This year, something unusual happened. After years of extreme drought and several very wet flood years, the Sierra snowpack, the source of one-third of the state’s water supply, is shockingly average this year: 104% of normal on Friday.

And more is on the way. The National Weather Service on Friday declared a winter storm warning for the Sierra, predicting 1 to 2 feet of new snow through Sunday. Chain controls went into effect on Interstate 80 Friday afternoon.

For a state where 11 of the past 17 years have been in severe drought, where massive, punishing storms last year brought the biggest snowpack since 1983 and waves of destruction along the coast, and storms in 2017 caused $100 million in flood damage to downtown San Jose and nearly collapsed Oroville Dam, an ordinary winter is a godsend, experts said Friday.

“It’s about as normal as you can get,” said Jeffrey Wood, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Sacramento. “It’s what we hoped for. In recent years we’ve had extremes. This year is definitely an outlier, but in a good way. Enjoy the normal.”

The last time California had a winter this close to the historical average was more than a decade ago, in 2010, when the Sierra snowpack on April 1 was at 104%. By comparison, last year on April 1 it was 232%. The year before, just 35%.

Two years of ample snow and rain have wiped away drought conditions. Most of California’s big reservoirs are brimming.

They were already full from last year’s bounty and have been topped with storms this year. The largest reservoirs in California on Friday were a combined 116% of their average capacity for the end of March, with the two largest, Shasta, near Redding, and Oroville, in Butte County, at 91% and 87% full.

The conditions mean that cities will not impose water restrictions this summer.

“This is a usefully boring year,” said Jay Lund, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Davis. “It will be useful if people use the lack of urgency to work on long-term preparations for both floods and droughts. That would be time well spent.”

Precipitation will continue to spread across the area today through Saturday, with the heaviest expected this afternoon into early Saturday. Here's a look at the latest forecast rainfall & snowfall totals. Expect mountain travel delays & chain controls. #cawx pic.twitter.com/1h0IVxPxQT

— NWS Sacramento (@NWSSacramento) March 29, 2024

The snowy February and March, along with healthy rain levels across the state, mean that California’s fire season this year could end up being another mild one.

“We might expect something similar to last year,” said Craig Clements, director of the San Jose State University Fire Weather Research Lab. “Below normal in terms of acres burned. More snow. More moisture. Higher soil moisture. And higher fuel moisture levels. Things can change if we get a big heat wave in August. But for now all the rain and snow have helped a lot.”

Last year, following the wet winter, 324,917 acres burned statewide, according to Cal Fire, well below the state average for the previous five years of 1.7 million acres and more than 90% less than the horrific fire year of 2020 when 4.2 million acres burned statewide.

The shifting risk levels don’t mean that climate change isn’t happening, experts say. The Earth continues to warm, which makes droughts more severe. And that warming can cause winter storms to carry higher levels of moisture because more water evaporates from the ocean into them during hotter conditions.

But this year and last serve as a reminder that every year isn’t a wildfire Armageddon, Clements said.

“You are going to have some normal seasons,” he said. “You are going to have wet seasons.”

Few barometers of the state’s changing water fortunes are as dramatic as the weekly reports from the U.S. Drought Monitor, put out by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

At the end of March 2022, 100% of California was in a drought, according to the monitor. Water shortages were prevalent around the state. A year later, just 28% of California was in a drought — mostly near the Oregon state line and in the southeastern corner of the state. This week? None of the state is in drought.

Early on it wasn’t clear what this winter would bring. On Jan. 1, the statewide Sierra snowpack was just 21% of normal. But steady storms through February, and particularly in the first week of March, brought the turnaround as the Sierra was blasted with 8 to 10 feet of new snow in blizzards that closed ski resorts and blocked I-80 and Highway 50.

Lund, the UC Davis professor, who described this winter as “unusually normal,” said California still has significant water challenges, particularly in agriculture. State officials and farmers need to do a better job capturing water from storms and diverting it to recharge groundwater, he said.

In other areas, such as the Tulare Basin in the San Joaquin Valley, groundwater has been so heavily over pumped for decades that some acres will need to be taken out of production, he said.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has pushed hard for construction of the largest new reservoir in California in 50 years, Sites Reservoir, a $4.5 billion off-stream project proposed for Colusa County that would divert water from the Sacramento River in wet years for use in dry years. This month, the project received $205 million from the Biden administration and now has more than 90% of its funding. Whether it can break ground depends largely on if it can secure water rights later this year from the State Water Resources Control Board and overcome lawsuits from several environmental groups that say the water diversions could harm fish species in the Delta.

On Tuesday, state officials are expected to take a manual snow survey near Sierra-at-Tahoe ski resort. Friday’s statewide totals are expected to increase from this weekend’s storms.

“Winter is not over,” said Wood, the meteorologist. “It’s not abnormal to have an early spring system like this, and it’s definitely not the end of potential wet weather for the area. We will get some significant snowfall out of this one.”

Weather and water

Last week saw some significant storm systems in terms of wind as well as localized rain showers locally.

Kate Forrest, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Sacramento office said the first system, which occurred between Tuesday and Thursday last week, brought about a half an inch to an inch of rain to valley areas such as Chico and beyond and up to 1.5 inches in Paradise and foothill areas.

A second system that lasted Friday and Saturday brought an additional 0.27 inches of rain to Chico, just short of half an inch in Red Bluff and 1.26 inches in Paradise.

Lake Oroville’s water level continues to increase and was reported to be 878.86 at 7 p.m. Sunday. The lake had a water level of 857.28 on the same day last year and was previously at 750.14 on March 31, 2022. Outflows from the Oroville Dam’s main spillway continued on Monday.

Meanwhile, Shasta Lake’s water level was reported at 1,055.06 feet as of 1 p.m. Monday.

Enterprise-Record reporter Jake Hutchison contributed to this report.

In the Bay Area, where dozens of large cargo ships, oil tankers, cruise ships and other vessels sail in and out of San Francisco Bay every week, the calamity raised the question: Could it happen here?

