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Releasing its draft Urban Water Management Plan (UWMP), the San Diego County Water Authority said that San Diego County will continue to have a safe and reliable water supply for decades. Urban Water Management Plans must be updated every five years by law.

The draft plan — known as the 2015 UWMP based on when the updating process began — estimates that the region’s future water demands will be about 14 percent lower in 2020 and about 15 percent lower in 2035 compared to projections in the 2010 plan.

As California enters its fifth year of official drought — and its ninth dry year in the past 10 — the elements of a modern, sustainable water system are finally taking shape. The state is improving water efficiency in agriculture and urban areas, expanding wastewater treatment and reuse, figuring out how to capture more storm water, and starting to monitor and manage badly over-drafted groundwater basins.

In Washington D.C., however, special interests are still pushing ineffective and inequitable water strategies. Nowhere is this tension between new water strategies and outmoded federal thinking more apparent than in the California drought legislation currently before Congress.

There was no change in drought conditions last week in California and Nevada, but spring storms added snow to the northern Sierra Nevada.

The U.S. Drought Monitor released April 28 shows that slightly more than 4 percent of California, in the northwest part of the state, is not in drought. But, unlike the previous update, which showed extreme and exceptional drought had eased in the state, there were no changes in this week’s report (which has a cutoff day of Tuesday).

For nearly two decades, Los Vaqueros Reservoir — a sprawling lake in eastern Contra Costa County nearly 3 miles long and 170 feet deep — has been a popular spot for boating, fishing, hiking and a key source of water for local residents.

But now, after years of drought and new money available from a 2014 state bond measure to fund water projects, a long-standing idea to dramatically enlarge the reservoir to help provide drought insurance to cities all the way to San Jose is gaining momentum.

Nearly a year after the East Bay Municipal Utility District was the first supplier in California to limit household use and publicly list violates, its board unanimously voted Tuesday to suspend excess-use fines.

Customers in the district have cut their water use by 24 percent since last summer, according to officials. “From the time that we implemented (the excess-use fines), we accessed approximately $596,000 in fines,” said Sherri Hong, EBMUD manager for customer and care community services. Since last summer, households in the district using more than about 1,000 gallons per day were fined $2 for each 748 gallons in excess of their limit.