I’ll be joining Tim Quinn, former executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies; and Tracy Quinn, Director, California Urban Water Policy, Healthy People & Thriving Communities Program at the NRDC (and also a board of of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California) in a webinar to talk about collaboration and conflict around …
Continue reading ‘Water Wars – What are they Good For? Webinar, March 15’ »
I was delighted to see my friend Tanya Trujillo’s name on the incoming Biden Administration Department of the Interior transition team list released yesterday. Tanya’s a New Mexican, former chief counsel to the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission, and current member of the commission. She served as a legislative aide to New Mexico Sen. Jeff …
There’s some fascinating tension around a proposed wastewater reclamation collaboration in Southern California. The project, if it goes forward, would provide some 150 million gallons per day (~170,000 acre feet per year) of treated effluent. Water now being discharged into the ocean would instead be available for aquifer recharge within Southern California. There are a …
Continue reading ‘Tensions around a wastewater reclamation collaboration in Southern California’ »
I’m puzzling over the San Diego County Water Authority’s pursuit of a new Colorado River pipeline. I’ve been puzzling for a while, given a that it would be really expensive and that a really big pipe (aqueduct) already exists to carry the water to San Diego. My puzzlement was goosed by a report that surfaced …
Continue reading ‘San Diego’s puzzling pursuit of a big new pipeline to the Colorado River’ »
New US Department of Agriculture report out this week shows the dollar value per acre of irrigated California cropland continuing to rise: Above is a quick plot of the data for six of the seven states included in the Colorado River Basin. THIS IS NOT COLORADO RIVER BASIN IRRIGATED ACREAGE. Large areas of many of …
Brett Walton had a great bit of business in yesterday’s Circle of Blue story on 2019’s remarkable drop in Colorado River Lower Basin water use: The last time water consumption from the river was that low was in 1986, the year after an enormous canal in Arizona opened that allowed the state to lay claim …
Continue reading ‘March 1985: when everything on the Colorado River changed’ »
Jeff Kightlinger, who as head of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California since February 2006 has played a major role in Colorado River governance, announced today that he’ll be retiring at the end of the year.
A friend sent me an illuminating table that does a nice job of adding perspective to something I’ve written about several times here – California’s stunning reduction in its use of Colorado River water. Data in thousands of acre feet.
Last year was, for Southern California water management, perfectly wet. By that I mean a good snowpack in the Sierra Nevada and the Colorado River Basin. I’m stealing a wonderful phrase here from a new paper by the University of Arizona’s Connie Woodhouse (the full paper’s behind a paywall): “A Long View of Southern California …
Continue reading ‘The risk of Southern California falling into “perfect drought”’ »
While Colorado River water management eyes were focused elsewhere this year – on the big snowpack up north, or the chaos success of the Drought Contingency Plan – California has quietly achieved a remarkable milestone. Its use of Colorado River water in 2019 will be 3.858 million acre feet. The last time it was below …
Continue reading ‘California’s 2019 use of Colorado River water lowest since 1950’ »