Ships have occasionally hit several of the eight major bridges that cross San Francisco Bay over the decades. But for a variety of reasons, the chances of a bridge collapsing are very low, experts said Tuesday.

“It would be ridiculous to say it could never happen here,” said Scott Humphrey, chairman of the San Francisco Bay Harbor Safety Committee, a state organization of industry, government, and nonprofit maritime organizations that meets monthly to improve shipping safety. “But it’s extremely unlikely that anything of that magnitude could happen here.”

All of the major bridges that cross San Francisco Bay, including the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge, have concrete buffers, called fenders, that surround the columns supporting the bridge near the water line.

If a large ship loses power or steering and hits one, it glances off, said Bart Ney, a spokesman for Caltrans, which owns most of the bridges spanning the bay.

“The bridges are designed for it,” he said. “The strategy is that if you get a vessel that is going to collide with the bridge, you want to keep it from touching the bridge. All of our bridges have a robust fender system that are designed to absorb energy. The bridge does more damage to the ship than the ship does to the bridge.”

The Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore did not have the same fender system, he said.

Further, the Bay Area is known for earthquakes. All of the major bridges across San Francisco Bay have undergone an extensive earthquake retrofits in the past 20 years, Ney said. They have been fitted with seismic dampening systems — joints that allow bridges to flex and move in earthquakes, along with huge hinges, and other features that not only help them survive earthquakes but avoid collapse in ship collisions, he said.

Khalid Mosalam, a professor of civil engineering at UC Berkeley, watched the video Tuesday of the Baltimore bridge collapse frame-by-frame.

“It’s a very classical mode of failure. It was breathtaking,” he said. “You study these things and learn about them and teach them to students, but you rarely see it happen, which is good thing.”

Many of California’s bridges are more resilient than bridges in other parts of the world, he added.

“Because of earthquake designs, the columns in West Coast bridges tend to be a lot stronger, a lot bigger,” he said. “If an accident like this happened here, I doubt it would lead to destruction like we saw in the video.”

But accidents do happen.

Last year, 2,874 large ships arrived and departed San Francisco Bay, sailing under the Golden Gate Bridge carrying everything from oil from Alaska to steel shipping containers full of electronics and clothes, according to the Marine Exchange of the San Francisco Bay Region, an organization that tracks ship movements. Expert harbor pilots board the ships and help them navigate when they are entering and leaving the Bay.

On Nov. 7, 2007, the 901-foot Cosco Busan, a cargo ship headed from Oakland to South Korea, sideswiped a Bay Bridge support column protected by a fender in dense morning fog.

The incident ripped a 211-foot-long gash in the ship and dumped 53,000 gallons of bunker fuel into the bay. No people were injured or killed, but the spill oiled 69 miles of shore. Roughly 6,800 birds were killed.

An investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board found that the ship’s pilot, John Cota, of Petaluma, had a “degraded cognitive performance from his use of impairing prescription medications.” Cota, the investigation concluded, had a history of alcohol abuse and prescriptions for at least nine medications for pain, depression and sleep disorders.

Other causes of the Cosco Busan incident included a lack of communication between Cota and the ship’s Chinese captain; inadequate crew training; and a failure by the Coast Guard to warn Cota by radio that he was heading for the bridge.

The bridge fender suffered only minor damage. The Bay Bridge itself was not damaged.

The Cosco Busan’s owner, Regal Stone Ltd., and its operator, Fleet Management Ltd., both of Hong Kong, paid $44 million to settle the civil case with state prosecutors.

Not long afterward, in 2013, another ship, the Overseas Reymar, a 748-foot-long oil tanker, struck the Bay Bridge in heavy fog. A state investigation found that the pilot, Capt. Guy Kleess of San Francisco, made a risky last-minute change in course and “lost awareness of what was happening around him.”

The oil tanker was empty, having offloaded its cargo at a refinery in Martinez the night before. No oil was spilled.

The accident caused $1.4 million in damage to the fender but did not structurally damage the bridge, Caltrans reported. The ship sustained $220,000 in damage.

After the incident, the harbor safety committee passed guidelines recommending large ships not sail under the Bay Bridge in heavy fog.

There are still some areas of concern. State law requires oil tankers to have tug boat escorts so they can be pushed away from danger if they lose power or steering. But tug boat escorts are not required for cargo ships moving in and out of San Francisco Bay. In 2004, following a series of Mercury News stories exposing the risk, state lawmakers passed a bill to require tug escorts for chemical tanker ships in San Francisco Bay, but Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the bill after the shipping industry raised cost concerns.

Early reports indicate that the ship in Baltimore reported it had lost power before colliding with the bridge. In April 2022, the Wan Hai 176, a 564-foot container ship, lost engine power and drifted seven miles off the coast of Point Reyes with 21 people aboard. It was intercepted by tug boats and towed into San Francisco Bay without incident. The Singapore-flagged vessel had more than 700 containers on board and 39,000 gallons of fuel.

“We have seen accidents in the Bay Area involving large ships in the past,” said Ben Eichenberg, an attorney with Baykeeper, an environmental group. “If a ship loses power, taking out a bridge isn’t the only disaster that can happen. It can run aground. It can leak oil. This Maryland accident should get us to review all of our safety procedures. There is going to be some soul searching here.”

But the windswept county in the Sacramento Valley — whose entire population of 22,000 people is just one-third of Palo Alto’s — may soon be known for something else: the largest new reservoir anywhere in California in the past 50 years.

Last weekend, President Biden signed a package of bills that included $205 million in construction funding for Sites Reservoir, a proposed $4.5 billion project planned for the rolling ranchlands  west of the town of Maxwell, about 70 miles north of Sacramento.

The funding is the latest boost for the project, which has been discussed on and off since the 1950s. Plans call for Sites to be a vast off-stream reservoir 13 miles long, 4 miles wide and 260 feet deep that would store water diverted from the Sacramento River in wet years, for use by cities and farms around the state in dry years.

“We have a definite tailwind at our back,” said Jerry Brown, a civil engineer unrelated to the former governor, and who is executive director of the Sites Project Authority. The authority is a group of government agencies in the Sacramento Valley planning the massive reservoir.

