The Brief

Dire water conditions, missed deadlines and uncertainty on the Colorado River are complicating critical water decisions in California.

No single state, water agency or federal official has shown the power, or the will, to break the deadlock among Colorado River basin states over how to share the dwindling supplies.

Years of fraught negotiations have failed to yield consensus even as major reservoir storage plummets to record lows — ratcheting up the tensions, and the stakes, for the states’ negotiators.

Now, key agreements for managing the river are expiring at the end of this year. These include agreements reached in 2007 that lasted nearly two decades, which took fewer than three years to craft.

This round of talks has already taken longer — and, so far, produced nothing so durable.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the federal steward for the river under the Department of the Interior, last week released a 10-year framework that establishes rough parameters for managing the river, but imposes no specific long-term plan.

The federal provisions include cuts of up to 40% to the shared supply of California, Arizona and Nevada in the lower basin. They also allow releases from Lake Powell, which collects flows from the upper basin, to dip low enough that they risk violating a legally required threshold for water deliveries to downstream states.

These dramatic cuts are an upper limit for future operations. The federal government plans to roll out more detailed management plans every two years if the states continue their impasse.

The agency will release the first of those plans any day, imposing cuts in the downstream states of California, Arizona and Nevada — an estimated 10% cut to California's supply through 2028, or roughly 440,000 acre-feet a year.

No mandatory cuts are expected in the upper basin states of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico, according to those involved in negotiations. The Los Angeles Times first reported the split.

It reflects the limits of federal power and political will: The Interior Department can force cuts in the lower basin, but has no comparable authority to impose cuts in the upper basin states — the limits of which the Congressional Research Service said are the subject of “ongoing debate.”

This isn’t the long-term plan that California’s water suppliers were hoping for.

Building anything to store, move or make more water typically takes decades and billions of dollars. Without longer-term certainty about how states will share the river’s water supply among 40 million people, millions of acres of agriculture and two states in Mexico — cities and irrigation providers are struggling to plan how to close the gaps.

“A cut is never fun, but you can deal with it. But not if you say, ‘Well, we have a cut here, and then maybe a cut in two years, and maybe another cut in two more years,’” said Bill Hasencamp, Metropolitan Water District’s manager of Colorado River resources.

“We need to plan for our future. And this deal does not let us do that.”

The future of Southern California’s water 

In California, where the availability of water is never certain, nature-defying engineering keeps dry parts of the state flush with water even when little falls from the sky.

Much of that engineering converges around one Southern California supplier: the Metropolitan Water District. The giant wholesaler imports water from Northern California and the Colorado River to supply cities and other retailers serving 19 million people across six counties.

Metropolitan’s imports are so central to the region that when its Northern California supplies dropped to a trickle during the most recent drought, 6 million Southern Californians faced unprecedented water restrictions in 2022.

Southern California isn’t facing such serious shortfalls again yet. But uncertainty over the Colorado River compounds the risks the next drought will bring.

“There's a good chance it'll be as bad as it's been, and there's a reasonable chance that it'll be worse,” said Hasencamp’s colleague, Keith Nobriga, whose job as an operations manager at Metropolitan is helping the district prepare for the future amid climate change.

The uncertainty also throws a wrench in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration’s water machinations to the north. Metropolitan's board will play an outsized role in deciding the fates of Sites Reservoir and the Delta tunnel because of the district's water needs and spending power.

Both multibillion-dollar projects, decades in the making, aim to send more of Northern California’s water south. Metropolitan is also planning a large-scale water recycling and reuse program, called Pure Water Southern California, with the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts.

Metropolitan has already committed hundreds of millions of dollars to the Delta tunnel’s planning costs and about $31 million for Sites Reservoir. The board hasn’t committed to receiving water or contributing to construction for either yet, though board votes on whether to approve the tunnel and recycled water project could come as soon as next year.

Subtracting one part of the equation, such as the Colorado River, could change the calculus for the others. But Metropolitan has to know how much water it stands to lose, and for how long.

The consequences of picking the wrong path could leave Southern California thirsty during the next drought, on one hand, or unnecessarily increase water rates, on the other.

