The Brief

Seven western states are now at an impasse over how to keep the Colorado River from collapsing due to climate change and overuse.

On Wednesday, the states of California, Arizona and Nevada released their plan outlining how they’d like to manage the river over the next twenty years. The states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico have released a separate, competing plan.

The two factions — known as the Lower and Upper Basin states respectively — vehemently disagree over many of the most important details, including which states should reduce their water use to account for climate change, and by how much.

Current agreements expire in 2026. Beyond that, there’s no certainty for farmers, cities and businesses that rely on Colorado River water for growing food, supporting rural economies, and supplying drinking water to millions of people.

"The two plans are diametrically opposed," said Pat Mulroy, a Colorado River policy expert and the former lead negotiator for the state of Nevada on Colorado River issues. But, she still believes there is a "glimmer of hope" for the seven states to come to an agreement.

Dispute puts economies at risk

It’s hard to overstate the importance of the Colorado River in the American West. If you take a shower in Los Angeles, eat broccoli in New York City in January, or see Cirque Du Soleil in Las Vegas, you have used Colorado River water. The 1450-mile long river provides drinking water to 40 million people from Wyoming to Mexico, and its water irrigates nearly all the vegetables Americans eat in the winter.

In Southern California alone, 25% of drinking water comes from the Colorado River. The rest comes from the Sierra Nevada and local sources.

Why the river is shrinking

This aerial view shows the All-American Canal along the U.S.-Mexico in Imperial Valley.

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Sandy Huffaker

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AFP via Getty Images

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The current crisis on the Colorado River began in the early 2000s, when water experts began to realize the so-called “Millennium Drought” wasn’t going away. Over the next few years, they realized that climate change was dramatically shrinking the river’s flow. Rising temperatures meant less snowfall in the Rocky Mountains, which is the source of the Colorado River’s water, and more evaporation from big reservoirs like Lake Mead and Lake Powell — essentially, a hot drought.

Scientists now believe that for every degree Celsius the climate warms, the Colorado River shrinks by 8%. They predict the river’s flow to continue shrinking by up to 30% by mid-century.

Where current negotiations stand

Management of the Colorado River is generally left to the seven states that use the river and the federal Bureau of Reclamation. Mexico and thirty tribal nations also have rights to Colorado River water, but do not have a formal seat at the negotiating table.

The seven states come together to hash out a deal whenever a new problem on the river presents itself, like increasing use by cities, drought, or — currently — climate change.

The current management plan, which regulates things like how much water gets released from major dams, and how water shortages are shared, expires in 2026.

The competing plans released today would cover the next few decades beyond 2026, during which the river is expected to continue to shrink.

The threat of "deadpool"

In order for Colorado River water to be used by millions of people downstream, it must first pass through two large dams.

But in 2022, water levels in the reservoirs behind those dams dropped to their lowest levels ever — prompting fears that the waterline would fall below the holes on the dams, and get stuck in the reservoirs, cutting off water to everyone in Arizona, Nevada and California.

Lake Mead in TK

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Courtesy NASA

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Lake Mead in July 2022, at just 27% of capacity, a historic low.

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Courtesy NASA

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To avoid this scenario, called “deadpool,” negotiators from California and Arizona – which use the most Colorado River water of any states — agreed last summer to massive temporary cuts in water usage.

Those cuts, plus last year's extraordinarily wet winter, seem to be enough to avoid deadpool in the near future, the Bureau of Reclamation announced Tuesday.

Now, negotiators are trying to figure out how to make some of those cuts permanent, and how much more they need to cut in the future.

Both basins agree the amount of water they use needs to be more responsive to real-time snowpack and reservoir levels, instead of using a set amount every year. But they disagree how exactly to calculate that, and who should be taking the cuts.

The Upper Basin’s proposal

The Upper Basin states — which use far less water than the Lower Basin — think the Lower Basin should shoulder all the responsibility for cutting back in the future.

Their argument has two parts:

First, they argue that lower snowpack and reservoir levels have already forced cities and farmers in the Upper Basin to use less water, so they should not have to cut back any further.

Second, they argue that because the Upper Basin has never used all of the Colorado River water that it’s legally entitled to, they’re not obligated to make any further cuts to address climate change.

“We don't know how much water we're going to have each year. We can't make promises we can't keep,” said Amy Ostdiek of the Colorado Water Conservation Board.

Ostdiek said the Upper Basin may be willing to make some cuts on a voluntary basis, but did not go into specifics.