Brown was also the former general manager of the Contra Costa Water District, where he oversaw expansion of Los Vaqueros Reservoir 15 years ago.

“The funding is a vote of confidence and a sign that the federal government sees a significant benefit to this project and it being a sound investment,” he said.

If the project overcomes opposition and a lawsuit by environmental groups, the 1.5 million-acre-foot Sites Reservoir would be California’s eighth largest. It would be four times the size of Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite National Park, which is the main water supply for San Francisco and the Peninsula. It would provide water to 500,000 acres of Central Valley farmlands, and 24 million people, including parts of Silicon Valley, the East Bay and Los Angeles.

Plans call for groundbreaking in 2026, with construction finished by 2032. If completed, Sites would be the largest new reservoir in California since 1979, when the federal government opened New Melones Lake in the Sierra Foothills between Sonora and Angels Camp.

With the newest funding approved by Congress, the project now has more than 90% of its financing lined up, Brown said, a major hurdle that has killed dozens of other large water storage projects around the state in recent decades.

The sources include:

• A $2.2 billion loan that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency invited the project to apply for;
• $875 million from Proposition 1, a water bond approved by voters in 2014;
• $389 million from Congress, which includes this month’s award;
• A $250 million loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture;
• $250 million in local cash and bonds from other California water agencies;
• $60 million from Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Act.

The project is supported by Gov. Gavin Newsom, farm organizations, labor unions and water agencies, including the Santa Clara Valley Water District in San Jose, Zone 7 Water Agency in Livermore, and the Metropolitan Water District in Los Angeles, all of which are partners.

Supporters say that as California’s climate continues to warm, more severe droughts are likely. Storing water in wet years to reduce shortages in dry years is more important than ever, they contend.

“We are going to need more storage projects with climate change,” said Matt Keller, a spokesman for the Santa Clara Valley Water District. “Our board is evaluating several different water supply projects from around Northern California and locally, and has been following this one for a while.”

The district, based in San Jose, provides water to 2 million people. It has contributed $2 million so far to Sites for planning and is considering offering up to $130 million more, which would provide it about 37,400 acre-feet of storage — nearly twice the volume of Lexington Reservoir near Los Gatos.

Politically, the project has a big advantage over many traditional dams. It would be an “off-stream” reservoir, which means that instead of damming a river, a remote valley of cattle ranches would be submerged, the water held in by two large dams and up to nine smaller “saddle dams” on ridges, somewhat similar to San Luis Reservoir, between Gilroy and Los Banos.

Had the reservoir already been built, Brown noted, it would have filled entirely in two years from big storms this winter and last winter.

But the Sierra Club and some of the state’s other environmental groups are opposed.

They argue that filling Sites would divert too much water away from the Sacramento River, the state’s largest, hurting endangered salmon, steelhead and Delta smelt, and depriving the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta of fresh water.

“It’s a costly project,” said Ron Stork, senior policy analyst for Friends of the River, a group that opposes Sites. “There’s political support for this idea — happy magical thinking that this project is going to solve our water woes in California. But it’s not the be-all and end-all for water in California.”

Stork and other opponents say cities and farms need to take less water from the Delta. Instead of new reservoirs, they argue, cities should fund water recycling projects and more conservation, and farms should embrace more drip irrigation, groundwater recharge and other techniques, and remove some unsustainable land from production.

The make-or-break moment for Sites is a series of hearings scheduled to run from June to November in which the State Water Resources Control Board will analyze fisheries studies and other documents and decide whether to award it the water rights to move forward.

In December, Friends of the River, the Center for Biological Diversity, and three other environmental groups filed a lawsuit against the project. They argued that Sites’ environmental studies, finalized in November, didn’t adequately study the reservoir’s impact on fish, or properly evaluate alternatives.

A month earlier, Newsom announced he had included Sites among the projects affected by a new state law passed last year to streamline large projects. That law, SB 149, requires that when opponents of large renewable energy, water or transportation projects sue to stop them under the California Environmental Quality Act, courts must decide the challenge within 270 days to reduce years-long delays.

“We’re cutting red tape to build more, faster,” Newsom said in November. “These are projects that will address our state’s biggest challenges.”

If Sites secures the permits, the 22 water agencies who are partners will spend 2025 negotiating how much each will pay for construction costs and how much water each will receive.

The chance of success?

“It’s 50-50,” Stork said. “There’s a lot of political faith in this project and momentum for it. I think it’s magical thinking, but it has momentum.”

But in the month since, like the stock market and the 49ers playoff hopes, the picture has improved significantly. On Monday, the snowpack, a vast 400-mile long frozen reservoir that provides nearly one-third of the state’s water supply, had jumped to 52% of normal, boosted by several big storms that have taken ski resorts out of the doldrums in recent weeks and tempered talk of a 2024 “snow drought.”

“We’ve come a long way from where we were at the beginning of the month,” said Andrew Schwartz, lead scientist at the UC Berkeley Central Sierra Snow Laboratory near Donner Summit west of Lake Tahoe.

Between Oct. 1 and New Year’s Day, just 35 inches of snow fell at the UC snow lab site, off Interstate 80. On Monday, that seasonal total had grown to 105 inches. For that location, at nearly 6,900-feet elevation, Monday’s total is 61% of the historical average — a number that while below normal is expected to grow in the coming days.

“There’s still some hope we are going to see a wetter pattern the first few weeks of February,” Schwartz said.

California’s water officials on Tuesday will tromp out to Phillips Station near Sierra-at-Tahoe ski resort to take their second monthly manual snowpack reading of the season — a largely ceremonial event in an age when snow gauges across the Sierra provide digital readings every day.

A significant storm system is forecast to hit Northern California and the Sierra from Tuesday night through Friday, with chances of another rolling in Sunday and next Monday.

“It will be on the higher side of the storms we’ve seen this year,” said Katrina Hand, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Sacramento. “You could see ponding of water on the roads this week, some creeks rising to near flood stage. And it will bring more snow to the Sierra.”

