Rejecting the pleas of California officials worried about water conservation, the state Supreme Court this week left intact a lower court ruling that makes it tougher for cities and water districts to impose punishing higher rates on water wasters. In its weekly closed-door conference, the Supreme Court refused to soften the statewide impact of an
Oil companies will probably have to stop injecting their wastewater into 10 Central Valley aquifers that the state has let them use for years, in the latest fallout from a simmering dispute over whether California has adequately protected its groundwater from contamination. The aquifers lie at the heart of a decades-old bureaucratic snafu whose discovery
The San Diego County Water Authority won two sweeping legal victories Wednesday in a mammoth rate case against Southern California’s largest water wholesaler. If the tentative rulings in the years-long disputes and, local water users could eventually see significant relief from soaring water bills. The Water Authority is owed $188.3 million plus interest from Metropolitan
San Diego’s $3.5 billion plan to fight the drought by recycling sewage into drinking water is forcing state regulators to rewrite their water recycling rule book. State rules call for purified sewer water to be pumped into large natural basins under ground before it can enter the local water supply, partly because that’s how it’s
The tension between California farm interests and the state’s urban water users ratcheted up Tuesday, as a consortium of mostly urban water districts filed a complaint alleging Delta farmers are stealing water. The group of 27 agencies, including the massive Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, said farmers in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta put water
Water managers switched on the first of three temporary pumps being installed along a 62-mile stretch of the Delta-Mendota Canal. The pumps will push water drained from San Luis Reservoir to upstream water districts facing water shortages. “This is unusual and very difficult to fathom,” said Rick Gilmore, the general manager of the Byron Bethany
The chances that California will begin clawing its way out of the drought with a wet winter got a bump Thursday with a federal report showing an El Niño weather pattern continuing to strengthen in the Pacific. The U.S. Climate Prediction Center< reported that telltale signs of El Niño — which include warming sea surface temperatures
Masumoto Family Farm sits on the Kings River watershed and has historically drawn its irrigation water from two sources: “ditch water” that originates as snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada mountain range upstream, and water pumped from the ground. Despite relying on the Kings River for a “significant amount” of the water they use to irrigate,
Through flushing toilets and running faucets, the city of Modesto produces millions of gallons of wastewater a day, just a stone’s throw from some of the driest agricultural areas in the state. In a few years, that wastewater — treated and disinfected — could flow to farms in the Del Puerto Water District, in what
Earlier this month, with his East Bay community facing the prospect of losing its only source of water, Edwin Pattison appeared before residents at a town hall meeting and lamented the strain of California’s growing population on dwindling water supplies. “When you increase a population significantly,” said Pattison, general manager of the Mountain House Community