Features:
Policy:
Arizona Daily Star, August 31, 2026
The U.S. government needs to launch a massive federal public works program to build more infrastructure to help Arizona and other Southwestern states cope with impending Colorado River water cutbacks, said U.S. Sen. Ruben Gallego and Tucson Mayor Regina Romero.
“We’re going to have to have a massive government works program like what created the CAP, to help towns update their water systems … to create and conserve water, to make up for the loss we are going to end up taking,” Gallego said Friday at a “Water Summit” panel discussion in Tucson.
He was talking about the construction of the 330-mile-long Central Arizona Project canal system that delivers drinking and irrigation water to the Tucson and Phoenix areas.
The CAP was built over more than two decades using $4 billion in federal funds appropriated mainly in the 1970s and ’80s. But it is now facing possible extinction due to federal approval this month of a new plan to cut deliveries to Arizona, California and Nevada from the Colorado River, which supplies the CAP, by up to 3 million acre-feet of water.
Cal Matters, August 31, 2026
Lawmakers this week made good on a year-old promise, passing a bill to narrow a controversial exemption from California’s environmental review law. The proposal passed both houses of the Legislature and now goes to the governor’s desk.
Senate Bill 954 follows through on a pledge state legislative leaders made last year, when Gov. Gavin Newsom threatened to withhold approval of a $300 billion spending plan unless lawmakers passed sweeping changes to the California Environmental Quality Act.
Lawmakers complied by passing Senate Bill 131, which exempted “advanced manufacturing facilities” from environmental review. But more than 30 lawmakers objected to how broad that exemption could be, because it could increase pollution in already vulnerable communities. They pledged to narrow it this year.
Tribes:
SAC Bee, August 30, 2026
A bill to would give Native American tribes more say over the use of state land — in what opponents say is too much — was approved by the California Legislature Sunday. The measure was authored by Assemblymember James Ramos, D-Highland, a member of the Serrano/Cahuilla tribe, to ensure that people could not be blocked from access to sacred sites. It would largely prohibit government agencies from “substantially burdening” the ability of Native Americans to exercise religious ceremonies on state land, except for public safety and security reasons.
“In a just world, there would be no need for this bill. Yet the State of California and the federal government have historically attempted to force assimilation on Native Americans,” Assemblymember James Ramos, D-Highland said in a statement. “It’s a long litany of grievous wrongs that aimed at exterminating the state’s First People and erasing their language, their culture and their spiritual traditions and traditions.”
Ramos previously told The Sacramento Bee there were two key provisions in Assembly Bill 1881: Language requiring state agencies to secure tribal consent before building projects that might affect Indigenous spiritual practices and the ability of tribes and individual members to sue if those rights are violated.
Navajo Times, August 27, 2026
Nevada’s decision to take the federal government to court over the Colorado River’s new operating rules could stall the Navajo Nation’s push to get its Arizona water rights settlement through Congress before the year ends, a Navajo Nation water rights attorney said this week.
“We’re on an extremely limited window of time,” said Dwight Witherspoon, an attorney with the Water Rights Unit of the Navajo Nation Department of Justice. “The lawsuit could be a monkey wrench. Yes, absolutely.”
The state of Nevada, the Colorado River Commission of Nevada and the Southern Nevada Water Authority filed a complaint Monday, Aug. 24, in U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada against Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, the Department of the Interior, the Bureau of Reclamation and Aubrey Bettencourt, the bureau’s principal deputy commissioner.
Energy/ Data Centers:
LA Times, August, 29, 2026
After weeks of intense negotiation, state lawmakers on Friday reached a compromise on legislation to regulate energy use by California’s growing data center industry, action triggered by community anger over the facilities and fears of high utility bills in some communities.
The goal, according to legislators and advocates, is to protect consumers from growing electricity costs driven upward by the sprawling facilities and to track the centers’ immense energy and water consumption.
Business groups representing tech companies argued that some of the proposed restrictions and requirements, along with California’s high energy costs and lack of available land, would make it difficult for data centers to open in the state.
NPR News, August 31, 2026
Under the searing desert sun, Max Wilson watched water flow through a canal in north Phoenix. This unassuming strip of blue next to a busy road is the city’s lifeline to the Colorado River. Soon, there will be less water in it.