Nobriga compares his job to insurance planning. The costs of nudging these water projects along, he says, are like paying an insurance premium.

“We'll keep these projects alive. We'll keep looking down the road,” he said. “And if it gets to a point where we really think these droughts are imminent, then we'll … construct and pay the big money for one or several of these projects. And we don't know which ones yet.”

Agriculture in limbo

California uses the largest share of the Colorado River’s water among the states. And the Imperial Irrigation District uses the largest share of that to supply half a million acres of alfalfa, grasses, winter vegetables and other crops in the southeast corner of the state.

As climate change and a megadrought plunged the Colorado River into its driest decades in over a century, the Biden administration struck a deal with the Imperial Irrigation District, trading more than half a billion federal dollars for short-term water conservation.

Growers cut irrigation to their alfalfa and other forage crops for weeks at a time, and the district conserved enough water to add more than 12 feet to Lake Mead on the Colorado River, according to Tina Shields, water manager for the irrigation district.

Now, those conservation programs are coming to the end of their funding and regulatory lifetimes. Starting new ones would require new plans and approvals to address the environmental impact of reduced irrigation runoff that feeds the Salton Sea.

Seeking those permits and environmental approvals “needs to be done on a longer term, not on a two-year term,” Shields said. “Because it’ll take us at least a year to negotiate, probably longer, the environmental actions necessary to move forward.”

In the meantime, negotiations are ongoing with other California water users about how they’ll share the coming cuts, including who is going to pay for it, Shields said. The district has not yet committed to anything.

“The district's perspective is: We've done a lot. We're doing a lot. It's challenging to do more,” she said.

Art of the deal

Though the U.S. Department of the Interior has not yet released its plan for the river’s next two years, those involved in negotiations expect that it will call for reductions and conservation in California, Arizona and Nevada similar to what the states proposed in May.

The three lower-basin states then must agree among themselves and with the federal government on how to implement it. After that, individual water suppliers in California will seek approvals from their boards for their share of the cuts.

Jay Weiner, an attorney representing the Fort Yuma Quechan Indian Tribe, whose reservation lies on both sides of the Colorado River, compared the plan to a Band-Aid, not a long-term path to sustainability.

“To a large extent,” Weiner said, “it leaves us at the mercy of this coming winter.”

The Trump administration relied on the states reaching consensus rather than imposing terms — an approach that so far hasn't broken the deadlock.

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs called for the federal government to step in and broker a deal. But federal leverage looks different in the upper and lower basins. Lower basin stakeholders say there are other strings the federal government could pull upstream, such as forcing water out of reservoirs, but isn’t. And cloistered negotiations and hardline positions among negotiators have driven an impasse.

Arizona negotiator Tom Buschatzke publicly lambasted the upper basin in The Denver Post for failing to propose “One. Single. Gallon.” of mandatory, verifiable reductions. Colorado negotiator Becky Mitchell wrote in The Colorado Sun that had the lower basin states lived within their means, “the reservoirs would not be in crisis today.”

Elizabeth Koebele, a political science professor at the University of Nevada, Reno said that negotiations have been most productive when participants had strong working relationships. Without clear federal leadership, she said, the same conflicts keep resurfacing.

The fraying relationships, she said, could stem from turnover. But years of constant crisis have also worn people down.

“We have been governing in crisis for a long time, and so every time we meet at the table, there's this big problem to solve,” she said. “The house is on fire.”

While the lower basin may sue the upper over deliveries that dip below a legally required threshold, both sides would risk the uncertain outcomes of litigation.

“In essence, this federal action has 40 million people living from paycheck to paycheck on water supply,” said Mark Gold, an environmental scientist and board member of the Metropolitan Water District.

That paycheck comes due again in two years with the same states, and the same asymmetry of power, still in place. Until then, the interior secretary can still force deeper cuts on the lower basin. No one, right now, is willing to force the upper basin to do the same.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A motorist was arrested on murder charges after authorities say she slammed her SUV into a city bus in Los Angeles, killing at least two people and injuring six others in a prelude to a second deadly tragedy: the fiery crash of a TV news helicopter that was covering the collision.

