[env-trinity] Fw: Trump's water ambitions have a staffing problem

[Tom Stokely]

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Big water projects — like raising Shasta Dam — are on the sidelines. | Rich Pedroncelli/AP
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DRIP DROP: Federal water managers and the local agencies they serve usually gather every January in Reno, Nevada, to swap wish lists, from higher dams to new reservoirs to changes to endangered species rules. This year, at the Mid-Pacific Water Users Conference, the focus was more basic: whether the federal water system has enough people left to keep it running.

“We’re left with so many holes, there’s no way we can do business the way we used to,” Adam Nickels, acting regional director for the Bureau of Reclamation’s California region, told the gathering last week.

The shift was striking given the politics. President Donald Trump has made Western water a priority, maintaining close ties with farm districts that receive federal deliveries — including Westlands Water District — and ordering agencies like Reclamation to move more water, faster.

Yet a year into his return to office, talk of marquee projects like raising Shasta Dam to store and deliver more water to Central Valley farmers (overriding longstanding environmental and tribal opposition) was largely absent. When raising Shasta did come up, it was tentative. “Dare I say it,” Nickels said, before describing his hope of advancing planning work.

Instead, officials described an agency under strain. Reclamation's California staffing is down roughly 40 percent over the past year, Nickels and other federal officials said, following layoffs and retirements under the Trump administration’s DOGE initiative.

In Northern California — home to Shasta Lake, the state’s largest reservoir and the backbone of federal water deliveries to Central Valley farms — crews logged roughly 15,000 hours of overtime last year, according to one official. The office typically has 21 mechanics maintaining Shasta’s dam and hydroelectric operations. It now has eight, some working 15-hour shifts.

Nickels told the crowd he’s trying to fill the gap by leaning more heavily on technology, including AI, and by relying on partnerships with water users themselves. “We are open for business, open for meetings and looking for ways to always improve,” he said.

The strain extends beyond the Interior Department. NOAA’s West Coast region is also down about 40 percent in staffing, its director, Jennifer Quan, told the gathering in a keynote address. Quan joined the conference this year after skipping it last year, when it came just days after Trump’s inauguration. She cast her attendance as part of an effort to rebuild relationships with water users, who are often at odds with the fisheries biologists who set pumping limits to protect endangered species.

“We want to be customer-service oriented,” Quan told the crowd.

She said she was juggling Trump’s executive order to maximize water deliveries with another one to boost the country’s commercial seafood industry. As part of her efforts to streamline the work, she said her agency was preparing to pilot an automated “letter of concurrence” for routine actions that don’t require the usual full analysis outlining how to limit impacts on fish populations.

The water districts getting federal deliveries have high hopes the federal government will continue to squeeze more water out of the state’s mountains and rivers for them.

They’re also hoping for more cash to fix crumbling canals and build reservoirs. Last summer's megabill set aside $1 billion to improve Western water, though the pot of money has yet to be divvied up — and won’t cover all the projects on the table.

SPEAKING OF WATER: Sen. Alex Padilla is introducing a pair of bills aimed at funneling funding to water projects, his office told POLITICO exclusively Tuesday. One of the bills, dubbed the MORE WATER Act, would reauthorize a Biden-era grant program for water recycling projects and create a new one for canals in need of repairs because of subsidence — snagging endorsements from groups as varied as the Environmental Defense Fund and the San Luis & Delta-Mendota Water Authority.

The other bill would authorize $5 million per year for water-saving agricultural projects. — CvK

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