In a Sacramento office building, university students carefully scan pieces of paper that underpin California’s most contentious and valuable water disputes. One by one, they’re bringing pieces of history into the digital era, some a century old and thin as onion skin.
The massive undertaking will unmask the notoriously opaque world of California water. Right now, it’s practically impossible to know who has the right to use water, how much they’re taking and from what river or stream at any given time in the state.
The State Water Resources Control Board aims to build a database that integrates a century of water rights records, geospatial mapping and up-to-date water diversion data that’s available to the public. This new directory will, most crucially, help regulators make high-stakes decisions on who to cut off when the next drought hits.
California may be the country’s tech capital, but it still relies on a room filled with aging paper records — maps the size of bedspreads, illegible letters written in bygone cursive and corduroy-bound ledgers — to manage its water supply. Other Western states such as Washington and Oregon have far more modern accounting systems.
The state’s labyrinth system of water rights dates back to the Gold Rush, when miners declared their rights to water by nailing paper notices to trees. The oldest rights holders have seniority, and when the state restricts water use during drought, they are the last to be curtailed, if at all.
A lack of timely and useful data became all too apparent during recent dry spells. After the 2012-2015 drought, new regulations populated a clunky online portal with new water use information, but problems remained in 2021 when regulators were forced to use outdated data to issue drought curtailments.
Since then, the state has committed approximately $60 million from the general fund to the water rights digitization and data modernization effort underway at the Water Board. Project managers estimate the new system, called CalWatrs, will be operational sometime in 2025.