Bailee Lynn Rios, 36, of Simi Valley, was arrested Tuesday night and is being held at a Los Angeles jail with bail set at $4 million, police said Wednesday. The case is being forwarded to the district attorney’s office, which will decide whether to file the charges in court or pursue different ones. Information on a lawyer who could speak on her behalf was not immediately available.

The helicopter, which was used by NBC and Telemundo, crashed about two hours after police say Rios drove her 2004 Ford Expedition the wrong way down a busy avenue, ran a red light and struck a vehicle before hitting the bus. One passenger was fully ejected from the bus and another was partially ejected, police said.

Rios’ mother, Cindy Rios, said she was shocked and saddened by the string of events. She said she had not spoken to Bailee Lynn since her arrest and had not been contacted by law enforcement.

“It’s just horrible,” Cindy Rios told The Associated Press in a phone interview Wednesday. “The fact that my daughter was involved and was the cause of it is just extremely disturbing.”

“If anything, I’m sorry for the other families,” she added. “My daughter’s alive. People lost their lives.”

Chopper crash killed a reporter, a pilot and a man on the ground

NBC4 Los Angeles reported that two people aboard the helicopter — reporter Eliana Moreno and pilot George Marciniw — were killed when the chopper went down Tuesday in the Chatsworth neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley north of downtown.

A person on the ground, identified as 29-year-old Edy Gutierrez Mejia, died in a parking lot, the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office said. He was from Guatemala, the country’s consulate confirmed.

The crash happened as news crews were reporting on the collision involving the SUV that slammed into the bus.

There were no immediate details on what caused the helicopter crash, but an alarm could be heard sounding inside the helicopter’s cockpit as it lost altitude in the final seconds of video the crew broadcast before the crash.

Just after the beeping noise starts, a woman’s voice says “uh oh.” The helicopter moves quickly away from the bus crash site and starts losing altitude. The woman says “You can’t pull up?” before the video stops as the chopper nears the ground.

“That video is probably the most important evidence that we have discovered so far,” National Transportation Safety Board investigator Fabian Salazar said Wednesday at a news briefing.

Salazar said the sounds were consistent with the helicopter’s engine changing speed, as well as what he said were likely advisory tones for the pilot. The NTSB said it is also investigating the bus collision.

The helicopter, a Eurocopter AS350, went down near a large storage facility. At least four cars and two storage containers burned after the helicopter caught fire. NBC4 reporter Robert Kovacik was at the bus scene and saw black smoke and rushed to the helicopter crash site.

Anchor and reporters pay tearful tributes to deceased colleagues

Moreno was a familiar voice for NBC4 and Telemundo 52 during the station’s aerial coverage. She and Marciniw were both were employees of Angel City Air, which operated the chopper for the station.

Moreno, born in Orange County, joined Angel City Air in 2010, the same year she earned a broadcast journalism and political science degree from Chapman University. She reported for several news outlets and began flying with Marciniw in 2023, the NBC4 website said.

Marciniw grew up in Southern California and graduated from Burbank High School in 1974.

“I think a lot of us are still trying to process what happened, this terrible loss,” NBC4 reporter Lauren Coronado told viewers early Wednesday as she stood near the crash site. A hazmat crew was cleaning up jet fuel, she said.

In a tribute to Moreno and Marciniw, the newscast referred to them as “the team in the sky,” saying Moreno would often post videos from her job and was in awe of the view. Anchor Lynette Romero held a colleague’s hand and wiped away tears after hearing Moreno’s voice when one of her posts was played.

In an interview with the station, Esteban Jimenez, a pilot, said he had known Marciniw since the 1990s. He said Marciniw had been his instructor.

“I just talked to him on Sunday. We were talking about the aviation business and retiring,” he said.

Expert talks about what may have caused the crash

Aviation safety expert Jeff Guzzetti said the alarm sounding in the helicopter’s final video sounds like the low rotor RPM warning horn that signals the main rotor is no longer spinning enough to keep the helicopter in the air.

“It just has all the earmarks of a potential loss of engine power and a dangerous decrease in the main rotor speed,” said Guzzetti who used to investigate crashes for both the NTSB and FAA.

