With more water billing complaints being heard and a city council member calling for an official audit of the Public Utilities Department’s billing procedures, NBC 7 Responds is looking into the committee formed years ago that was tasked with oversight of the water department. “I’m paying $5,000 a year for water, that’s crazy,” Stephen Hanson out of Pacific Beach said about his water bills last year.
While the Temperance Flat Reservoir Project hit a speedbump recently, local officials still have hope the project will get funded and bring more water storage to the Valley. “I hope in 10 years we can all get together and celebrate a new dam,” said Doug Verboon, Kings County supervisor and county representative on the San Joaquin Valley Water Infrastructure Authority.
More than 40 farmers and business owners in the Oroville area sued the state Wednesday over the effects of the Oroville Dam crisis, seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. The giant lawsuit against the California Department of Water Resources was filed by the same law firms representing the city of Oroville in a suit it filed in early January against DWR. It accuses DWR of harboring a “culture of corruption and harassment” that compromised dam safety and led to last February’s near-catastrophe.
For California Governor Jerry Brown and his administration, 2017 was a water year to remember, and one that would figure into the drafting of the state’s 2018–19 budget, which was released early this month. The $190 billion proposed spending plan names California’s drought and the “extreme natural events of 2017” as determining factors in how the cash was divvied up.
I want to thank Gov. Jerry Brown for signing SB 558, which allows the Secretary of State to place my rainwater recycling measure on the June 2018 ballot. The measure, SCA 9, would allow property owners to install rainwater capture systems without triggering a reassessment of the value of their property and an increase in their property taxes. It is modeled after a similar exclusion that helped the solar industry get off the ground back in the 1980s.
Despite a recent blanket of 1 to 2 feet of snow, snow cover in the Sierra is at its lowest point in late January since the peak of the state’s multi-year drought in 2014 and 2015, according to an analysis from NOAA’s National Operational Hyrdologic Remote Sensing Center. Tahoe City, along the north shore of Lake Tahoe, had picked up only 23.5 inches of snow this season through Jan. 30, a season-to-date snowfall deficit of 70.5 inches, or just under 6 feet.
Hampered by hot weather and a stubborn high-pressure ridge that has blocked winter storms, California’s Sierra Nevada snowpack — a key source of the state’s water supply — on Tuesday was a paltry 30 percent of normal. The last time there was so little Sierra snow at the end of January was in 2015, when it was 25 percent of its historic average.
A critical hearing needed to approve Governor Jerry Brown’s controversial Delta Tunnels project has been delayed until February 8. The California Water Fix Hearing Team of the State Water Resources Control Board has delayed the hearing as it continues to review several motions to delay a key hearing by 90 days over alleged illegal exparte communications between the Board’s staff and California Department of Water Resources (DWR) personnel.
The Colorado River is essential for life in the southwest U.S. and northwest Mexico. It provides water for over 35 million people and over 5 million acres of farmland. Close to 18 million of those residents live in the greater Los Angeles area, the second most populated city in the country.
The Trump administration on Wednesday delayed implementation of an Obama-era clean water rule by another two years to give the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers more time to do away with it. The move follows a Supreme Court ruling last week that said legal challenges to the Waters of the U.S. rule should be decided in federal district courts. That will result in the lifting of a stay issued by an appeals court blocking the 2015 rule from going into effect.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
