Ventura River

The City of Ventura pumps hundreds of millions of gallons of water from the Ventura River every year, often completely drying up parts of the river. The City is the biggest pumper in the watershed, and it has the most direct impact on flows in the “live reach” of the Ventura River, which historically flowed year-round from Casitas Springs to the ocean. The City’s unmitigated pumping at Foster Park is destroying endangered species habitat, degrading downstream water quality, and ruining public trust resources.

In an attempt to restore flows to the river, Channelkeeper filed a groundbreaking lawsuit in 2015 to challenge the City’s over-pumping as well as the State Water Board’s failure to do anything about it, despite its mandate to prevent the waste and unreasonable use of the state’s waters and to protect those waters as public trust resources.

Our legal and public pressure brought the City of Ventura to the negotiating table, and through a formal mediation process in 2019 that also included the State Water Resources Control Board and California Department of Fish and Wildlife and other parties that extract water from the river, we’ve secured binding commitments from the City to remove fish passage barriers in the river and to reduce or curtail its pumping from the river when flows fall below critical levels for an interim period until a longer term solution is developed.

A few years later, the City of Ventura filed a cross-complaint, bringing other water users into the case and expanding it to a watershed-wide adjudication, or formal resolution process. The outcome of this process will help shape the future of the watershed for decades to come.