Water is vital to our agricultural industry here on the Central Coast, and I believe state Assembly candidate Jordan Cunningham is willing to fight for it.

I have spoken at length with Jordan, who is fully engaged in making sure that our Proposition 1 water bond is spent wisely and responsibly. The bond will help prepare California for future droughts by providing better infrastructure for storing water, protecting watersheds, creating water recycling programs and more. But it will only do this if it is spent wisely. I am trusting Jordan to make sure this money is spent the way voters intended.

Efforts in Congress are heating up to bring some relief to California’s historic drought, just as the dry summer season is starting.

The Golden State is in its fifth year facing exceptional drought conditions. And while its congressional delegation is eager to find ways to better save water, and redirect it where needed, longstanding partisan and regional fights that fueled water wars since before California was a state are paralyzing efforts to help.

The House of Representatives took action this week on a bill concerning the water supply in California. But to hear the reaction of two north state congressman you’d think it was two different measures.

What happened is a bill passed last summer by the House, that stalled in the Senate, was inserted into an energy and water appropriations bill. That forces the Senate to again consider the earlier measure it had rejected, since it wants the appropriations bill to move forward.

 

Bernie Sanders mocked the presumptive Republican nominee for his recent comments on the drought in California, calling out Donald Trump over his dismissal of climate change.

“You see, we don’t fully appreciate the genius of Donald Trump, who knows more than all the people of California, knows more than all the scientists,” Sanders told the crowd of more than 5,000 people who braved 92 degree heat to hear the senator speak.

 

 

They told Vince Calcagno to cut his water use by more than a third last year as the desert summer loomed with its 112-degree highs. He stood near the swimming pool in his pretty back yard off a Palm Springs golf course and wondered, “How am I going to make this work?”

It worked as badly as he envisioned. After months of almost no watering, “the back yard looks pretty awful now,” Calcagno, a retired restaurant owner, said recently. “It’s brown and full of crab grass.”