This spring President Donald Trump asked the Department of the Interior to consider removing those protections. In May the Department of Justice concluded that Trump “can and should” reverse the monument designations.

But this week, the White House Press Office told CalMatters that nothing is set in stone: “We would not get ahead of the President on any policy changes that may or may not be planned,” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly wrote in an email.

Janessa Goldbeck, CEO of Vet Voice Foundation, which lobbied for the Chuckwalla National Monument designation, said the administration might be thinking twice about reversing that status after blowback from a recent proposal in the House Budget Bill to sell off public lands.

“Veterans, hunters, anglers, a lot of people who are not traditionally invested in politics who came out to say hands off our public lands,” she said. 

Speculation that the Trump administration could revoke monument status for more than half a million acres of protected land in California has environmentalists fretting, but some outdoor recreation and mining advocates hope to undo what they call a “lame duck land grab.”

The Chuckwalla National Monument hugs the southern edge of Joshua Tree National Park and extends eastward across the Mojave and Colorado Deserts. 

Tribal trails thread through the monument and the region is considered culturally and spiritually important to numerous tribes, Biden’s proclamation stated. It’s also home to endangered desert tortoise and desert pupfish, and rare species of aster, sage and cholla, that “grow nowhere else on Earth,” according to Sierra magazine.

“This is not just a bare landscape out in the desert,” tribal engagement strategist Donald Medart, a member of the Fort Yuma Quechan Indian Tribe, told CalMatters. “This is a living, breathing, thriving place, where people have lived since time immemorial. We intend to protect it by any means possible.”

Biden dedicated the monument in the final days of his term, but it got off to an inauspicious start. The White House had planned to celebrate with a ceremony at Chuckwalla on Jan. 7, then cancelled it amid powerful winds that fanned catastrophic fires in Los Angeles that day. Biden issued a proclamation establishing the monument a week later.

On his inauguration day Jan. 20, Trump declared an “energy emergency” to fast-track power projects, and ordered the Interior Department to look at the new monuments. Officials pored over geological maps to identify their oil and mining potential, the Washington Post reported.

In May, a Michigan gold miner, an Idaho-based off-road vehicle organization and a conservative Texas think tank sued the federal government to overturn the Chuckwalla monument designation, alleging that it restricts access to public lands for recreation and amateur mining. However, Biden’s proclamation preserves existing rights to use of the land.

Chance Weldon, director of litigation of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, said that’s true, but future mine claims and trails could be off limits. He said the foundation believes that vast national monuments declared by presidential proclamation are a misuse of the Antiquities Act, which authorizes their creation.

“When you have thousands of acres being taken off line, that’s something that should be decided by Congress, not by the president at the stroke of a pen,” Weldon said.

Goldbeck questioned the plaintiffs’ basis for challenging the monument: “This is an out of state entity being represented by another out of state entity, trying to undo something that Californians love and fought for.”

Environmental and tribal groups have argued that once a president dedicates a monument it can’t be undone. But in June the Department of Justice told Trump he could eliminate monuments if he thinks the space or structures they contain “either never were or no longer are deserving of the (Antiquities) Act’s protections.”

Some local officials have also balked at what they consider restrictions of Chuckwalla National Monument. The city of Blythe weighed in against the designation, arguing that it would hurt tourism, solar development and the local economy.

It’s unclear whether those objections are part of the administration’s calculations. Trump has put the brakes on alternative energy development, and on Monday directed the treasury to end tax credits for wind and solar programs.

In a recent Senate hearing, Department of the Interior Secretary Doug Burgum suggested that the monument is just too big.

“The question is not whether the monuments serve the purpose, I think the real question is the size,” Burgum said, responding to questions from California Sen. Alex Padilla.

Burgum said he has heard concerns from residents of other states that local communities weren’t consulted on recent monuments, but he noted that wasn’t the case in California. Padilla thanked him for acknowledging California’s public review efforts and said the Trump administration should follow the same process for any changes to Chuckwalla National Monument.

“If it’s going to be revisited or undone, we expect that same level of engagement on the back end before any action is taken or before any decisions are made,” Padilla said.

