Politics
Cost of bringing clean drinking water to California communities estimated at $11.5 billion
California has made significant progress helping small communities address problems of contaminated drinking water, but the costs of bringing safe tap water to hundreds of communities over the next five years will run more than $11.5 billion, according to a new state estimate.
In a newly released report, the staff of the State Water Resources Control Board estimated that at the start of this year approximately 913,000 Californians depended on public water systems that are failing to comply with drinking water regulations, while an additional 1.5 million people depended on water systems that are determined to be “at-risk.”
Officials carried out the assessment nearly five years after the state established the Safe and Affordable Funding for Equity and Resilience, or SAFER, drinking water program. They said in the report that under the program, the state water board has since 2019 given more than $831 million in grants for drinking water projects in disadvantaged communities, and that about 250 failing water systems serving more than 2 million people have come into compliance with drinking water standards.
“What our analysis has shown time and again is that the common denominator is size,” said Joaquin Esquivel, chair of the state water board. “Small systems struggle, especially in communities that have experienced discrimination and disinvestment, and their challenges will be amplified as weather grows more extreme, new contaminants emerge and costs increase.”
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California declared access to clean, safe and affordable water a human right in 2012, but the state has faced significant challenges in developing policies and securing adequate funding to bring solutions for communities where people live with contaminated tap water.
In small rural communities across the state, the water pumped from wells contains harmful levels of contaminants including naturally occurring arsenic, bacteria from sewage leaks, nitrate from animal manure, fertilizers or other sources, and carcinogenic chemicals.
Not all systems that are deemed to be failing deliver water that is contaminated, but many of them have at least one contaminant at levels that violate safe drinking water standards.
According to state data, about 56% of the 385 failing water systems supply disadvantaged communities, and 67% of them supply majority communities of color.
“All of our current failing water systems are on track to come off the failing list,” said Kristyn Abhold, senior environmental scientist for the state water board. “They are working on long-term solutions, and our staff and funding resources are being targeted to the ones that are in most need.”
State water regulators have found that the vast majority of the failing water systems serve a small number of residents, while 98% of the state’s population receives water from sources and suppliers that meet drinking water standards.
For a water system to come into compliance with regulations, it takes not only funding but also planning, engineering work and permits, Abhold said.
State officials have assessed other communities that are at risk by analyzing the potential for water quality violations or water shortages, among other factors.
The number of people affected has fluctuated in recent months as some water systems have come off the list and others have been added. The state’s latest estimates show that 738,000 people currently receive water from failing systems, while more than 1.8 million people depend on 548 systems with drinking water supplies determined to be at risk.
The state’s report includes estimated costs for infrastructure solutions such as installing treatment systems, drilling a new well, or consolidating by connecting one water system to another.
The estimated costs of solutions in the latest report were substantially higher than previous state estimates. In a 2021 report, the state water board included a range of estimated costs up to $9.1 billion. Officials said they used new methods and improved data this time, including more water systems and risks in their analysis.
According to the report, the estimated costs of long-term solutions for failing and at-risk public water systems total $6.6 billion over five years, while the costs of solutions for “high-risk” small water systems and domestic wells total $4.9 billion.
Those combined costs, totaling more than $11.5 billion, would be significantly higher if loan repayment costs and operations and maintenance costs are included, the report said, pushing the total estimated cost of “achieving the human right to water” to $15.9 billion.
Officials projected that $2 billion in state grant funds will be available over five years, as well as $1.5 billion in state loans, leaving a substantial gap in available funding. Officials said a large portion of the money to address the problems may need to come from “local cost share” funds collected through rates, fees and taxes.
The report’s higher cost estimates were released amid discussions about budget cuts in Sacramento.
Citing recent cuts, more than 180 organizations, including environmental groups and other organizations, wrote to state leaders urging them to approve placing a $10 billion bond on the November ballot to provide “direct and meaningful investments in the California communities and natural resources most impacted by climate change.”
As part of that ballot measure, they called for including $1 billion for drinking water and wastewater infrastructure for communities and tribes.
Leaders of the groups wrote that “recent and proposed cuts to funding for such programs have prompted consensus that additional bond funding is necessary to ensure priority programs continue beyond this year.”
Jennifer Clary, California director for the group Clean Water Action, said: ”drinking water infrastructure isn’t a luxury item. Without these projects, thousands of Californians will continue to lack access to safe and clean drinking water.”
Clean water advocates have also voiced concerns as state officials have reviewed the costs of a program that provides household tanks and hauls water by truck to thousands of low-income families whose wells have gone dry.