The Lower Basin’s proposal

California and Arizona have already committed to slashing their water use dramatically, and say they’ll continue to do so in the future. But they think any further cuts to respond to the effects of climate change should be shared by all seven states.

“Adapting to climate change is not just the responsibility of one state or one basin or just the cities or farms,” said JB Hamby, the lead negotiator from California. “It is all of our collective responsibility. Putting the entire burden of climate change on one person or another will result in conflict, and we can do better than that.”

The Lower Basin argues that when reservoir levels drop dangerously low, all seven states need to do their part to avoid deadpool.

"It's a very big gap," said Eric Kuhn, a former water manager for the Upper Colorado River Basin who now writes about the river. "Similar numbers, similar concepts, but who's responsible is a very big difference."

What happens now?

Negotiators from both the Upper and Lower Basin say they still hope to come up with a plan that they all can live with.

Mulroy, the former lead negotiator for Nevada, said she was "pleasantly surprised" to see that the Upper Basin had offered to make voluntary cuts, and that she thought it provided an opening for continuing the negotiations.

"Do I think it's a long road to resolution? Yes. But the fact that last year was a great winter, and this one's a relatively decent winter, I think it buys them some time," she said.

If the seven states can't agree on a compromise, the federal Bureau of Reclamation may propose its own plan, which may not be popular with anyone. And depending on the results of this fall’s election, a new administration could throw out anything proposed by the current Bureau of Reclamation.

There’s also a risk that the disagreement could end up in the Supreme Court — which many experts say would be a disaster, as the case could drag on for years and in the interim, there would be little clarity about how to manage the river.

After copper wire theft left the Sixth Street Bridge in darkness for years, the city of Los Angeles has hired a Pasadena-based engineering firm to restore the lighting, a move aimed at improving safety for Boyle Heights and the surrounding neighborhoods.

City officials contracted Tetra Tech to relight the bridge, which has been plagued by copper wire theft since its opening in 2022. The outages have frustrated residents and commuters who use the bridge to walk, run, bike and drive between downtown LA and the Eastside.

Aging infrastructure, copper wire theft and delayed repairs led to nearly 2,000 streetlight service requests in Boyle Heights in 2024. Nearly seven miles of copper wire have been reported stolen from the Sixth Street Bridge.

Tetra Tech began working on the project’s design in January and is scheduled to restore the wiring to all lights along the bridge, including along roadways, barriers, ramps, stairways and arches before the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games come to Los Angeles that summer, according to a Feb. 18 news release from Councilmember Ysabel Jurado’s office.

The firm – which was selected by the city’s Bureau of Engineering – will fortify the pull boxes, service cabinet and conduits to protect against copper wire theft. Tetra Tech will also install a security camera system to deter vandalism and theft.

“When our streets are well-lit, our neighborhoods feel safer and more connected,” Jurado said in the news release. “The Sixth Street Bridge plays a vital role in connecting Angelenos between the Eastside and the heart of the City.”

Jurado – who pledged to look into fixing the Sixth Street Bridge lights when she was elected in 2024 – said the partnership with Tetra Tech “moves us one step closer to restoring one of the City’s most iconic landmarks as a safe, welcoming public space our communities deserve.”

According to officials, the total contract value with Tetra Tech is $5.3 million, which includes work on the Sixth Street Bridge as well as the Sixth Street PARC project, which encompasses 12 acres of recreational space underneath and adjacent to the bridge.

The PARC project will make way for sports fields, fitness equipment, event spaces and a performance stage. PARC’s grand opening is anticipated later this year.

Because the work for the PARC project and the bridge is connected, the Board of Engineers recommended using the existing PARC contract with Tetra Tech to ensure completion ahead of the 2028 Games, officials said.

The cost for the design work on the bridge alone is roughly $1 million.

On Thursday, Jurado announced that her streetlight repair crew had restored lighting and strengthened infrastructure for more than 400 streetlights across her district, including Boyle Heights, Lincoln Heights, and El Sereno. Next, they plan to tackle repairs in downtown L.A.

For the last 70 years, the  27th Street Bakery hasn’t just been the go-to place for people who want to spend less time in the kitchen — it’s become a staple in South Central, providing jobs and security for people living in the neighborhood.

The bakery is Black-owned and in its third generation as a business. It’s co-owned by sisters Denise Cravin-Paschal and Olympic gold-medalist Jeanette Bolden-Pickens, as well as her husband Al Pickens.

