infrastructure and other challenges magnified by climate change.