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The administration touts its proposed rules as the starting point of a long-term effort to double Central Valley Chinook populations from historical levels, reaching numbers not seen in at least 75 years. But environmental groups have almost unanimously rejected it, saying it promises environmental gains that will never materialize and jeopardizes the existence of California’s iconic salmon and other fish.

“There is no way the assets they’ve put on the table, water and habitat combined, are going to achieve the doubling goal — no way, not possible,” said Jon Rosenfield, science director with San Francisco Baykeeper. 

Dubbed Healthy Rivers and Landscapes but better known as “the voluntary agreements,” the proposal is one of two pathways for state officials as they update a keystone regulatory document called the Bay-Delta Water Quality Control Plan, which was last overhauled in 1995.

With the ecosystem of the Bay-Delta in the throes of collapse, the set of rules is critical to determining how much water flows through the Delta for salmon and other species and how much is available for growers and cities in the Central Valley and Southern California.

Once vital to indigenous cultures and the coastal ecosystem, Chinook salmon and other native fish have declined for decades due to dam operations, water diversions, increased water temperatures and marine food web issues. Numbers of spawning adult Chinook have dropped so low that all commercial and recreational salmon fishing has been banned for two years in a row, and preliminary numbers this year show no signs of recovery. 

State officials from multiple agencies have lauded the Healthy Rivers program — which would meter out flows for fish while mandating restoration of floodplains and other river features — as their preferred option for updating the plan.

California’s most influential water districts, serving tens of millions of people and most of the Central Valley’s farmland, have rallied behind the state’s preferred option, which has taken center stage during public workshops since November.

Newsom administration officials have worked on these rules for years during negotiations with the San Joaquin Valley’s Westlands Water District, the nation’s largest agricultural water provider, the giant Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and other water users.

California Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot described the proposal as “a new and strengthened approach” that will protect both the environment and the water supply. 

Crowfoot told the water board that the proposed rules would do “a good job working to balance all of (Californians’) needs, and ultimately help the environment to recover in ways that’s workable for communities across our state.” 

Such a balance has long eluded state officials.

“This is progress,” Chuck Bonham, director of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, said at a November water board workshop. “It’s gone on so long. It’s time.” 

Back in 2020, Gov. Gavin Newsom endorsed the “voluntary agreement” approach. “Today, I am committing to achieving a doubling of California’s salmon population by 2050. These agreements will be foundational to meeting that goal,” he wrote in a CalMatters opinion piece.

Nina Hawk, the Bay-Delta Initiatives group manager with the Metropolitan Water District — which provides water that serves 19 million Southern Californians — said the Newsom proposal would create an equitable pathway to meeting human and environmental water demands.

“It is important that we try to balance what the state board defines as beneficial uses … both for the environment and for farms, in a way that looks at the integrity of the water system and also for the state of California’s natural resources and its economy,” Hawk said.  

Kevin Padway of the Zone 7 Water Agency, which serves 270,000 East Bay residents, encouraged the water board to adopt the rules, commending them as an “immediately implementable” route to balancing water demands for people and environmental uses.

But environmentalists aren’t sold. Some have even refused to call it by its formal name, saying it’s a euphemism with no bearing on “healthy rivers.” They say the rules would favor water users, allowing cities and farms to draw so much water from the Delta and its tributary rivers that salmon will continue their long decline. They say the proposed rules simply don’t offer fish the water they need, let alone support the state’s salmon rebuilding mandate. 

“If you’re diverting more than half of a river’s flow, you are guaranteeing negative population growth” of salmon, said Gary Bobker, Friends of the River’s program director.

The complex flow rules could even allow growers to entirely drain some rivers in critically dry years, according to Barry Nelson, a water policy analyst with the Golden State Salmon Association who spoke at a recent board workshop.

“Dewatering rivers during droughts would be completely consistent with the Bay-Delta Plan,” he said. 

The State Water Resources Control Board is the agency with the authority to approve the rules. A public hearing and vote could come in 2025.

The water board’s other option would require strict minimum flows in rivers. Water users say those rules would have unacceptable impacts on farms, hydropower and communities — including planned housing projects — while environmentalists and tribes laud it as more protective of fish. It would ensure that rivers contain an average of 55% of the total water available in the watershed at a given time — a measure called unimpaired flow.