“My grandfather employed a lot of people around here as he was growing his business and so have we,” Cravin-Paschal told the LA Local. “They feel that this is a safe place to come. We have the respect of being here for 70 years and so we enjoy it.”

The bakery sits on Central Avenue, the focal point of Black Los Angeles between the 1930s and 1960s. As segregation laws were struck down, Black people in LA began to move elsewhere and took their businesses with them. The bakery, though, is still Black-owned and operating 70 years later.

Today it is considered the largest manufacturer of sweet potato pies on the West Coast, the bakery’s website states. Last year, the city and District 9 Councilmember Curren Price Jr. presented the bakery with a plaque that reads: “A Walk Down Central Avenue — A legacy of community: powered by the people and its places.”

It hangs on the wall in the bakery’s lobby along with several other photos and recognitions they’ve received over the years.

“Our goal is to keep this legacy alive and we’re celebrating 70 years of being here in business. We are so grateful to the community,” Bolden-Pickens said.

In celebration of its anniversary, a sign in the bakery says it is offering one slice of sweet potato pie for 70 cents on Saturdays starting this weekend through Oct. 31.

The bakery was a restaurant at first bringing Southern flavor to LA

The bakery began as a restaurant in the 1930s on Central Avenue founded by Harry and Sadie Patterson, according to the family and Los Angeles Conservancy. Back then, Central Avenue was the epicenter of LA’s Black community and Patterson, who came from Shreveport, Louisiana, decided to bring his Southern recipes to life in Los Angeles.

The restaurant later became a bakery in 1956, according to the bakery’s website. Patterson’s daughter Alberta Cravin and her son Gregory Spann took over the bakery in 1980. After Spann passed away, Cravin’s daughters — the sisters who are current owners — took over the family business. Five other relatives also help them out, Cravin-Paschal said.

These days, the bakery is open Tuesday through Saturday each week and the bulk of their customers are other businesses. They serve nearly 300 vendors including convenience stores like 7-Eleven, Ralphs grocery stores, Smart & Final, ARCO gas stations, restaurants and other mom-and-pop stores. Louisiana Fried Chicken has been a customer since 1980, Cravin-Paschal said.

An average delivery today is usually 45 dozen pies and they also ship orders out of state, Cravin-Paschal said.

She also told The LA Local they have six full time employees and most of them have worked for the bakery at least 25 years.

“I like working here, I like the people,” Maximina “Maxi” Rodriguez, a longtime employee, told The LA Local. After 32 years at the bakery, she said she plans to retire in June. “I’m going to miss it.”

Rodriguez said working at the bakery is a family affair for her, too. Her sister, Guadalupe Garibaldi, has worked at the bakery for over 40 years and her niece, Yoselin Garibaldi, is now a cashier and driver.

Patterson’s lessons inspired 3 generations to keep the business running

For Bolden-Pickens and Cravin-Paschal, running the bakery is a labor of love. Both told The LA Local that their grandfather taught them to stay true to the fresh ingredients they use and not to cut corners.

These lessons helped Bolden-Pickens in her life before taking over the family business. She won a gold medal as part of the U.S. 4×100 meter relay team in track and field during the 1984 Olympics.

“What I learned from being an Olympian is that it takes a lot of hard work. I learned that from my grandfather,” she said.

Bolden-Pickens said it hasn’t been easy running the business, but they’ve been able to stay afloat because of the lessons learned from their grandfather.

“I remember during the pandemic, we actually had to go to the egg farm and stand in line for a couple of hours just to get the eggs that we needed,” Bolden-Pickens said. “We use the best spices. We make our own vanilla.”

Cravin-Paschal said after the death of their brother Gregory Spann, who was the main baker for nearly two decades, they struggled for a few years to keep the recipe and taste consistent. But eventually they figured it out.

“We had a little rough spot because we all know the recipes but you have to put it together (correctly),” Cravin-Paschal said. “Now we’re back to the original taste.”

As marijuana use among teens has grown in the past decade, researchers have been trying to better understand the health risks of the drug. Now, a new longitudinal study finds that cannabis use among adolescents increases risks of being diagnosed with bipolar and psychotic disorders, as well as anxiety and depression, years later.

"This is very, very, very worrying," says psychiatrist Dr. Ryan Sultan at Columbia University, a cannabis researcher who wasn't involved in the new study published in the latest JAMA Health Forum.