The storm, an atmospheric river from Hawaii that is expected to be a 2 on a scale of 1 to 5 — with 5 being the strongest — is forecast to dump 1 to 3 inches of rain across much of the Bay Area by Friday. About 3 to 5 inches is expected over the North Bay, and up to 4 to 6 inches is forecast for the Santa Cruz Mountains and Big Sur.

The heaviest day will be Wednesday with chain controls expected throughout the Sierra and gusty winds forecast to reach 50 mph or more.

By Friday, the storm is forecast to bring up to 2 feet of new snow to the Lake Tahoe area, up to 3 feet farther south at Sonora Pass, and up to 5 feet on Mount Lassen.

California often experiences big swings in the amount of rain and snow it receives each year.

“Every winter, water managers are biting their nails and investing in Pepcid,” said Felicia Marcus, a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Water in the West Program. “The start to this winter was anemic, but right now it’s pretty OK.”

As the Earth continues to warm from climate change, scientists say that California is seeing more “weather whiplash” between very dry and very wet years. Eight of the past 12 years have been drought years in the state, punctuated by some drenching years (2017, 2023).

Last year, a series of huge atmospheric river storms battered California, ending the state’s severe 2020-22 drought. Last Feb. 1, the Sierra snowpack was a staggering 212% of normal. By April 1, it was the biggest snowpack in 40 years, at 232% of the historical average. A few ski resorts stayed open until the Fourth of July last year.

The fact that this year has begun much more modestly is in many ways a good thing, experts said Monday.

Reservoirs around the state filled last year because of the relentless rain and in many places are still above average for this time of year. If this winter had started with a new series of big atmospheric river storms, it could have filled them to the top, causing flooding downstream.

“You don’t want to fill them up this time of the season, because if the storms come in faster than you were expecting, then you have a flood risk,” Marcus said. “Droughts are bad, but floods kill people.”

Reservoir operators around the state, working off historical records showing the probability of rainfall each day of the winter, release more water out of reservoirs early in the winter between November and February, and then typically begin to capture more in March as the winter winds down and melting snows flow in from rivers, adding more water into the reservoirs.

Even with that conservative approach, some of California’s biggest reservoirs have seen impressive gains this past month as January storms have swept across the state.

The water level at Shasta Lake, the state’s largest reservoir, near Redding, which is 35 miles long, has risen 20 feet since Jan. 1. A critical  source for farms and cities, it was 79% full on Monday — 112% of normal for this date.

Similarly, the state’s second largest reservoir, Oroville, in Butte County, has risen 23 feet since Jan. 1, and on Monday was 76% full — 132% of normal for this date.

One of the most important reservoirs in Southern California, Diamond Valley Lake in Riverside County, on Monday was 93% full, a big shift from a year ago when it was 61% full.

Unless all the rain and snow turns off completely starting in mid-February, California should be in decent shape from a water supply standpoint this summer, experts said Monday, with the chances of urban water restrictions low.

“I think this year we are probably going to be OK,” Marcus said. “But we never want to waste water, because next year could be the beginning of a 10-year drought.”

Newsom attributed the rosier deficit outlook in Wednesday’s proposed budget to his office using more optimistic revenue expectations than the legislative analysts who estimated last month’s higher figure.

With that shrunken shortfall, Newsom unveiled a proposed $291.5 billion budget for 2024-25, including a $208.7 billion general fund that covers operating expenses for most programs including education, health and human services, criminal justice and transportation. But the gap is still daunting.

“For decades and decades we’ve come to expect the volatility in our tax system,” Newsom said, where revenue “goes up during good times, goes down very badly in the bad times.

“This is a story of correction and normalcy, and one that we in some respects anticipated, and one we’re certainly prepared to work through.”

The governor said his proposed budget maintains promised multi-year funding commitments, including $15.3 billion to tackle homelessness, $8.7 billion for mental health, $109.1 billion for transitional kindergarten through community college and $1.1 billion for public safety.

The plan calls for “modest but not significant cuts to the vast majority of those programs,” Newsom said, without new taxes like a “wealth tax” on rich California residents that some lawmakers have proposed.

Among the moves the governor’s budget proposes to fill the $37.9 billion deficit:

• $13.1 billion from reserve funds
• $8.5 billion in reduced spending for things like climate and housing programs and school facilities, and freezing new contracts, cell phones, technology equipment and nonessential fleet purchases and travel.
• $5.1 billion in funding delays, including $1 billion for transit and inter-city rail projects and $550 million in kindergarten facilities grants.
• $2.1 billion in spending deferrals, including $499 million for the University of California and California State University systems.

Republican leaders who have criticized the state’s spending were skeptical.

“Welcome to year six of ‘Gavinomics’ where his budgets turn surpluses into deficits and his policies push Californians to flee,” said Senate Minority Leader Brian W. Jones, a San Diego Republican and vice chair of the Senate Budget and Fiscal Review Committee.

Democrats countered that their caution in socking away reserves has paid off.

“In anticipation of an inevitable downturn, we have diligently prepared for leaner times, accumulating record level budget reserves that will allow us to adopt a budget that protects the gains we’ve made over the last decade,” said Assemblyman Marc Berman, a Menlo Park Democrat.

California’s budget is subject to wild fluctuations in revenues because of the state’s heavy reliance on income taxes, particularly from the wealthy whose taxable earnings are largely driven by investment returns. Personal income tax provides about two-thirds of the state’s general fund revenues, with 1% of tax returns — 180,000 — accounting for half of income taxes paid.

A year ago, California saw an unprecedented $97.5 billion budget surplus flip into a $22.5 billion deficit, a figure that swelled to $31.5 billion by May when the governor released his revised proposal for the budget lawmakers had to approve in June.

But even that figure proved wildly off. Due to an unusual delay in tax filings — winter storm disaster declarations prompted the IRS last year to extend 2022 tax filing deadlines into November — state leaders didn’t get a clear picture of income tax revenue filings until December.

The non-partisan Legislative Analyst’s Office reported Dec. 1 that revenues were $58 billion below assumptions for the 2022‑23 through 2024‑25 budget years. A few days later, the LAO projected a $68 billion deficit for the 2024‑25 budget, with additional yearly shortfalls of around $30 billion through 2027-2028.