Guzzetti said the pilot appeared to be trying to perform an emergency maneuver to use the wind to force the rotor to spin again much like a breeze turns a windmill. Doing that can create a bit of lift that could help cushion the impact, but Guzzetti said there would have been little opportunity to do that because the helicopter had been hovering at a low altitude beforehand.

There are risks to news helicopters particularly in a major city like Los Angeles where multiple helicopters respond to an incident, but the pilots all coordinate closely over the radio to ensure they maintain a safe distance from each other. The industry also shares best practices to help keep these news flights safe.

“It’s a very unique form of flying. And the community is very good about lessons learned,” Guzzetti said. “And so because of that, you don’t hear about too many of those accidents. So they’re rare, but they do occur, just because the mission is a risky one.”

Other crashes involving news helicopters

The station said this is the second aviation tragedy in its history.

In 1977, a KNBC news helicopter crashed when it ran out of fuel while returning to the station after covering a wildfire in Santa Barbara, killing the pilot and camera operator. The pilot, former U.S. Air Force officer Francis Gary Powers, had been in the news years earlier when he was shot down and captured while flying a U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union for the CIA, an ordeal portrayed in the movie “Bridge of Spies.”

There have been at least eight fatal crashes involving news helicopters in the U.S. since 2000, killing 16 people, according to a review of federal accident records and news accounts.

They include a 2023 crash in a New Jersey forest that killed the pilot and a photographer aboard a helicopter used by Philadelphia station WPVI and a 2022 crash beside a Charlotte, North Carolina, interstate that killed a pilot and meteorologist during a training flight for WBTV.

A 2007 midair collision in Phoenix of two TV news helicopters that were covering a police chase led the NTSB to recommend that news helicopters have at least two people in the cockpit so the pilot can focus on flying while the reporter focuses on the story.

___

Golden reported from Seattle, and Collins from Hartford, Connecticut. Associated Press writers Josh Funk in Omaha, Nebraska; Olga Rodriguez in San Francisco; Kathy McCormack in Concord, New Hampshire; and Allen Breed in Raleigh, North Carolina, contributed.

Federal and county law enforcement announced charges Wednesday against three people in a widening investigation of homelessness services fraud in the L.A. area. Prosecutors previously charged three other people and said they plan to bring “many more” cases.

In Wednesday’s announcement at a news conference, authorities alleged a bribery scheme built on "ghost" clients illustrates a yearslong problem.

"Nobody was minding the shop," the region’s top federal prosecutor, Bill Essayli, told reporters in response to a question from LAist. "There's no vetting. There's no auditing. There's no accounting. It was just a rush to push as much money out the door."

What are the charges?

Authorities arrested Michael Young — founder of the Culver City nonprofit Home At Last — and accused him of using shell companies and fake bids to misappropriate $12 million in taxpayer funds. The allegations include siphoning $1 million into a high-end nightclub, a nearly $50,000 trip to Tahiti and a $140,000 restoration of a vintage Chevy Impala.

Michael Young, 46, of Baldwin Hills

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Courtesy Department of Justice

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A headshot of Alex Soofer shared by a federal prosecutor on X.

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First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli via X

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Scott Turner, the U.S. secretary for Housing and Urban Development, said Young's group received more than $118 million in public dollars for homeless housing since 2019 — over $75 million of it through the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, or LAHSA.

The new cases allege about $12 million in misappropriated funds — almost all of it by Young.

The bribery charges are against Lakiya Malone, an employee of the nonprofit Special Service for Groups, or SSG, who was responsible for referring homeless people to LAHSA-funded housing. Prosecutors say Malone took roughly $180,000 in bribes from Alexander Soofer, head of the now-defunct nonprofit Abundant Blessings, and in exchange steered him "ghost" participants — so he could bill for services never rendered.

Lakiya Malone, 48, of South Los Angeles

Donye Mitchell, 55, of Orange

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Courtesy Department of Justice

)

“She was supposed to guard the money, and instead she took bribes,” Essayli, the first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, said.

In a statement, SSG said it has been working with federal prosecutors “to ensure that any responsible individuals are held accountable” and has strengthened its “protocols and compliance.”

Charges against Soofer were announced in January. Authorities announced Wednesday that he has agreed to plead guilty to wire fraud and money laundering. Soofer admitted in his plea agreement to the alleged bribery scheme.

