From the onset of his foray into presidential politics a decade ago, Donald Trump has been obsessed with managing California\u2019s water, often interjecting himself into decades-long conflicts over how the precious commodity should be divvied up.<\/p>\n
During his first stint as president, Trump was heavily influenced by the Westlands Water District, a huge agricultural water agency in the San Joaquin Valley that sought more irrigation water for itself and other farm interests.<\/p>\n
That relationship led to an extremely controversial contract that guaranteed Westlands as much as 1 million acre-feet of water each year from the federal Central Valley Project, solidifying the district\u2019s supply situation. Lacking water rights, Westlands had historically depended on temporary contracts to meet members\u2019 demands.<\/p>\n
The new contract angered environmental groups because it\u00a0threatened to reduce flows<\/a>\u00a0through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta for wildlife habitat. The groups sued and\u00a0won rulings against the contract in trial and appellate courts.<\/a><\/p>\n After Trump moved back into the White House in January, he immediately picked up where he left off, issuing an order to federal water officials to maximize deliveries in California.<\/p>\n He also complained that a\u00a0shortage of water deliveries to Southern California<\/a>\u00a0was a factor in the rapid spread of deadly wildfires in Los Angeles County, claiming that the state\u2019s efforts to protect \u201can essentially worthless fish called a smelt\u201d was at fault.<\/p>\n \u201cGovernor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way,\u201d Trump wrote on his social media site, Truth Social.<\/p>\n Newsom\u2019s office rebuked the claim, saying, \u201cThere is no such document as the water restoration declaration \u2013 that is pure fiction.\u201d<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Trump\u2019s executive order pushed the Bureau of Reclamation to modify how it operates the Central Valley Project, a complex of reservoirs \u2014 including Lake Shasta \u2014 and canals that captures runoff from Northern California mountains and supplies water agencies in the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys.<\/p>\n