Legislative Analyst Gabriel Petek said Wednesday that about half the difference between the two deficit projections involves assumptions about minimum school funding requirements under 1988’s Proposition 98, and the other half is revenue projections. The governor’s office, he said, assumes legislative action on school funding and is more optimistic on revenues.

But Petek said there is no “correct” deficit estimate, and that “both are almost certain to be wrong to some extent.”

The governor will revise the budget in May after income taxes are filed and the legislature must approve it in June.

The state’s Republicans, whose votes the Democratic majority hasn’t needed to pass a budget, say Democrats are overspending, noting the state budget has more than doubled in a decade, from $152 billion to $311 billion last year, an increase from $108 billion to $226 billion in the general fund.

While homeless advocates were relieved Newsom declined to propose significant cuts to homelessness spending, service providers “still face an uncertain future when it comes to funding services and affordable housing development,” Bring CA Home, a coalition of advocates and providers, said in a statement.

The proposed budget keeps funding levels flat for transitional kindergarten through junior college education, the single largest state program, and above Prop 98 guaranteed levels, including the transitional kindergarten rollout, student mental health and special education.

Albert Gonzalez, president of the California School Boards Association, said that while they were “concerned to see a reduction in school facilities funding and a cost-of-living adjustment below 1 percent,” school boards “understand a $38 billion deficit demands tradeoffs.”

Environmentalists were disappointed that many of the cuts are coming from programs to address climate change, particularly after this past year, which is expected to rank as the hottest in recorded history.

Newsom committed in 2021 to a landmark $54 billion on climate programs over five years — including expanding electric car charging stations, boosting solar and wind power incentives, and thinning forests to reduce wildfire risk. His proposed Wednesday budget trimmed that to $48 billion over seven years, with the hopes that some funding will come from the federal government.

“We had hoped for a more courageous proposal,” said Mary Creasman, CEO of California Environmental Voters, a non-profit group in Sacramento. “Every penny we pinch now is going to have exponential costs for Californians in wildfires, floods and other disasters.”

Staff Writer Ethan Varian contributed.

The idea was to boost the famed football franchise’s image and use most of the proceeds to help fund programs at California’s state parks system, similar to the way that other license plates raise money for Lake Tahoe, Yosemite, veterans programs and other causes.

But now, with less than five months until a make-or-break deadline, the team that has clinched top seed in the NFC playoffs is looking for a Hail Mary from its fans.

Under state law, motorists must pre-purchase 7,500 orders for any specialty license plate before the California Department of Motor Vehicles will agree to print it. As of this week, only 2,700 orders have come in for the 49ers plate, first unveiled in May 2022. The cost is $50 up front and $40 a year to renew, on top of normal vehicle registration fees.

“It’s a lofty goal,” said Justin Prettyman, executive director of the San Francisco 49ers Foundation, which is leading the effort. “I truly do believe that if we are able to get to 7,500, the plates will then sell themselves.”

Facing a similar shortfall with only 1,055 pre-orders after two years of trying, the Los Angeles Rams quietly dropped their campaign in October to create a specialty plate to help fund state parks. But the 49ers asked the DMV for an extension and now have until May 31 to hit pay dirt or fumble the opportunity.

It isn’t for lack of effort. Hall-of-Fame receiver Jerry Rice already pitches the plate on the scoreboard at Levi’s Stadium during home games. Team officials plan to ramp up digital advertising, and the California Natural Resources Agency, which is partnering with the 49ers on the project, will have a booth at Levi’s Stadium on Sunday for the 49ers-Rams game trying to secure more sign-ups.

“We want to continue sharing the sense of urgency,” said Tony Andersen, a spokesman for the Resources Agency, which oversees the state parks department. “The sooner folks can get their orders in, the better so we can meet that mark. We want to avoid people waiting until the last minute. It’s a great cause.”

The proposed plate has the simple yet iconic 49ers logo on it, with the words “Faithful to State Parks.”

Overall, 75% of the proceeds from sales would go to the state’s “Outdoors for All” program, which aims to expand access to parks to underserved communities, along with other state parks projects.

The nonprofit 49ers Foundation also would receive 25% of the proceeds for the team’s youth and science education programs.

The specialty 49ers plates are eligible for autos, trucks, motorcycles or trailers registered in California. More information and signup details are at 49ersplates.com.

More than $200 million has been raised over the years from California’s 14 specialty plates, among them the Yosemite plate, which funds projects in Yosemite National Park; a Snoopy plate that raises money for California museums; a whale-tail plate that has generated money for beach cleanups and coastal programs; a veterans plate that aids military veterans programs; and other specialty plates.

But they don’t always succeed.

In recent years, other attempted plates to raise money for environmental causes, including a redwoods plate in 2017 to help fund redwood protection in parks and a Salton Sea plate to fund restoration of that beleaguered body of water in Imperial County, have died after not being able to reach the 7,500 mark.

In 2010, a plate with an image of the Golden Gate Bridge — whose backers hoped it would raise $1 million a year for the California Coastal Conservancy — failed to secure enough buyers, as did a plate featuring an image of a bear and a mountain that would have funded projects of the Sierra Nevada Conservancy, a state agency.

One supporter of the idea of using license plates to raise money for environmental causes said Friday he’s not sure why the 49ers and Rams plates haven’t been more popular.

“The presumption was that there is a market for Rams and Niner fans to identify themselves via their license plates,” said State Sen. Josh Newman, D-Fullerton. “But maybe the market isn’t there. Or the marketing doesn’t work. It’s more likely that the marketing isn’t working.”

Newman said maybe for many fans, a decal and license plate frame is enough.

“There are 70,000 people at Niners games in Santa Clara,” he said. “You’d think there would be 7,500 people who’d want one.”

Like the other plates, if the 49ers plate doesn’t secure 7,500 pre-orders, refunds will be given to people who signed up to purchase it.

California’s most popular commemorative plates first came out in the 1990s, with big splashy artwork, like the Yosemite and Coastal Commission’s whale-tail plates.

