The future of the Colorado River and more news from the states

Happy Friday! Thanks for sticking with us through another busy news week.

In case you missed it, New Jersey Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed legislation that criminalizes interference with reproductive and transgender healthcare while barring a range of officials from aiding investigations spawned by states where such care is illegal.

Idaho Republican Attorney General Raúl Labrador announced that his office is appealing a recent federal court ruling allowing abortions to protect the mother’s health or prevent her death from self-harm. Labrador is asking a federal appeals court to block the decision, allowing the near-total abortion ban to be enforced as written. 

Next week, voters in Georgia’s 13th Congressional District will decide who they want to finish the late Democratic Congressman David Scott’s term. Oklahoma voters will also head to the polls for primary runoff elections.

Louisiana: Frustrated foster parents vented to a panel of lawmakers about seeing less money from the state to care for kids in state custody. The news came as a surprise to the legislators, who added almost $17 million to the budget to boost the monthly per-child payments to those families.

Tennessee: Republican lawmakers banned popular cannabinoid-derived hemp products in July, and after one month of sales tax collections, projections are on pace for a  $110 million loss. The state’s new hemp laws ban smokable products and in particular THCA, which several industry groups estimated made up 75% of the state’s cannabinoid market.

California: A Senate committee gutted one of the state’s most substantial DUI reform bills in years, despite widespread support from other lawmakers and families of drunken driving victims. The bill would have required in-car Breathalyzers for anyone convicted of a DUI.

North Carolina: The Republican majority on the state Board of Elections voted against including Sunday hours as part of early voting plans in most counties where local boards could not agree on weekend schedules. 

West Virginia: Some lawmakers are frustrated by a lack of information about how Republican Gov. Patrick Morrisey is spending federal funds and want details on how the state is using dollars from a federal block grant program that gives states broad flexibility with how they spend it.

See the rest of the news of the day from all 50 states, plus our D.C. Bureau and Stateline, on News From The States.

Routt County rancher Philip Rossi knew as early as January of this year — as the Flat Tops range above the Yampa River basin sat largely bare of snow — that 2026 would be a difficult water year, Colorado Newsline reports.

Water managers at the Upper Yampa Water Conservancy District say that agricultural irrigators across the district received only about half of their normal water allocation from storage infrastructure like the Yamcolo and Stillwater reservoirs this year. For Rossi, it was even less, forcing him to pick the best quarter of his cropland to irrigate and let the rest go dry.

Agricultural producers are coping with similar challenges in river valleys all across Colorado’s Western Slope, where cumulative streamflows — a measure of the total amount of water that has flowed past a given point on a river since the previous October — range from near-record to record lows. In nearly a century of record-keeping, total water volumes have never been lower on the Colorado River at Cameo.

The effects of this extreme drought, part of a long-term warming and drying trend fueled by human-caused climate change, will be felt long after the dismal 2026 water year ends, even if hoped-for projections of a wetter-than-average winter come true. Hard choices will need to be made as feed remains scarce, and fuel, fertilizer and other input costs for farmers and ranchers continue to soar.

More extreme heat days are coming. Will states be ready?

Throughout the U.S., extreme heat days are becoming more frequent and more intense. State policymakers are now attempting to plan for extreme heat’s growing risks, which could strain public health and infrastructure budgets and the agricultural economies.

In Episode 42 of the Stories From The States podcast, you’ll hear from an associate manager at The Pew Charitable Trusts who has been researching how the hotter summers could affect communities across the country and how some states are responding.

Subscribe to Stories From The States on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or YouTube.

Maryland health officials are rolling out a new and controversial program to help those with severe mental health challenges stay on top of their treatment —  by using a court order to mandate that those patients comply with their medical plans, Maryland Matters reports.

The Maryland Department of Health announced the launch of the new Assisted Outpatient Treatment program that will grant mental health professionals, concerned family members or friends the ability to petition a circuit court for someone to receive mandated medical treatments for their mental health conditions.

Some conditions, such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, can interfere with the patient’s ability to recognize that they need medical care, depending on how their conditions manifest.

Such situations can lead to repeated hospitalization or incarceration for an individual suffering from behavioral health challenges, while being heartbreaking for families who watch a loved one’s struggle with mental health.

But disability rights advocates have raised concerns that assisted outpatient treatment orders step on a patient’s right to make their own medical decisions.