More than 3,000 domestic wells have run dry throughout California since 2020, according to reports submitted to the state. Those with dry wells have started relying on water delivered by tanker trucks to fill their tanks, while also receiving bottled water.
Leaders of the nonprofit group Self-Help Enterprises, which manages the water-hauling effort, recently urged Gov. Gavin Newsom and other state leaders to reject proposals that would take away critical funding for the program. They wrote in a June 11 letter that taking away $17.5 million would “cut off access to water for more than 20,000 people who are still awaiting a permanent solution.”
The letter, which was first reported by the news site SJV Water, was also signed by leaders of other organizations, including the Community Water Center and Union of Concerned Scientists.
“The reversions of these funds will cut off access to water for more than 20,000 people who are still awaiting a permanent solution,” the groups said. “Cutting funding for such a crucial program would have devastating effects on rural and disadvantaged communities by immediately cutting them off from their sole source of water supply, and doing so with no warning.”
Leaders of some groups said later that the funding for the program has been restored.
Politics
Omar’s disclosures erased millions, leaving her with potential negative net worth. She won’t explain why.
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Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., refused to address her revised financial disclosures that could imply she has a negative net worth after the progressive lawmaker dramatically reducing the reported value of assets tied to her husband’s business ventures.
“Can you tell us if your husband still has the consulting business and the wine business?” Fox News Digital asked Omar.
The congresswoman stayed silent as she was repeatedly questioned, after previously telling Fox News Digital that the original filing — showing Omar’s reported assets reducing by as much as $29.9 million — was inaccurate and “incomplete” information.
ILHAN OMAR’S OFFICE SAYS SHE’S ‘NOT A MILLIONAIRE’ AFTER $30M FILING REVISED DOWN TO UNDER $100K: REPORT
US Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, speaks during a press conference with family members of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh as members of Congress call for US investigations into Israel’s actions and reintroduce the Justice for Shireen Act, outside the US Capitol in Washington, DC, May 18, 2023. The Al Jazeera journalist, who was a dual US citizen, was killed on May 11, 2022. The Israeli army later admitted one of its soldiers likely shot the reporter. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)
The controversy surrounding Omar’s finances began when a 2024 financial report estimated that Omar and her husband possessed between $6 million and $30 million in assets, all while the Minnesota fraud scandal within the Somali community was beginning to come to fruition.
A more recent 2025 financial disclosure report shows Omar’s revised value of shared assets between her and husband to sit at a maximum of $125,000 — a multi-million-dollar drop from the year prior. The lower estimate of their assets, $20,000, compared to the low and high debt estimates, $30,000 and $100,000, would imply the Minnesota Democrat could have a negative net worth.
Both her and her husband have separate debts, each ranging somewhere between $15,000 and $50,000 — from her own student loans and her husband’s credit card debt, according to the disclosures.
WATCH: OMAR SILENT WHEN CONFRONTED ON ALLEGED TIES TO MASSIVE MINNESOTA FRAUD SCANDAL
RICHFIELD, MN – AUGUST 08: Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) (C) campaigns with her husband Tim Mynett (R) at the Richfield Farmers Market on August 8, 2020 in Richfield, Minnesota. Omar is hoping to retain her seat as the representative for Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District in next week’s primary election. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
The biggest change in the documents involved Omar’s husband, Tim Mynett. His reported ownership interests in both his winery and venture capital advisory firm, which were previously valued in the millions of dollars, are listed with no value now.
In Omar’s 2024 financial disclosure records, Mynett’s share in his winery was valued between $1 million and $5 million, and his share at the venture capital advisory firm was valued between $5 million and $25 million. Now, his equity interests are both listed at $0.
Omar’s office previously told Fox News Digital that Mynett has partners in both businesses and said the earlier disclosure mistakenly reflected the businesses’ total equity rather than his ownership interest. The office also said the original filing listed assets without accounting for liabilities.
VANCE REFERS TIM WALZ, MINNESOTA ATTORNEY GENERAL TO DOJ FOR CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION OVER STATE’S ALLEGED FRAUD
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., has publicly voiced his interest in the Ethics Committee opening an investigation into Omar’s personal finances after the 2025 financial reports came out showing the possibility of a $29 million drop in her net worth.
Vice President JD Vance also has previously said the U.S. Department of Justice will be opening a probe into her alleged fraud as part of the administration’s anti-fraud taskforce that he spearheads, though no formal investigations have been shared with the public at this time.