But complicating the trend is a state law, signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006, that limited the size of the art work on the plates. Prompted by concerns from the California Highway Patrol that officers were having a hard time reading the license plate numbers, the law required that any logo be no larger than 2-by-3 inches — about the size of a business card.

So 49ers fans wanting a big image of five Super Bowl trophies or Dwight Clark pulling in “The Catch” will have to wait.

Many fans apparently aren’t even aware that the 49ers license plate campaign, which began in May 2022, exists.

“I haven’t heard of them” said Mary Lemos, a bartender at Kezar Pub, a long-time 49ers fan bar in San Francisco with walls covered with the teams’ memorabilia. “Our customers haven’t either. But if they knew, I’m sure they would be interested.”

The ships — which can be more than 800 feet long and 100 feet wide — emit soot from huge diesel engines and boilers when they are sitting at the dock, sometimes for days. That pollution can affect communities in waterfront cities like Oakland, Richmond, Los Angeles, Long Beach and San Diego, increasing the risk of asthma, heart attacks and other health problems.

Since 2007, California has required large cargo ships and cruise ships to plug in to the local power grid to obtain electricity when they arrive at a port, so their engines and boilers don’t idle, a practice that reduces air pollution.

The new rules, approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday and published in the Federal Register on Friday, expand those requirements to include oil tankers, chemical tankers and car-carrying ships. They will be phased in between now and Jan. 1, 2027.

Officials with the California Air Resources Board say tankers and car carriers emit 56% of all the particulate pollution from ships at berth in California, and that the new rules, which it passed in 2020, will save 237 lives, and yield $2.3 billion in public health savings by 2032.

“Pollution from ocean-going vessels is causing poisonous air for people living near the ports and is increasing regional smog,” said Bill Magavern, policy director at the Coalition for Clean Air, an environmental group with offices in Sacramento and Los Angeles. “This rule will help people in port communities and in California coastal regions breathe healthier air.”

Air pollution in port cities spiked during the COVID pandemic, when dozens of ships backed up at ports.

The shipping industry opposed the new California rules. It objected to the way that emissions are calculated. Under the original rule, total emissions from a company’s shipping fleet at the dock had to be reduced 50% by 2014 from 2007 levels, then 70% by 2017 and 80% by 2020. The new rule requires a 90% reduction, but from each ship, rather than from a fleet average, said Mike Jacob, vice president of the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association, an industry group in Oakland.

“We already are under an existing rule,” Jacob said. “We think the way it occurs right now is better. We have invested over $1.5 billion in shore-power infrastructure. We felt going through another process for determining whether or not you are compliant was like ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.’”

The oil industry is suing over the new rules.

A tanker can comply if it either plugs into the power grid at the dock, or if it puts in place an exhaust-scrubbing device that captures the fumes from its diesel engines and boilers and cleans them.

In September 2020, the Western States Petroleum Association sued the California Air Resources Board, claiming that the technology hasn’t been invented yet for such scrubbing devices to meet the tough standards that the air board imposed.

The association, whose members include companies like Chevron and ExxonMobil, lost that lawsuit in Los Angeles County Superior Court. In March, it filed an appeal.

“Right now the technology doesn’t exist to the degree that the emissions have to be capped,” said Kara Greene, a spokeswoman for the Western States Petroleum Association. “The air resources board says it will be. But there are no venders for it now.”

Environmental groups note that the California Air Resources Board, first established by former Gov. Ronald Reagan in 1967 to reduce smog, often passes rules setting standards higher than current technology can achieve. The goal is to push industry to invent it by a looming deadline.

In recent years, as California’s smog levels have fallen, the agency has continued to tighten regulations on a wide variety of sources of soot pollution — called particulate pollution — including from trucks, locomotives and other sources. Such pollution can lodge deep in the lungs of people who regularly breathe it, increasing the risk of asthma, cancer, heart attacks and other ailments, particularly in low-income communities near ports, freeways, power plants, factories and rail yards.

Under the federal Clean Air Act, signed by former President Richard Nixon in 1970, California is allowed to set its own air pollution rules that are tougher than federal standards. If the EPA approves, then other states can copy California’s rules.

The Trump administration worked to deny California rules for autos, but the Obama and Biden administrations have approved them. Oftentimes, when California’s more stringent smog rules go into force, at least a dozen other states, including New York, copy them, and they eventually become the national standard.

Environmental groups this week urged other states to copy California’s new shipping pollution rules. They also urged California regulators to impose additional smog rules on ships as they sail through state waters, not just when they are sitting at the dock.

“It’s always good to see California in the driver’s seat on air pollution issues, and it’s especially good to see EPA back the Golden State,” said Regina Hsu, a senior attorney with Earthjustice, an environmental group based in San Francisco.

The storm, powering in from the North Pacific, will mostly hit the far northern reaches of the state, bringing 2 to 3 inches of rain in Eureka and other communities, forecasters said Friday.

“There’s a wet storm coming,” said Marty Ralph, director of the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at UC San Diego. “It should be largely beneficial. And it’s going to be fairly long lasting — over 48 hours.”

But most Bay Area residents probably won’t need their umbrellas.

About half an inch is expected late Sunday and Monday in Santa Rosa, Cloverdale and other parts of the North Bay, according to the National Weather Service. San Francisco may get one-tenth of an inch.

Farther south, there will be significantly less.

“It looks like any really measurable rain is going to be north of the Golden Gate,” said Jan Null, a meteorologist with Golden Gate Weather Services in San Mateo County. “There will be drizzle in Half Moon Bay and some other parts of the Bay Area.”

It’s been four months since the Bay Area received any significant rain. May 3 was the last time, when .54 inches fell in San Francisco.

The storm will shift Northern California’s weather from a summer pattern into more of a fall and winter feel.

The rain will bring major benefits, experts say. It is expected to help firefighters who are battling several lightning-started wildfires in rural forests near the Oregon border — including the 96,000-acre Six Rivers Complex Fire, which is burning in Del Norte County and was 79% contained Friday, and the 30,000-acre SRF Complex Fire, which is only 7% contained, and burning in Humboldt and Del Norte counties.