While momentum has built behind the state’s Healthy Rivers plan, the state water board could still go either way with their vote. It is even possible that officials adopt both options, with the unimpaired flow pathway reserved as a regulatory backstop, should the Newsom proposal fail, or as concurrent rules applied to waters users who opt out of the voluntary agreements.  

Doubling Chinook runs — is it a stream dream?

A longstanding mandate requires fishery and water managers to double the Central Valley’s population of naturally reproducing Chinook salmon from levels observed between 1967 and 1991. This would translate into an average of 990,000 spawning Chinook each year, almost 10 times recent averages.

State officials say their Healthy Rivers plan would help to realize this goal. Around year-eight — when the program could be extended — officials hope to be about 25% of the way to the doubling goal, said Louise Conrad, lead scientist with the state Department of Water Resources.

Officials with the National Marine Fisheries Service, in a January letter to the state, said the eight-year timeframe “is concerning, given the dire status of native fish species within the Sacramento River Basin and Delta.”

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, in comments emailed to the Water Board in January, noted the light water allowances in critically dry years.

“EPA is concerned that the total volume and timing of Delta inflow and outflow provided under the proposed VA (voluntary agreement) alternative relative to baseline is not large enough to adequately restore and protect aquatic ecosystems,” the agency wrote. 

This target of doubling Chinook is nothing new. The almost legendary “doubling goal” has been on the books since the early 1990s, when federal law set the deadline for 2002. 

Now the state’s proposed rules would punt it to 2050 — what salmon advocates say is much too far away for a species already on the brink and a vanishing fishing industry.

“Salmon runs could potentially be extinct by then with the flow assets they’re putting forward,” said Ashley Overhouse, Defenders of Wildlife’s water policy advisor.

Representatives of California tribes, who historically relied on Chinook as a dietary mainstay, say they were excluded from planning discussions. 

“The only people that have been at the table talking about the voluntary agreements are water agencies, water contractors, irrigation districts, and private companies,” said Gary Mulcahy, government liaison for the Winnemem Wintu Tribe. “They (state officials) have excluded tribes, disadvantaged communities, environmental justice communities for nine years.”

But the flow rules environmentalists and tribes prefer would cut deep into urban and agricultural water supplies, causing “impacts far and wide” on water exports from the Delta, storage in upstream reservoirs and hydropower production, said Jennifer Pierre, general manager of the State Water Contractors, which represents 27 water agencies that serve 750,000 acres of farmland and 27 million people.

Farmers, she said, would experience substantial permanent economic losses, forcing widespread fallowing of their crops. San Joaquin Valley growers would lose more than a quarter of their water in dry years, and 13% on average for all years, according to the draft rules.

Thaddeus Bettner, executive director of the Sacramento River Settlement Contractors — a group of farmers who largely grow rice  — said it would force as much as 30% of his district’s 450,000 irrigated acres out of production, with harder impacts on growers with little groundwater to fall back on. 

Rice farmer Jon Munger, with 13,000 acres on the east side of the Sacramento Valley, said, in some years, the unimpaired flow approach favored by environmentalists could strip him of virtually all of his water in summer months. His groundwater supply is very limited.

“We wouldn’t have any water to grow rice,” he said. 

That option would also squeeze residential water use. The Placer County Water Agency, which serves about a quarter-million residents northeast of Sacramento, would lose almost half its supply, threatening initiatives to accommodate a growing population, said General Manager Andrew Fecko. 

It would cost Southern California a big chunk of its municipal water, too. 

“We wouldn’t have sufficient water supply,” said Hawk at the Metropolitan Water District. “It would be a decline at the taps, it would be a decline for businesses.”

Billions of dollars in new salmon habitat

The program proposes restoring 45,000 acres of structural habitat, like floodplains, tidal marshes, in-river piles of woody debris and gravel spawning beds over the next eight years. 

Thousands of acres are already completed or underway. This, according to Overhouse at Defenders of Wildlife, leaves roughly 30,000 planned acres that would be brand new additions to the ecosystem — which she and others say would mute the promised benefits of the program. 

All of this will cost money, and to date $2.4 billion in public funds have been secured to support the flow measures and the habitat restoration. Another $500 million may be needed.