According to prosecutors, Soofer also admitted to "pocketing at least $2 million in taxpayer money for his own personal enrichment and for businesses unrelated to homeless housing," and that he has agreed to forfeit the money to the U.S. government. Prosecutors previously alleged he diverted a much larger amount: at least $10 million.

An LAist investigation found LAHSA kept awarding millions in contract renewals to Soofer’s group even after LAHSA’s own compliance team labeled it "high-risk" for, among other things, billing for services while reporting no enrolled participants.

The third defendant announced Wednesday is Donye Mitchell of the nonprofit Big Blue Umbrella. Mitchell is accused of lying about his experience to land a $1.2 million county-funded grant, receiving $315,000 and using those funds for personal expenses, including bail for a domestic violence arrest and video games. Officials said he's believed to be in Las Vegas and hadn’t been arrested as of Wednesday morning.

Mitchell is “a convicted fraudster, by the way,” Essayli said. He was convicted in 2011 of defrauding California unemployment benefits, according to the criminal complaint in the new case, and was ordered in 2012 to compensate the state $6 million.

The county funds he’s accused of stealing were awarded by a county vendor in 2024 — well after his fraud conviction.

LAist has left phone messages for Young's and Malone’s lawyers inviting their response to the charges and will update this article if they respond. It is unknown if Mitchell, who has not yet been arrested, has a lawyer.

Prosecutors' critique 

Essayli and L.A. County District Attorney Nathan Hochman criticized what they called a glaring lack of oversight of massive spending on homeless services. Hochman cited a court-ordered 2025 report that found L.A. city officials failed to properly track $2.3 billion in homeless funds, largely by outsourcing to LAHSA — which the review found failed to collect accurate data on its vendors and hold them accountable.

"We have not seen the results you would expect for billions of dollars being spent," Hochman said.

“This is the beginning of these prosecutions,” he added.  ”Many more” are expected in the coming months, he said.

Continuing trouble for LAHSA 

The new charges were announced the day after LAHSA's governing commission decided to give up its responsibility for federal dollars, including applying for roughly $240 million a year in federal homelessness funding and running the annual homeless count.

Also on Tuesday, Mayor Karen Bass skipped a congressional hearing on LAHSA's fraud problems, calling it a "politically motivated" attack.

LAHSA, now led by Interim CEO Gita O'Neill, said in a statement Wednesday that it has "zero tolerance for fraud, waste, or the exploitation of public resources" and commended prosecutors’ action.

The agency said it terminated its contracts with Young’s nonprofit in June after evidence of wrongdoing emerged, and is pursuing recovery of cash seized from Young. The statement added that LAHSA fully cooperated with the federal task force and that no LAHSA staff are implicated — only "external provider executives and outside contractors.”

Essayli was asked Wednesday whether LAHSA's past or current leadership has been culpable.

"That's actually a very difficult question to answer," he said.

"It is not against federal law to be incompetent, unfortunately. I wish it were,” Essayli said. “So just because the people at the helm did not do a good job, that does not give us the authority to arrest them."

“ I assure you, if anyone in power engaged in violation of federal law, we will not hesitate to charge them.”

Mellody Hobson, investor and Lucas Museum co-founder, has stepped down from the LA28 Board of Directors, LA28 confirmed to LAist Wednesday.

In an email reviewed by LAist, Hobson said that the demands of steering the newly opened Lucas Museum were too great to continue serving on the 35-person board, which is led by Casey Wasserman.

The move comes after pressure from local activists who sought to meet with Hobson to raise their concerns about the Olympics and Paralympics, including how the Games would affect South Los Angeles where the Lucas Museum is located.

Rev. Gary Bernard Williams, a pastor in South L.A., told LAist late last month, weeks before the news of her departure, that he believed “she could be a person that could be a counterbalance to the other members of the committee that really do not have the same kind of care and concern for what happens to our people.”

Williams, a member of a coalition of labor and community groups called the Fair Games Coalition, said he saw Hobson as the group’s best shot at influencing the LA28 Board, which includes a number of allies of President Donald Trump as well as some city appointees.

Hobson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.