Strong study design

Researchers analyzed health data on 460,000 teenagers in the Kaiser Permanente Health System in Northern California. The teens were followed until they were 25 years old. The data included annual screenings for substance use and any mental health diagnoses from the health records. Researchers excluded the adolescents who had symptoms of mental illnesses before using cannabis.

"We looked at kids using cannabis before they had any evidence of these psychiatric conditions and then followed them to understand if they were more likely or less likely to develop them," says Dr. Lynn Silver, a pediatrician and researcher at the Public Health Institute, and an author of the new study.

They found that the teens who reported using cannabis in the past year were at a higher risk of being diagnosed with several mental health conditions a few years later, compared to teens who didn't use cannabis.

Teens who reported using cannabis had twice the risk of developing two serious mental illnesses: bipolar, which manifests as alternating episodes of depression and mania, and psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia which involve a break with reality.

Now, only a small fraction — nearly 4,000 — of all teens in the study were diagnosed with each of these two disorders. Both bipolar and psychotic disorders are among the most serious and disabling of mental illnesses.

"Those are the scarier conditions that we worry about," says Sultan.

Silver points out these illnesses are expensive to treat and come at a high cost to society. The U.S. cannabis market is an industry with a value in the tens-of-billions — but the societal cost of schizophrenia has been calculated to be $350 billion a year.

"And if we increase the number of people who develop that condition in a way that's preventable, that can wipe out the whole value of the cannabis market," Silver says.

Depression and anxiety too

The new study also found that the risk for more common conditions like depression and anxiety was also higher among cannabis users.

"Depression alone went up by about a third," says Silver, "and anxiety went up by about a quarter."

But the link between cannabis use and depression and anxiety got weaker for teens who were older when they used cannabis. "Which really shows the sensitivity of the younger child's brain to the effects of cannabis," says Silver. "The brain is still developing. The effects of cannabis on the receptors in the brain seem to have a significant impact on their neurological development and the risk for these mental health disorders."

Silver hopes these findings will make teens more cautious about using the drug, which is not as safe as people perceive it to be.

"With legalization, we've had a tremendous wave of this perception of cannabis as a safe, natural product to treat your stress with," she says. "That is simply not true."

The new study is well designed and gets at "the chicken or the egg, order-of-operations question," says Sultan. There have been other past studies that have also found a link between cannabis use and mental health conditions, especially psychosis. But, those studies couldn't tell whether cannabis affected the likelihood of developing mental health symptoms or whether people with existing problems were more likely to use cannabis — perhaps to treat their symptoms.

But by excluding teens who were already showing mental health symptoms, the new study suggests a causal link between cannabis use and later mental health diagnoses. Additional research is needed to understand the link fully.

'Playing with fire'

Sultan, the psychiatrist and researcher at Columbia University, says the study confirms what he's seeing in his clinic — more teens using cannabis who've developed new or worsening mental health symptoms.

"It is most common around anxiety and depression, but it's also showing up in more severe conditions like bipolar disorder and psychosis," he says.

He notes that mental health disorders are complex in origin. A host of risk factors, like genetics, environment, lifestyle and life experiences all play a role. And some young people are more at risk than others.

"When someone has a psychotic episode in the context of cannabis or a manic episode in the context of cannabis, clinicians are going to say, 'Please do not do that again because you're you're you're playing with fire,'" he says.

Because the more they use the drug, he says the more likely that their symptoms will worsen over time, making recovery harder.

"What we're worried about [is if] you sort of get stuck in psychosis, it gets harder and harder to pull the person back," says Sultan. "Psychosis and severe mood disorders, particularly bipolar disorder are like seizures in your brain. They're sort of neurotoxic to your brain, and so it seems to be associated with a more rapid deterioration of the brain."

Some electric bikes in California could soon require license plates under a proposed state bill aiming to address the rise in electric bike related injuries.

AB 1942 or the E-bike Accountability Act, would apply exclusively to Class 2 and Class 3 electric bikes.

Class 2 bikes can be operated without peddling until it reaches the speed of 20 mph.

Class 3 bikes reach a max speed of 28 mph; motor assist could only kick in with peddling.

The bill would also require owners to carry proof of ownership and would direct the Department of Motor Vehicles to establish a registration process. It was introduced by Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan of Orinda in Contra Costa County earlier this month.

E-bike injuries spiked 18-fold between 2018 and 2023, according to state traffic data.

The bill may be heard in committee March 16.