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New Diamond Valley Lake Recreation Plans Moving Forward

It has been many years, but for the cities of Hemet and San Jacinto the dream of creating an area surrounding Diamond Valley Lake into a major regional recreation park is finally taking shape with a memorandum of intent signed by the five major entities involved. The long-sought MOI now signed by the city of Hemet, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, Valley-Wide Recreation and Park District, Riverside County Regional Park & Open Space District and Eastern Municipal Water District was revealed Tuesday, April 25, at the Hemet City Council meeting.

OPINION: Lois Henry: Groundwater Repayment Coming Due Early For Some Valley Farmers

Fixing our groundwater deficit will be painful. No way around it. And growers in the massive Semitropic Water Storage District are learning that sooner than most.Though the state has set a series of short- and long-term deadlines to restore the depleted water table, Semitropic is so far in the hole it got special legislation passed in September allowing it to ramp up its own timeline — and landowner fees. It’s holding a vote on Wednesday to slap a $500-per-acre surcharge on any “new” ground developed for farming and is proposing to use satellite imagery to determine exact water consumption by crop.

Are Floating Solar Panels Energy’s New Frontier?

When you’re trying to generate a lot more solar power, you’re limited by the size and heft of those big solar panels. Where can you put them? The answer so far has been the desert, or on rooftops. There have even been efforts to put panels on top of landfill sites. Solar entrepreneur Troy Helming of the San Francisco-based solar company Pristine Sun has a new idea: floating on water.

OPINION: The Value Of Water Independence

Twenty years ago, the elected officials who served on the boards of the Orange County Sanitation District and Orange County Water District had a visionary idea to recycle treated wastewater to drinking water standards and percolate that water into our underground aquifer where it could eventually be used again for drinking water. The project — which would be known as the Groundwater Replenishment System — was not without opposition, much of it surrounding the cost of the project and the water it would produce.