The information in this newsletter is being distributed among allied associations that form the California Alliance for Golf (CAG), the organization that speaks with one voice in the Capitol regarding legislative and regulatory issues of statewide scope.
WATER NEWS
THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE IN-BETWEEN
Among the many challenges golf faces in California, water is the one common to all. It matters not whether a facility is publicly owned, privately owned, large, small, in a wet region, in a dry region, along the coast, inland, urban, rural, or somewhere in between, access to it and the price of that access is an issue now and seemingly forever. One might say of it what Lincoln famously said of the relationship between public opinion and the capacity of governments to get things done. With it all things are possible; without it nothing is possible. Dare we suggest, a genuine existential challenge.
So, with the legislature on break until August 18, when it reconvenes for a 3-week sprint to see which of the bills that have made it this far in the 2025 legislative session make it to the Governor’s desk for his signature or veto, these dog days of summer might be a good time to take a snapshot of where things stand regarding water in California.
And the good news is that there actually is some good news to go along with the usual challenges. Given just how resilient the California golf community has been in reducing its water footprint in coping with declining access in combination with accelerating prices, there really is no “bad news” that golf cannot deal with – just challenges that we have long demonstrated we can overcome.
Before getting down to the “good news,” most of which deals with increased focus on supply, it’s important to emphasize that the California golf community has long made clear not just through its rhetoric but more importantly by its real-world performance that it is committed to reducing its water footprint consistently over time. Golf will always classify conservation as a key element of the California supply quotient, but it will at the same time maintain a belief shared by the state’s water wholesalers, retailers, and public utilities that if it is the only focus of the state’s supply quotient, California won’t be able to sustain its current population, let alone allow for some measure of the growth necessary to remain the world’s 4th largest economy with all the benefits that status provides. California will need to continue to invest as well in those supply solutions better suited to 21st Century realities than those that fashioned the solutions that worked well in the 20th Century – e.g., nonpotable reuse, potable reuse, storm water capture, aquifer replenishment, and where appropriate, desalination.
The Good
Fritz Durst, chairperson of the Sites Project Authority Board of Directors, recently announced that construction on what may be the last of California’s great above-surface reservoirs is set to commence in 2026. Sites is designed to be an "off-stream" reservoir. During wet years, when water flows in the Sacramento River run high, water can be pumped to the lake in the Antelope Valley west of Maxwell. Because of the higher-than-normal rainfall that fell over the North State from November 2024 to early April 2025, about 550,000 acre-feet of water could have been shipped to the reservoir. The lake could hold up to 1.5 million acre feet of water, which is about one-third the size of Lake Shasta.
Continuing this trend toward focus on supply, SB 72 (Caballero; D-Merced) appears on its way to an easy approval in the Assembly when the legislature heads back into session August 18, and for reasons we have shared in previous updates, we are optimistic that Governor Newsom will sign it into law. For the first time in California history SB 72 would set a water supply target adding 9 million-acre-feet of additional supply by 2050 to replace the amount estimated to be lost to the state by aridification. Although not nearly as fierce as was their opposition to the budget legerdemain Governor Newsom pulled off in making “reforms” to CEQA a condition of signing this year’s budget, many environmental organizations have expressed heartburn – another example of this Governor and an increasing number of legislators’ willingness to act counter to their wishes and the common political practice not so long ago.
There is a lesson in this for everyone, including golf. The exigencies of any moment, this moment’s exigencies being the critical need for more housing and water access, will always trump whatever set of political dynamics, entitlements, and/or precedents that one may have thought were sacred. Golf takes certain longstanding tax and land use policies for granted at great peril.
Those who live in the City of Los Angeles, Ventura County, and wide swaths of the San Gabriel Valley recall that coming off the three driest years on record in spring 2022 and seeing their State Water Project allocation having been cut to zero, they were put on an immediate 35% water diet by their wholesale agency the Southern California Metropolitan Water District (MWD). The reason: Unlike other customers of MWD that had access to imports from the Colorado Basin in addition to the State Water Project, they had access only to the State Water Project. On July 8, the MWD Board voted to authorize an additional $54 million to complete design and begin construction of the Sepulveda Feeder Pump Stations Project to push Colorado River water and stored supplies from Diamond Valley Lake, Southern California’s largest reservoir, and provide those single-source communities access to another source of imports. It is Metropolitan’s first project using a “progressive” design-build method recently authorized by the state legislature to allow for the expedited completion of these kinds of public interest construction projects. This very much below the radar decision is reflective of two political trends that are discernible to those who track these things: 1) An increasing focus on the importance of water supply/access, and 2) an increasing move to remove “impediments” to construction, whether of large infrastructure projects or housing tracts. Of course, one person’s “impediment” is another person’s bulwark against violations of public interest, and for golf, a menu of conflicting interests resembling a double-edged sword.