Omar has been reluctant to answer Fox News Digital’s questions about her financial fallout and potential probes to be opened against her.
The Minnesota lawmaker similarly dodged answering any of Fox News Digital’s questions just last month about the revised disclosures.
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“There’s also the possibility that it might rain on this sunny day,” Omar replied without responding directly to the content of the question.
Fox News Digital’s Robert Schmad contributed to this report.
As a student years ago, I dove deep into the history of the Red-hunting McCarthy era and became familiar with the actor who emerged second only to Wisconsin Sen. Joe McCarthy as the villain of that insidious time: his shameless, conniving young lawyer, Roy Cohn. Never would I have imagined that a future president would count Cohn as a mentor and role model.
Then came Donald Trump.
Now, in Cohn-inflected McCarthyesque style, President Trump is channeling his tutor yet again, baselessly labeling his political enemies — all Democrats — as communists as he looks ahead to the fall’s midterm elections. Once more Trump shows that his catchphrase “Make America great again” means regressing, this time to Trump’s formative 1950s and the McCarthy era that sadly helped define it.
In recent speeches, including on the Fourth of July, Trump’s utterances of “communist” or “communism” reached double digits each time. (As that implies, the president didn’t set aside his divisive rhetoric even for the nation’s 250th birthday.)
“Our warriors did not fight communism on battlefields across the world only to have that menace rear its ugly head right back here in America,” Trump said late on the Fourth on the National Mall.
Trump couples his commie-baiting with a dash of his trademark xenophobia. “There is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including by newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success,” he said at Mount Rushmore a day earlier. (He’s got it backward, of course: Immigrants come here for the American way of life and promise of success.)
Here’s the irony: Trump’s actions in his second term make him look more like the commie. He’s projecting again.
Now that Trump is exploiting a few victories lately by left-wing democratic socialists in Democratic primaries to paint the entire party as communists, it’s time to review the record — his record.
A hallmark of communism is government ownership of companies and control of the economy, at the expense of private property and free markets. In just over a year, Trump has used billions of taxpayers’ dollars to buy shares for the government in a growing list of private companies — U.S. Steel, Intel, Westinghouse and more — citing national security. The companies don’t always welcome their new stakeholder; at a minimum, they rightly fear it for the demands the government could make about prices and production.
“It’s what Putin did,” the estranged Republicans at the Lincoln Project posted online Monday. “Trump is the closest we’ve ever come to communism.”
“What began as a populist revolt against so-called elites has become a program of state ownership, price fixing and top-down industrial control,” free-market economist Veronique de Rugy wrote in The Times last October of Trump’s actions. “The power to ‘partner’ with business is the power to control it.”
Comrade Trump’s first big government grab, and a model for those to come, was in June last year, when he wrested a permanent “golden share” in U.S. Steel in return for approving its sale to Japan’s Nippon Steel. The company’s charter was revised to give the U.S. president extraordinary veto power over nearly a dozen corporate activities, including closing or relocating plants, supply-chain decisions, even pricing.
“We have a golden share, which I control,” Trump told reporters at the time, in words I never thought I’d hear from a president of the party once associated with free markets.
Just last week, Trump boasted to CNBC how he’d extracted a 10% stake in beleaguered chip giant Intel last August, after first demanding that its chief executive resign. “Intel came in. They had a problem. I said, ‘I can solve your problem, but I want 10% of the company.’ … Somebody said that’s not very American. I said, ‘No, I think it is very American, actually.’ And I’ve done that with other deals.”
And so he has.
The Pentagon is now the largest stockholder in struggling MP Materials, a large rare-earth mine in California, and guarantees a 10-year price floor for its output that stunned competitors. The administration has since taken shares in other rare-earth companies. The Commerce Department took an option for an 8% stake in Westinghouse, to spur construction of nuclear reactors, and has the right to 20% if the government decides the company should go public. The government takes a 15% cut of Nvidia’s and Advanced Micro Devices’ AI chip sales to China.
As much as anything he does, Trump’s direct intervention in private enterprise invites the question “What if Biden/Harris/Obama did that?” The answer, of course: Trump and Republicans would cry “Communist!”
Trump’s actions are the sort Americans generally have only seen during economic emergencies or major wars, and then rarely. I covered the frenzied and ultimately successful response to the near-collapse of the global financial system and the U.S. auto, insurance and housing industries. Behind the scenes in the Obama White House (and George W. Bush’s at the outset) was constant, angst-filled debate about any actions smacking of government takeovers and a determination that interventions be temporary, unlike Trump’s schemes. (For all the still-lingering unpopularity of the banking bailout, the Treasury — the taxpayers — got all the money back and then some, and exited the business.)
