2026 marks a pivotal year to save Monterey County aquifers.

Be honest with me—If I were to start a conversation with you that was about water and state mandates, would your eyes glaze over?

Katie Rodriguez here, after spending the last year pushing past the jargon, agency alphabet soup and basic hydrology hurdles. 

Water unites all of us. It’s the precious resource we can’t live without, the thing we use every single day.

Water management is complicated. Therefore, talking about water can get complicated. And when you layer on state regulations and legal terminology it gets easy to tune out. 

But in Monterey County, water sits at the center of some of the region's most urgent environmental, political and economic questions that will have massive ramifications if nothing is done to manage it properly.

Behind the scenes, researchers, engineers, policymakers and local leaders have spent years studying our water supply, tracking where it goes and how it flows, developing hard to study potential solutions and the costs that come with them.

My goal for this week’s cover story was to not only break down why this year is so important when it comes to water management, but to hopefully make the challenges, the proposed solutions and the biggest unanswered questions accessible and interesting to read about.

Thanks to a legislative package signed by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2014, we are working backwards from a 2040 deadline to get our aquifers under control. And a tremendous amount of work has been done over the last decade. Now, local water leaders need to show the state how they plan to get there.

The problem is, the deadline is approaching quickly, and people need to get together. Of course, disagreements persist, largely around what should and can be done, who stands to benefit, and who pays for the billions of dollars in projects on the table.

2026 is a big year—and you can read all about it here.