The SCGA is pleased to be one of the “supporting sponsors” of the “Colorado Basin Golf & Water Summit” October 12 in Las Vegas, a conference organized initially and primarily by the National Golf Course Owners Association (NGCOA) but secondarily organized and supported by the SCGA and many more.

In light of the Lower Basin states’ conservation proposal, the Biden Administration has announced that it is temporarily withdrawing the draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) published last month so that it can fully analyze the effects of the proposal under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

To live in Southern California is not only to understand how it is possible to be on flood watch and drought watch at the same time, it is to understand also how it is possible to live during the greatest growth period in the game’s history in the most golf starved market in the United States while losing golf courses of all types and sizes.

A glance at the front page of Wednesday’s Los Angeles Times tells you all you need to know about where California stands with respect to water.

Mother Nature may be blessing us, and the state legislature may be giving us a rest, but the fundamentals that make the surcease so welcome remain firmly in place.

If you thought that the 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management Act’s (SGMA) addition of yet another layer atop California’s and the Southwest’s already highly layered and complicated water law wasn’t going to result in a bevy of litigation to determine access to the commodity that Mark Twain quipped was “for fighting, not drinking,” you were naïve.

January 31 came and went without the seven (7) states that form the Upper and Lower Basins of the Colorado River Compact coming to agreement on how to cede enough of their extant river allocations to meet the federal government’s (U.S. Bureau of Reclamation) short-term 2023-2026 requirements.

The atmospheric rivers that began pummeling California right after Christmas have produced more than enough snow in the Sierra Nevada and rain everywhere else to provide relief to those parts of the state dependent upon Mother Nature and the State Water Project for the bulk of their water needs – not permanent relief, but a timeout to regroup after the three driest years on record.

As 2023 opens, there is some good news, some bad news, some interesting news, and some no news to report.

As we suggested a few months ago, it was not a matter of whether but only of when the Metropolitan Water District’s (MWD) emergency drought order would be extended beyond the original 6 million state water project dependent customers that have been under severe restrictions since June 1 to the 13 million MWD customers with access to imports from both the state water project and the Colorado River Basin.