In the war of all against all that too often has characterized the negotiations among the seven (7) states of the Colorado Compact as they race toward a 2026 deadline to come to agreement on how to divvy up the spoils of a river allocated at 17 million-acre-feet-per year that experts estimate can only deliver somewhere between 10 million and 12 million-acre-feet-per year, finally a ray of hope – or more accurately the first inkling of a consensus on some kind of formula for sharing the pain.
It’s a simple concept called “natural flow.” Instead of negotiating future cuts across the entire seven-state region, the process would rely on recent water records — the amount of water flowing from the Colorado River headwaters in the Upper Basin to a point in Arizona marking the boundary of the Lower Basin states. The concept may be simple, but its execution requires complex calculations that depend upon evolving research, because the theory — the premise of sharing the river based on how much water would travel downstream without dams or diversions or other human interventions — is in reality a complex mathematical problem that intersects with ancillary technical issues. However, the United States Bureau of Reclamation has years of data about flows from 29 points along the River Basin that can be used as a starting point. And this is the first time that one can say with any confidence that the seven (7) states may have arrived at a “starting point” for a negotiation the final result of which promises to be impactful, more so for Arizonans than anyone else, as much of the “impact” in California will be more on farmers than urban dwellers.
A possible “starting point” is “good news” to be sure, but this subject (Colorado Basin) consumes most of the “bad news” section that follows as well.
Governor Newsom may have jettisoned his desire to hold the state budget hostage to fast tracking the construction of the Delta Conveyance Project by obviating much of the “normal order” required of such ambitious and impactful projects, but we would concur with those who openly suggest that 2026 represents the best moment in years (45 of them if you’re counting) to approve and then commence construction of a “Project” that has gone by various names and involved various different iterations, all with the same goal of providing an alternative way of diverting water in the Sacramento Delta in case of disruption due to natural disaster – a disruption that would cut off millions of Californians from their main source of imported supplies for months if not years. The reasons for that optimism are many, and we will be sure to share them as part of our reporting on the policy debates as they unfold as part of the “normal order” expected to ramp up in very short order. For now, suffice it to suggest that a combination of exigent circumstances and shifting political winds militate in favor of some form of a “Delta Conveyance” project/plan after years of trying by every California governor since the 1st Jerry Brown Administration.
And no “good news” about California water would be complete with mentioning that at least for the moment, the state’s reservoirs are filled and the Sierra snowpack’s capacity to produce the runoff that provides so much of the state’s imported water needs is proving much more resilient against the privations of aridification than the Colorado Rockies. So far, anyway.
The Bad
If you understand that the 7-9 million-acre-feet of additional supply that is the “target” established in the bill (SB 72) that every major water supplier, every water wholesaler, every water coalition, and so many major business groups are so strongly supporting in 2025 is aimed at merely replacing the amount of water expected to be lost to California by 2050, you understand the “bad” that is at the heart of every discussion about water in California. The “good” is all about dealing with, mitigating, or overcoming the “bad” through conservation and various other modes of increasing supply. It’s never about finding some trove of undiscovered bounty or expecting Mother Nature to reverse course. It's only about managing the challenges posed by this underlying reality, one that archeologists and other students of antiquity tell us led to the demise of more civilizations than pandemics, earthquakes, and wars.
With that said, there is still more to be said about the relationship between a warming/drying climate and the capacity of the natural phenomena we rely upon to produce water for storage and use during the long dry spells that characterize the weather on the west side of the Great Divide.
We have long understood that our side of the Divide is subject to periods of prolonged drought like the one that started around 2000 and continues to this day notwithstanding some very wet years interspersed among them. “Megadrought” we call it. We have come to understand that a warming/drying climate produces more of the same precipitation as rain than snow, which lessens the runoff that is so easy to capture and store for future use. We have even come to understand the relationship between earlier springs and a hastened runoff that is harder to capture in the same way that the later springs with their more leisurely runoffs did for so many decades.
