By: Robyn Grimm
“If we really want long-term resilience here in the Valley and beyond, we have to build it together, and that starts with trust. [Shared data] is what lets people sit down and say, we might not agree, but at least we’re agreeing that we’re starting off with the same facts.”
– Eddie Ocampo, Consortium Steering Committee Co-Chair and Director of Public Affairs at Self Help Enterprises
In May 2026, the California Water Data Consortium hosted a virtual Town Hall on leveraging water data infrastructure to maximize the benefits of Proposition 4. Over 150 leaders from state agencies, local water agencies, nonprofits, research institutions, and communities registered to participate. The conversation made at least one thing overwhelmingly clear: proactive investment in water data infrastructure is critical for climate resilience success in California.
Three interconnected challenges emerged as priorities: regional data coordination, aligned data governance, and workforce development. Addressing these will require sustained funding beyond the Proposition 4 bond itself – and General Obligation bonds in general.
Why Data Standards Matter (And Why They’re So Hard to Build)
When asked about barriers to a more data-driven and resilient water future, attendees identified regionally coordinated data standards and protocols as the top barrier, followed by monitoring gaps, data architecture and management, and regional coordination. Panelists and attendees alike spoke on how a lack of aligned data standards and regional coordination leads to missed opportunities and economic inefficiencies. Without standards and coordination, data generated in one basin can’t talk to data from another. Investments don’t build on each other; they operate in parallel.
The challenge extends across the ecosystem. One virtual event attendee shared that rural communities face particular constraints:
“Rural counties and GSAs face unique challenges in building and maintaining the data systems and workforce needed to support projects, modernized data collection and information-sharing platforms. Limited staffing capacity, constrained budgets and aging infrastructure often make implementation especially difficult in rural communities. Dedicated funding, guidance and technical support are essential to help rural areas launch, operate and sustain these systems so they can fully participate in modern data initiatives.”
– Sharla Stockton, Luhdorff & Scalmanini
Coordination and aligned data governance enable parties to work together to fill monitoring gaps and apply data to decision-making in more transparent, cost-effective, and timely ways.
But as Tara Moran, senior advisor at the Consortium, noted: “Data standardization may sound relatively straightforward, what what we’ve learned is that it isn’t a technical problem—it really is an institutional one.”
Governance Gaps: Who Decides? Who Maintains? Who’s Responsible?
Nearly all attendees reported shared frustrations related to data governance, or lack of clarity about who makes decisions, who has authority, and how maintenance and QA/QC are funded. This is true at the state level, too.
Paul Gosselin, Deputy Director for Sustainable Water Management at DWR, named the frustration many local agencies share:
“One of the more frustrating things for local agencies is producing information to the state and just wondering if it’s just going in a file. If we’re going to ask for data, we better use it, and we better show people how we’re using it and make it more transparent.”
This is where trust and governance converge. Without clear governance, data is not published and shared in timely, consistent, or transparent ways, and this erodes communities’ trust. Without trust, they won’t participate. Data infrastructure, at its core, is about creating trustworthy systems.
As Lacey McBride, Merced County’s Water Resources Manager, put it: “Having the public data to back up the policies in the beginning… is critical to public acceptance.”
The Underfunded Essentials
When asked what top 3 aspects of data infrastructure are critical to climate adaptation yet hardest to fund, attendees overwhelmingly identified shared open data infrastructure, cross-sector coordination, and long-term monitoring as barriers. While one-time funding for projects is available, sustained funding for data governance is scarce.
As attendee Laura Feinstein from San Francisco Estuary Institute explained in the virtual meeting chat: “Our problem is that once our project funding runs out, we don’t have sufficient funding to operate and maintain the databases and tools—even ones that our government partners rely on.”
Sustainable funding for ongoing support and capacity building is essential for managing climate adaptation.
Equally critical is the people dimension. Aaron Fukuda, CEO of the Tulare Irrigation District, was direct:
“As much as the quality of the data is important, you have to hire quality people. If they can’t communicate and translate that data into real action, you actually create mistrust and damage.”
Attendees repeatedly pointed to workforce development, communities of practice, and sustained operations funding as critical needs—things that rarely make it into a grant application but that, without them, the whole system breaks down.
Why This Is An Ecosystem Problem
The Town Hall drew a broad cross-section of the water resilience data ecosystem: from support organizations, grantees, granting agencies, researchers, and others.
Even support organizations, people whose job is to help expand capacity, reported barriers. This isn’t a grantee problem or an agency problem. It’s an ecosystem problem.
The ecosystem needs investment at every level: support organizations need resources to convene and coordinate; grantees need clear guidance and technical assistance; agencies need capacity to develop and maintain standards; researchers need accessible, well-documented data; and communities need transparency and trust.
A Different Approach: Resources First, Requirements Second
State granting programs can support water data infrastructure by encouraging and funding data management planning, regional coordination, data-sharing pilots and tools, transparent model development, and the development of consistent standards. But – critically – these grant program guidelines and policies should be designed to enable, not burden, grantees.
As Tara Moran emphasized: “If we can integrate data and the funding, the technical assistance, the guidance and resources into granting programs, then we really open up this world of possibility to re-engineer decision making using better data and information.”
The key is flexible, adequately resourced support rather than unfunded mandates.
What Comes Next
Water data infrastructure, when built with the right governance, long-term investment, consistent standards, and people who can translate data into action, becomes critical infrastructure. It’s what enables better decisions, more resilient communities, and a water future that works for everyone.
The town hall conversation was not just about numbers and technical upgrades; fundamentally it’s about building trust and common understanding amongst groups of people who are all trying to collectively manage our resources more effectively, more sustainably.
That’s the infrastructure we need to build.
Watch the Town Hall recording below, read the full report, and download the executive summary at cawaterdata.org/prop4report.