State board details $60 million Cal Waters modernization and linked SB 88 measurement rule updates

The State Water Resources Control Board on Feb. 19 received a progress update on the Upward/Cal Waters project, a multi-year, $60 million effort to replace legacy water-rights information systems, digitize paper records and build a public-facing portal and geospatial tools to improve reporting and access to water-rights data.

Board members and division staff said the new platform is designed to make water-rights records searchable online, improve the quality and usability of measurement data and align reporting with upcoming revisions to the state’s water measurement regulations (SB 88).

The project team told the board the investment is split with roughly $40 million earmarked for IT systems and the remainder for staff and implementation support, and that Deloitte was contracted in February 2023 to build the system with advisory input from Gartner and oversight from the California Department of Technology.

“This is a really important moment for us as we embark in this organizational change management and really begin to socialize our project to the public, to the board,” said Brent Vandenberg, supervising geologist and project director for Upward California. He described a user portal that will let water-right holders see and manage their records in one login and new GIS tools to plot points of diversion and upload spatial…