What we are now only beginning to come to terms with is just how much a confluence of factors in addition to those known factors are conspiring to reduce the flows from the Rocky snowpacks more and faster than we first thought. The culprits: A halving of the runoff produced by the snowpack and the increasing amount of dust created by a warmer/dryer Arizona that is carried by the prevailing winds to the Rocky Mountains, which in turn captures solar radiation and speeds up the spring thaw.
This year’s roughly 100% of normal Rocky Mountain snowfall yielded no more than 45% of normal runoff by the end of June, with many predicting that it was likely to fall further. The hydrology of California’s Sierra Nevada and the Upper Colorado River watershed are radically different. In California, nearly all precipitation occurs in the first half of the water year, primarily during the winter. It builds as snowpack, and then it melts off; by that time, no more precipitation is expected for the remainder of the water year. On the Colorado River roughly 50% of the water year precipitation falls in the winter. What happens is that spring precipitation ends up playing a bigger factor in runoff efficiency than it does in California, which results in much less runoff efficiency in the Colorado River Basin, an inefficiency exacerbated by increasingly warm and dry springs.
Dust from northern Arizona takes flight on windstorms in early spring and drops in layers on Rocky Mountain snowpack. As gradual melting uncovers each layer, the dust’s relative darkness absorbs more solar radiation, speeding the thaw, accelerating the snowmelt by weeks to months. The sooner the snow melts, the sooner plants green up and start using it, reducing what reaches the river. Add in dry soils that increasingly act as a sponge when drought years pile up, and the mountain grows ever thirstier. This exacerbates ongoing reductions in snowpack as warming air causes some of what used to fall as snow to instead fall as rain, especially lower on the mountain.
Taken together, this explains why the two enormous reservoirs that store all that Colorado River runoff (Lakes Mead and Powell) are at 31 and 32 percent of capacity as of July 1, while the rest of the reservoirs in the far west are filled to the brim. It’s a vicious feedback loop that many suggest could lead to both Lake Mead and Lake Powell reaching “dead pool” levels if the next couple of precipitation years are paltry, albeit there are those of equal credibility who counsel against panic – vigilance, yes, but not panic.
Thus, while it is certainly a “good” thing that the water agencies in the Compact states might be aligning around a “natural flow” formula capable of bridging their various interests and divides to come up with an allocation plan before the end of 2026, the bottom line is reminiscent of that odd fellow who ran for New York Mayor a few years ago on the single issue of rents being too “d . . ” high. There just isn’t enough water to go around in the Colorado Basin anymore.
Add to that harsh reality that President Trump has proposed the elimination of the Bureau of Reclamation’s WaterSMART program that has supplied more than $3.2 billion in direct grants since 2010, and it doesn’t get any easier for the Far West. WaterSMART grants have funded more than 2,350 projects addressing water conservation, habitat restoration, water recycling, and drought preparedness. The golf community in the Coachella Valley knows it well, as it has been the primary source for golf rebate/incentive programs in that golf-packed desert golf mecca and a source for so many of that region’s other more universally applicable rebate/incentive programs. On the other hand, those cuts were not in the “One Big Beautiful Bill” just passed by Congress; so, there is ample opportunity to prevent the President’s proposal from being incorporated into the federal budget as finally adopted by Congress.
And let’s not forget that virtually everywhere in the state the price of water continues to go up faster than the Consumer Price Index (CPI) without any prospect for relief, some faster than others and none faster than the City of San Diego, where the City Council’s Environmental Committee has moved the following set of proposed price increases forward to the full Council for final consideration at a September 30 hearing for an envisaged January 1 implementation:
- 14.7% in January 2026
- 14.5% in January 2027
- 11.5% in January 2028
- 11% in January 2029
Compounded, these hikes would result in a total increase of just over 62%. Given that these would be atop roughly 9% year-over-year increases for the period of 2021-2025, we’re talking real money here. The councilmembers may want to strap themselves in for a long session come September 30 if nothing changes between now and then. And the City’s golf courses that buy water from San Diego Public Utilities may want to pay close attention.
The In-Between
We live in an age that prefers dialectical clash to compromise – an age that seems to have little place for the in-between. But when it comes to water, “in-between” is the best descriptor of golf’s position – a “one water” vision that preaches the need to keep the accelerator down on conservation while pursuing an eclectic mix of sources of supply in addition to conservation – storm water capture, aquifer replenishment, reuse (potable and nonpotable), desalination, and even the occasional above-surface reservoir. Per that vision, both “good” and “bad” are just different places on the “in-between” spectrum.