The state’s proposed rules would allocate to the Sacramento River system between 100,000 and 700,000 acre-feet of water per year, depending on how much precipitation has fallen. But environmentalists say this isn’t nearly enough. They also worry that regulatory loopholes would allow future water projects — such as the Sites Reservoir, for which Newsom advocated at a public appearance last week — to divert water that would be protected if the state adopted unimpaired flow rules.

“It is not an accident that they haven’t solved this problem,” Nelson, with the Salmon Association, said. “The VAs (voluntary agreements) and the Delta tunnel and Sites are a package.” 

Some conservationists are optimistic about the state’s proposal.

Rene Henery, California science director with Trout Unlimited, thinks more habitat and water — especially in dry years — will be needed to protect salmon. But he also thinks the rules could succeed, as long as it’s just the first step of many in a flexible and collaborative restoration process — something he and a team of colleagues are trying to initiate with a state-funded project called Reorienting to Recovery.  

UC Davis fish biologist Carson Jeffres, who has studied floodplain restoration projects, also said the salmon doubling objective is achievable through the Newsom proposal as long as state officials “have the courage to be nimble and adjust and adapt if it looks like things aren’t going as planned.”

Tribal water rights advocate Regina Chichizola, executive director of Save California Salmon, rejected the Newsom administration’s notion that the state balances competing needs and demands. 

“We’ve compromised so much that we’re facing an extinction crisis, that tribes don’t have fish for ceremonies,” she told the board in an emotional public comment last week.

“Of course I want to make sure that all of the cities have access to water, but in the end agriculture is going to have to use less water,” she said. “The job of the water board is not to make everyone happy, it’s to protect beneficial uses and clean water, and if the salmon go extinct on your watch, that’s something that you’re going to have to tell your grandkids about.”

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With summer fast approaching, toxic algal blooms are beginning to pop up at Inland Empire lakes, posing a threat to people and their pets.

The blooms of cyanobacteria, commonly called blue-green algae, often look like streaks of spilled paint.

Their presence has prompted state and regional officials to urge lake visitors to take precautions.

In recent weeks, “caution” advisories have gone out for Lake Elsinore and Diamond Valley Lake in Riverside County, Puddingstone Reservoir at San Dimas in Los Angeles County, and Silverwood Lake in the San Bernardino County foothills. Signs were posted around those lakes specifying what activities should be avoided.

State officials said the signs at Silverwood Lake were taken down early this week after tests confirmed copper sulfate treatment had eliminated the threat there, for now.

Mary Fahey, a spokesperson for the California Department of Water Resources, said via email, however, that visitors should still look out for and avoid algae and scum, both in the water and along the shore.

Fahey wrote that “patches of algae may still be present in the lake, such as in back coves where the treatment could not reach.”

It’s important, too, said West Bishop, an algae scientist and water quality research manager with EutroPHIX, to recognize that tests represent a snapshot in time of a particular water sample.

“It’s likely to come back at some point,” said Bishop, who is based in Charlotte, North Carolina, and treated Silverwood, a State Water Project reservoir, for a bacteria bloom several years ago.

Two other prominent Inland Empire reservoirs — the State Water Project’s Lake Perris near Moreno Valley and Metropolitan Water District’s Lake Skinner near Temecula — aren’t under advisories, officials said.

Pets are especially vulnerable

There are three levels of advisories issued when harmful bacteria is present in the water: caution, warning and danger.

Under current caution advisories, swimming is generally permitted. But people are urged to stay away from algae and scum, to avoid drinking the water or using it for cooking, to not eat shellfish from the lake, and to keep pets out of the water.

“Dogs are very sensitive to toxic algae and can ingest it when they lick their fur after swimming,” Fahey wrote.

It’s OK to eat fish caught in a lake under a caution advisory, officials said, but the guts should be thrown away and filets should be cleaned with tap water or bottled water before cooking.

Adam Gufarotti, Lake Elsinore community support manager, said the advisory there won’t prevent the 11th Annual Dream Extreme Fishing Derby from taking place Saturday, May 18.

Nor will it halt boating activities, he said.

Rebecca Kimitch, a spokesperson for Metropolitan Water District, said a caution advisory covers all of Diamond Valley Lake, the huge drinking-water reservoir near Hemet.

Diamond Valley is 4.5 miles long, 2 miles wide and 250 feet deep, when full.