All that rain will slow the fires substantially, but also will douse their smoke — much of which has drifted into the Bay Area this week — and blow it west and north, experts say.

“It may not fully extinguish these fires,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA. “A lot of the fires burning up there right now are in heavy heavy timber. But it really will dramatically reduce fire activity and if it’s followed up by another rain event that might really be the end of first season up there.”

Along the Humboldt/De Norte coast, Sunday’s storm is predicted to be a 4 on a scale of 1 to 5.

For the Bay Area and other locations downwind, “it’s going to dramatically improve air quality,” Swain added.

Atmospheric river storms are the biggest “rivers” on Earth. Moisture-rich storms that often originate near Hawaii, they flow through the sky up to 2 miles above the ocean and carry twice the volume of water per second as the Amazon River and 25 times the volume of the Mississippi where it flows into the ocean.

When high-pressure ridges off the coast block atmospheric rivers from California, diverting them to Canada or the Pacific Northwest, California can enter a drought. That happened repeatedly during California’s severe drought from 2012 to 2016, and again regularly during the most recent drought from 2020 to 2022.

When the ridges are gone, as they are now, the storms can move from the ocean into California, delivering a moisture-laden punch. They are key to the state’s water supply. In a typical year, California receives about a dozen such storms, which account for roughly 50% of its precipitation.

This past winter, the state received 31 atmospheric river storms, said Ralph, of UC-San Diego.

“They really broke the landscape drought and reservoir drought in most of California,” he said.

They also delivered the largest snowpack to the Sierra Nevada in 40 years. All that snow, and high levels of moisture in soils and trees, are a key reason that California has had a very mild fire season this summer.

As of Monday, 257,405 acres had burned in 2023 in California on lands overseen by Cal Fire, the state’s leading firefighting agency, and the U.S. Forest Service. That is just 22% of the five-year average over the same dates.

“It’s rather nice to be in a window where there where there aren’t ongoing concurrent fire crises in multiple parts of the state,” Swain said.

California’s water outlook for next year is very positive also.

On Friday, the two largest reservoirs in the state, Shasta near Redding, and Oroville, in Butte County, were 74% and 76% full — roughly 130% of their historical average for this date. San Luis, between Gilroy and Hollister, was 82% full — double its historic average. And the largest reservoir in Southern California, Diamond Valley, in Riverside County, was also 82% full.

With the winter rainy season about two months away from beginning in earnest, water managers are more concerned at this point with too much, rather than too little rain.

El Niño conditions are shaping up in the Pacific Ocean. They form when winds shift, causing a changing in the upwelling of cool waters, which heats the temperature of the water’s surface.

Although El Niño years are not a guarantee of wet winter conditions, they do increase the likelihood, particularly in Southern California. Several of California’s wettest winters, like 1982-83 and 1997-98, have occurred during strong El Niño events.

After the drought-busting storms of this spring, water managers and dam operators deliberately let some water out of reservoirs to free up space to catch more water and reduce the risk of downstream flooding — space they will need if this winter is another wet one.

California is off to its slowest start to fire season in 25 years.

A state traumatized by huge fires over the past decade that have burned millions of acres — killing more than 200 people, and generating choking smoke and apocalyptic orange skies — has seen almost no major fire activity so far in 2023.

As of Thursday, just 24,229 acres had burned in California since Jan. 1, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. That’s 82% less than the state’s 10-year average and is the lowest of any year since 1998.

Only four structures have burned statewide in wildfires so far this year and there have been no fatalities, reports Cal Fire, the state’s main firefighting agency. By comparison, one fire in July 2018, the Carr Fire near Redding, destroyed 1,614 structures and killed eight people, including three firefighters.

The reason for the state’s good fortune now, experts say, is water. Lots of it.

“I was in the mountains this past week,” said Scott Stephens, a professor of wildland fire science at UC Berkeley. “Things are green. Streams are flowing. It’s still wet.”

While fire agencies often warn that extra rain can help fuel fire danger, an analysis of 30 years of rainfall and wildfire records by the Bay Area News Group shows that wildfire risk in California is much higher after dry winters, and lower after wet winters like this year’s.

Since 1993, four of the five worst fire years measured by acres burned statewide occurred after drier-than-normal winters. Those were 2020, 2021, 2018 and 2008. The only one that followed a wet winter was in 2017, when fall rains came late in the season and power lines fell in winds, sparking the Wine Country fires in October, and the massive Thomas Fire in December in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties.

In contrast, all five of California’s mildest fire years over the past three decades happened after wet winters — 2010, 1995, 1998, 2011 and 2019. This past winter was similar. The statewide average rainfall was 140% of normal.

“My prediction has been that we are going to be below normal for wildfire this year,” said Craig Clements, director of the Fire Weather Research Laboratory at San Jose State University. “And that’s what we’re seeing right now.”

An onslaught of drenching atmospheric river storms this winter ended California’s three-year drought, filling reservoirs, causing flooding in some areas, and delivering the biggest Sierra Nevada snowpack in 40 years.

To be sure, big fires are still a possibility, fire scientists say. Dry lightning storms, like the state experienced in 2008 and 2020, or a rash of arson fires, or extreme heat waves with hot winds blowing from east to west, could spark big blazes, particularly in September and October, which typically are the most dangerous wildfire months in California.

“We aren’t out of the woods,” Clements said. “When we get to the fall, fuel moistures will be low again. If rains start late, or if we have a bunch of wind events, we could still have a big fire.”

Typically, if a winter was dry, fire officials will say that summer fire risk is high because the landscape is dry and primed to burn.

But if the winter was wetter-than-normal, they’ll regularly say that fire risk is also high because lots of grass has grown up, which provides fuel for fires.

“The abundant rain has produced tall grass and other vegetation that’s dried out already and is ready to burn,” said Cal Fire Chief Joe Tyler at a news conference June 29.

But every year doesn’t bring huge firestorms.

“The fire agencies say it’s always high fire danger,” said Jan Null, a meteorologist with Golden Gate Weather Services in Half Moon Bay, who helped compile the data. “If it’s wet, that equals bad. And if it’s dry it equals bad. That hurts their credibility. I think they want to make people aware of fires, which is part of their preparedness program. But all years don’t have the same risk. Summers following wet winters typically have fewer acres burned.”

