Sacramento Bee

The “Silver Bullet” Required to Improve California’s Water Rights System: More & Better Data

California Lags Behind Other Western States in Obtaining Critically-Needed & Available Water Diversion Data

Recently I’ve posted stories about efforts to enforce California’s water laws in the face of efforts by some diverters to evade and ignore limits on their ability to privatize public water resources–especially in times of critical drought.  One post focused on the federal government’s successful criminal prosecution of a San Joaquin Valley water district manager …

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Reforming California’s Financial Penalties for Water Theft Will Create an Effective Deterrent

Overdue State Water Reform Legislation Likely Be Enacted in 2024–Finally

In a Legal Planet Post earlier this week, I recounted the saga of how federal prosecutors recently secured the criminal conviction of Dennis Falaschi, the former San Joaquin Valley water district general manager who oversaw the decades-long theft of millions of gallons of publicly-owned water from California’s Central Valley Project.  That successful prosecution certainly qualifies …

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Wildfires, CEQA, Climate Change & the Courts

Recent Court Decisions Halt Building Projects, Invalidate CEQA Reviews for Failing to Assess Wildfire Hazards

Environmental and conservation groups have for a number of years attempted to convince California courts of the need to integrate climate change considerations into environmental analyses prepared under the state’s most important environmental law, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).  However, the California judiciary has demonstrated little appetite for doing so.  Until now. Recently, courts …

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