Among other things, a sign at the marina warns visitors to keep children away from algae, and not to use the water for drinking, cooking or cleaning fish. Instead, fish should be cleaned with tap water or bottled water.

Swimming is never allowed at the reservoir, Kimitch said.

Swim season approaching

At Puddingstone Reservoir in Frank G. Bonelli Regional Park, however, people can swim in a designated area during the season.

Derek Elleri, lake aquatics manager at for Los Angeles County Parks and Recreation, said the swimming season will begin on schedule Memorial Day weekend, despite the advisory there.

Visitors are allowed to fish, boat and get out on the water with stand-up paddle boards and personal watercraft, Elleri said.

“We’re at the caution level,” he said. “We tell people to be mindful of the risks and try to avoid contact where they can.”

Elleri said workers spotted algae growth at Puddingstone a couple weeks ago.

It was “almost like a paint sheen on the water,” he said.

Test results received Monday, May 13, confirmed harmful bacteria in the 250-acre lake, he said.

When bacteria levels rise higher and “warning” advisories are issued, swimming is forbidden at affected lakes, according to a state website.

Under a “danger” advisory, visitors are asked to avoid eating fish caught at those lakes as well, and to stay out of the water.

Algae problem grows

The timing of the bacteria blooms’ appearance at some Inland Empire lakes before the summer heat arrives is cause for concern.

“It’s definitely concerning, not necessarily a surprise, unfortunately,” said Bishop, the algae expert.

Such blooms are occurring earlier and lasting longer around the country, Bishop said, as reservoirs age andaccumulate nutrients and as climate change fuels a rise in water temperatures.

Other factors include increasing carbon dioxide levels and stronger ultraviolet light penetration, Bishop said.

The cyanobacteria blooms are dangerous because they can produce many different toxins — ones that harm the liver, kidneys, brain, digestive system and skin, he said.

“I don’t want to be a fear monger, but these toxins have been likened to ricin and cobra venom,” he said.

According to posted signs, toxins can irritate peoples’ eyes and cause skin rashes, vomiting and diarrhea. Pets can also suffer from vomiting, diarrhea and convulsions, and even die.

Because the bacteria are so toxic, Bishop said, “We need to get this under control.”

Bishop said one of the biggest needs is to reduce the nutrient load in lakes. Nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus pile up as rain washes residential and agricultural fertilizer, human waste and animal waste into bodies of water.

“These nutrients jumpstart these blooms, and allow these blooms to achieve higher densities,” he said.

Silverwood Lake is more than 50 years old and, as a result, has accumulated many nutrients, he said.

Lake Elsinore, Southern California’s largest natural freshwater lake, also has much nutrient material because it’s at the end of the San Jacinto River drainage.

“With that all sitting there and accumulating, there is very little flushing out,” Bishop said.

Lake Elsinore also is shallow. So it tends to heat up earlier than other area lakes, Bishop said.

Oxygen-rich bubbles are helping

In Lake Elsinore, city officials are taking steps to address the problem.

Gufarotti, the community support manager, said the city on Feb. 6 launched a “nanobubble” technology project. The $2 million system purchased from Hawthorne-based Moleaer uses microscopic gas bubbles 2,500 times smaller than a grain of salt to release oxygen in the water.

“It’s introducing oxygen-rich bubbles at the bottom,” Gufarotti said.

It’s a two-year pilot project focused on the eastern part of the lake, he said, adding that the city may expand the system to cover the entire lake after the trial period ends.

Elevated bacteria levels — which were in the lower part of the caution range — were detected at two of five monitoring sites, Gufarotti said. Those are near the West Marina and Perret Park.

Harmful bacteria wasn’t detected at three other stations near the nanobubble equipment, Gufarotti said.

Gufarotti told the Lake Elsinore City Council in a Tuesday, May 14, report that the lake is clearer and bluer than it was this time last year because of the project.

Chris Stephan, Moleaer global director of sales for surface water, said there is more oxygen in the lake and less harmful algae.

Still, summer is around the corner and rising water temperatures will present a challenge.

“Water holds less oxygen when it’s hot,” Stephan said.

Gufarotti said the city, in addition to deploying the nanobubble system, is gearing up to apply a treatment to kill algae twice a month.

“The summer is going to be tough,”  he said. “And we’re going to fight back.”

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