While rainy winters do cause more grass to grow, fire scientists say they also keep moisture levels higher in soils, shrubs and trees longer into the summer. So when fires do start, they often don’t spread as fast as in dry years.

“Grass fires aren’t usually a big problem for Cal Fire,” Clements said. “They can get on grass fires really quickly, and retardant drops work well on them. The fact we have more grass isn’t going to make or break our fire season. What makes or breaks our fire season is the big fuels — the forests, the trees and the heavy shrubs.”

Right now, Clements said, moisture levels in shrubs, like manzanita and chamise, are higher than normal, running about one month ahead of average.

“If vegetation is wetter it’s harder to ignite,” Stephens said. “You get lower flame lengths, and fire doesn’t spread as fast. Try to start a campfire with wood that has been wet from rain. It’s hard.”

In addition, snow is still covering the ground across many areas in the Sierra Nevada, a rarity for July and August.

Skiers wearing shorts frolicked at Lake Tahoe on July 4th. Mammoth Mountain ski area in the Southern Sierra is open this weekend.

Because there has been so little fire activity in 2023, plenty of engines, firefighters, helicopters and planes have been available when fires have started.

On Monday, a blaze called the Wonder Fire began in brush and timber north of Redding. Cal Fire, the U.S. Forest Service and other agencies kept it to 162 acres. No homes burned and there were no injuries.

“Within an hour they had like eight air tankers there,” said Zeke Lunder, a fire analyst in Chico. “They can keep small fires fairly small as long as there isn’t a lot of competition for resources.”

Lunder, who has worked for the past 25 years developing fire mapping and fire behavior models, said that as the climate has warmed, some public officials and climate activists have given the incorrect message that every year is going to be catastrophic. But local weather conditions like wind, lightning, soil moisture and availability of firefighting resources are still key, he said.

“I don’t think you’ll find any firefighters who will say climate change isn’t changing the dynamics,” he said. “But it’s not predictable, and it’s not across the board.”

State firefighting officials say they welcome the trend this year. But they don’t want the public to become complacent.

“It’s been about as good as you could hope for,” said Isaac Sanchez, a Cal Fire battalion chief. “We want zero fires and zero acres. But if you are going to have to have fires you want them on the low side. And that’s what we’ve had.”

Until this weekend, the only fire of even moderate size this year so far in California was the Rabbit Fire, which burned 8,283 acres in Riverside County. It began July 14 and was contained a week later. No homes burned. By comparison, California’s two largest fires, the Dixie Fire in July 2021, and the August Complex Fire in August 2020, burned roughly 1 million acres each in rural Northern California.

On Saturday, two other new fires were burning, the 4,200-acre York Fire, in a remote area of the Mojave National Preserve near the Nevada state line, and the 2,200-acre Bonny Fire, near Aguanga in Riverside County.

“We’re happy with what we’ve experienced so far,” Sanchez said. “If we are able to keep this level of fire activity up through the rest of the year, we’ll be happy with that. But we are prepared for that not to be the case. We’re ready.”

Due to massive amounts of snow this past winter, the opening date is the latest in 90 years, when modern records began. The previous record was July 8, 1933.

“Everything came together fortuitously and wonderfully in the last couple of days,” said Yosemite spokesman Scott Gediman. “We’ve are really excited.”

The road had been buried under more than 15 feet of snow and ice after a winter that saw the most snow ever recorded in Yosemite’s high country near Tuolumne Meadows.

As crews dug it out over the past few months, they began to discover major damage to buildings, including the store, restaurant and employee housing at Tuolumne Meadows, the main visitor area along Tioga Road.

Gediman said that roughly 30 buildings had been damaged, some of them aging structures whose roofs caved in from the weight of the snow and ice. The wastewater system at Tuolumne Meadows, along with power lines, a cell phone tower and radio repeater tower all suffered significant damage from the harsh winter weather.

Earlier this week, parks officials said they might not be able to open Tioga Road for another two weeks because so many visitor facilities had been damaged.

But in recent days, parks employees have been able to secure portable toilets and make enough repairs to damaged portions of the road that it can now open, Gediman said. But visitors should expect spartan conditions.

The Tuolumne Meadows Wilderness Center will be open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and a general information desk near the Tuolumne Meadows visitor center will be open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. But the Tuolumne Meadows store, post office, restaurant, lodge, and campgrounds at Porcupine Flat and Tamarack Flat will remain closed for an unknown length of time while repairs can be made.

Still, the opening of the iconic Tioga Road is expected to relieve congestion in Yosemite Valley for the rest of this summer, as visitors now have another place to venture. On weekends since the weather began to warm up, crowds coming to the park to see raging waterfalls from the vast amounts of melting snow have sat in sometimes hours-long traffic jams, leading to requests that the park re-instate a day-use reservation system it put in place during the COVID pandemic to limit visitation.

Some of the traffic congestion was relieved last weekend, when road crews finished clearing and reopened Glacier Point Road, a landmark drive that looks down from the massive granite rock formations that flank Yosemite Valley’s southern edge.

One of the marquee drives in America’s national park system, the two-lane Tioga Road bisects Yosemite’s alpine center, passing through subalpine meadows and forests of lodgepole pine and juniper. It runs 46 miles from Crane Flat to Tioga Pass, where it crests at 9,945 feet in the highest highway pass in California.

The road typically closes every winter in November. Then it usually reopens in mid-May. It is a key route not only for tourists, but for local residents who need to cross over the Sierra Nevada.

The route for centuries was a footpath for Miwok Indians, upgraded to a mining road in 1883 during a brief silver boom, and then a private toll road that charged $2 per horse and rider.

In an unusual act of philanthropy, it became public and part of the park in 1915, when Stephen Mather, the first director of the National Park Service, bought it for $15,000 with his own money and donations from the Sierra Club and the Modesto Chamber of Commerce. He sold it to Congress that year for $10, hoping to bring more tourists into the park.