President Donald Trump makes his first visit to the San Joaquin Valley on Wednesday since taking office in 2017. Water is the topic, and farmers are expected to pack the audience in Bakersfield. In Washington, D.C., Trump said Tuesday that he's ready to use his “big voice” to bolster Republicans' 2020...
Walters: Has Newsom Settled the Water Wars?
The beating heart of California’s massive system of capturing, storing and distributing water is the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Water flows into the West’s largest estuary from the Sacramento, San Joaquin and several lesser rivers that drain the state’s mountain chains on its northern and eastern edges. While most of the...
Gov. Gavin Newsom Restarts Giant Water Tunnel Project
SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom has restarted a project to build a giant, underground tunnel that would pump billions of gallons of water from the San Joaquin Delta to the southern part of the state. Newsom's administration on Wednesday issued a Notice of Preparation for the project, which is the...
Costa Gets Feisty on Election Challenge While Home for Holiday
Jim Costa kept his calm while discussing his recent votes on issues that have gripped the country of late. He voted for impeachment, sharing his reasoning in a speech on the House floor. He celebrated legislative victories in his agricultural wheelhouse: the USMCA, and the Farm Worker Modernization Act. But, when...
Sen. Feinstein Urges Newsom-Trump Teamwork on California Water
Sen. Dianne Feinstein waded into California's water wars as a peacemaker Thursday morning. Listen to this article: In a letter, the six-term Democrat urged Gov. Gavin Newsom and Interior Secretary David Bernhardt to work together to develop consistent standards for water projects in California. Potential for Conflicting Rules "I urge...
California Must Stop Relying on the Endangered Species Act to Manage the Environment
In California, state and federal endangered species acts play an important and often outsized role in regulating water and land management. These powerful laws are also often at the center of conflicts between environmental and economic uses of water. The state and federal acts have helped prevent the extinction of...
GOP's Cookingham Likes His Chances in Valley's Blue CA-16
Many Republicans have tried to knock off Jim Costa since the congressman representing Fresno and the Central Valley first won federal office in 2004. Some have come close, like Johnny Tacherra in 2014 — to the point he attended freshman orientation in Washington, D.C. — before Costa was declared the...
Rejecting Federal Proposal, California Lays out Vision for Protecting Endangered Species and Meeting Water Needs
California’s water policy can be complex, and — let’s be honest — often polarizing. Water decisions frequently get distilled into unhelpful narratives of fish versus farms, north versus south, or urban versus rural. Climate change-driven droughts and flooding threats, as well as our divided political climate, compound these challenges. We...
Environmentalists Oppose Westlands' Bid to Secure Water
WASHINGTON — The Interior Department proposes to award one of the first contracts for federal water in perpetuity to a powerful rural California water district that had long employed Secretary David Bernhardt as a lobbyist. Conservation groups are demanding fuller disclosure of financial terms and an environmental review of the...
Rep. TJ Cox Tackles Impeachment, Water, Immigration
With Congress in recess, TJ Cox sat down with GV Wire to talk about his first year in the House of Representatives and his upcoming 2020 reelection bid. Cox, a Fresno Democrat, will face David Valadao, the Hanford dairyman and Republican he narrowly defeated in 2018. The Impeachment Question The...