Trump’s economic big-footing isn’t the only way in which he resembles the commies Americans know best, and whom he so admires: Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jung Un. There are also the images of himself everywhere, monuments planned, drearily long and self-adulating speeches and interference in the nation’s cultural, educational and legal spheres and — worst of all — in elections.
At Rushmore, Trump closed with a demand that Congress pass his so-called SAVE America Act to restrict voting. “We do that and we’re not going to lose an election for 100 years,” he said, speaking of course about Republicans.
One-party rule through central government election finagling? Now that’s a communist.
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Maine state Rep. Valli Geiger, a Rockland Democrat, former nurse and former mayor, is drawing sudden national attention after saying now-former Democratic Senate nominee Graham Platner encouraged her to consider taking his place on the ballot in the Maine Senate race.
While Geiger has not been named the replacement nominee, her name entered the Maine Senate scramble after she told local outlet WMTW that Platner called her Monday night, praised her as a “fighter” and asked whether he could put her name forward. Platner’s campaign told the outlet he had not made an endorsement decision but confirmed he encouraged Geiger to consider running if he stepped aside.
After Geiger said Platner called her about potentially putting her name forward, Geiger posted Tuesday she would not “throw Graham under the bus,” while also saying she would not “slander or accuse” Jenny Racicot, the woman who accused Platner of rape, “of anything more than telling the truth as she experienced it.”
By Wednesday, local outlets were reporting that Geiger said Platner had encouraged her to consider running if he withdrew. Platner, who suspended his campaign Wednesday night, has denied the claim.
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT IF PLATNER DROPS OUT? HERE’S WHO COULD REPLACE HIM ON THE BALLOT AND HOW IT COULD WORK
Graham Platner Maine State Rep. Valli Geiger (Maine State Legislature/Getty Images)
“For the movement to continue, it can’t be me. For that reason, we are suspending campaign operations,” Platner said in a video posted to social media.
Geiger is a third-term Democratic state representative from Rockland, according to her legislative biography, representing a coastal House district in Maine that includes Rockland, Criehaven Township, Matinicus Isle Plantation, the Muscle Ridge Islands, North Haven and part of Owls Head. Her biography says she serves on the Labor Committee and the Energy, Utilities and Technology Committee.
Before entering the state legislature, Geiger served six years on the Rockland City Council, including one year as mayor and four years on the Rockland Comprehensive Planning Commission, three of them as chair.
Her biography says she holds a master’s degree in sustainable design and built her own passive-solar, net-zero-energy house. It also describes her as a former nurse at Pen Bay Medical Center who later worked as a health policy analyst and health administrator, including as director of the Healthreach Hospice program and clinical director for Federally Qualified Health Centers around Maine.
The Maine State Capitol May 18, 2026, in Augusta, Maine. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
PLATNER CAMPAIGN PUTTING ‘THUMB ON SCALE’ TO INFLUENCE POSSIBLE REPLACEMENT, MAINE DEM ALLEGES
Geiger’s connection to Platner predates the latest replacement speculation. Local reporting has described her as a close Platner supporter, and WMTW reported she previously stood with him and credited him with helping secure funding for rape kit tracking in Maine.
In her Facebook post responding to Racicot’s allegation, Geiger wrote that Racicot’s story “seems credible” but added that “none of us knows the truth nor will we ever.” She also described Platner as “a man becoming a better man” and said she had hoped he would lead the political movement his campaign had built and will not “throw Graham under the bus.”
In the post, Geiger also praised Platner’s “passion for economic populism” and said she had granted him “an enormous amount of grace” for his behavior during what she described as his “dark years” after multiple deployments.
Dr. Nirav D. Shah, director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, speaks during a news conference about COVID-19 at Maine Emergency Management Agency in Augusta. (Derek Davis/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images)
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The Maine state representative is not the only Democrat whose name has surfaced as Maine Democrats prepare for the possibility that Platner exits the race against Republican Sen. Susan Collins.
Several Democrats have expressed interest or are considering bids, including former gubernatorial candidate Troy Jackson, Secretary of State Shenna Bellows and former Maine CDC Director Nirav Shah.
Under Maine law, the Maine Democratic Party can replace him on the general election ballot by selecting a new nominee through its party process, with the replacement required to be chosen by July 27.
Fox News Digital’s Andrew Mark Miller and Paul Steinhauser contributed to this report.
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