Wilson, who is the water resources management advisor for the City of Phoenix, has to make sure cuts to this canal’s supply don’t cause taps to go dry for more than 1.7 million people who depend on his system.
He is confident water will keep flowing out of kitchen sinks, showers and sprinklers across the nation’s fifth-largest city.
Water Finance & Management, August 31, 2026
In response to prolonged drought conditions across the western United States, the federal government on Aug. 21 announced mandatory water cuts to the Colorado River for the Lower Basin states of California, Nevada and Arizona.
The plan is aimed at protecting Lake Mead and Lake Powell, which have suffered from years of drought and recently hit historical low water levels in recent weeks. In fact, the combined contents of Lake Powell and Lake Mead have not been this low since before Lake Powell began filling following the closure of the gates at Glen Canyon Dam in 1963, USBR said.
The broad framework released by Bureau of Reclamation will be used to develop future operational guidelines for the two reservoirs. According to Fitch Ratings, the cuts will increase costs for water utilities in those Lower Basin states more acutely than the Upper Basin states (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming).
Climate:
The Washinton Post, August 31, 2026
This year, average temperatures from June 1 to Aug. 29 have been around 2.05 degrees Fahrenheit above average across the contiguous states, nudging 2026 just beyond what was experienced in 1936 — and the highest, considering records dating back to 1895.
“Remember that summer 1936 was fairly cool globally, even by the standards of the day. There was one notable exception,” said Alaska-based climate scientist Brian Brettschneider, who described it as a “near lock” that summer 2026 in the contiguous U.S. would finish as the warmest on record.
The Colorado Sun, August 31, 2026
This year’s El Niño might be one of the strongest on record, but its impacts on Colorado’s weather — and upcoming snow season — are still to be determined, climate and weather experts say.
The El Niño, a climate pattern that begins in the Pacific Ocean, can drive dry periods in some regions while others are hit by storms. And this year, it is already strong and likely to keep growing, according to forecasts. But because of Colorado’s inland location, and other factors that influence its weather cycle, climatologists aren’t yet ready to promise relief from this summer’s punishing drought.
“One thing that I see that makes me a little nervous is that people get really excited that it’s going to be this big snow year for Colorado,” said Peter Goble, Colorado’s assistant state climatologist. “I’m not saying it won’t be … but we definitely don’t have enough information to say that just based on the fact that El Niño is in place.”
Colorado River:
SJV Water, August 28, 2026
A nascent proposal by Arizona to fill the water gap from its dwindling Colorado River and groundwater supplies by reaching into California’s rivers likely won’t go over well in the Golden State.
“Over our dead bodies,” was the response envisioned by the leader of one of the southern San Joaquin Valley’s most powerful water boards. The proposal is one of two ambitious projects involving California that are being explored in a private-public partnership between Arizona’s Water Infrastructure Finance Authority (WIFA) and Canadian company EPCOR.
EPCOR has proposed capturing excess water from the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers in flood years, banking it somewhere in the southern San Joaquin Valley and delivering 100,000 acre feet a year to southern California water agencies for urban use.
In exchange, Arizona would take a like amount of Colorado River water before it runs to California.
Maven’s Notebook, August 31, 2026
The Colorado River’s next operating era is beginning under unusually difficult conditions. On August 21, the Department of the Interior issued the final agency actions for the post-2026 Record of Decision and the operating guidelines for 2027 and 2028. Rather than establishing a fixed operating regime for the next decade, the Record of Decision creates a framework for shorter-term decisions. The two-year guidelines set the rules that will govern operations at Lake Powell and Lake Mead. They arrive as the basin faces some of the most severe conditions in the modern operating record: 26 years of drought, combined storage in Powell and Mead at its lowest level since Powell’s initial filling, and a winter that produced record-low snowpack.
At the August meeting of Metropolitan’s Imported Water Subcommittee, Colorado River Policy Manager Shanti Rosset briefed committee members on the new federal documents and their implications for Metropolitan’s water supplies.
“This is not a planning exercise for distant risk,” Ms. Rosset said. “The new rules are beginning with both reservoirs already under substantial stress.”
