You are now in California and the U.S. category.

Rick Williams stood on his dead front lawn near Sacramento, California, wondering why he still pays a drought surcharge on his water bill and cannot run his sprinklers as often as he needs when a nearby reservoir is so full it could overflow come spring.

After four years of catastrophic drought and nearly a year of mandatory water conservation measures, Williams is joining a growing chorus of consumers in the wetter parts of the state to call for an end to restrictions they see as overbearing.

Federal water managers warned Tuesday that northern California could be headed for an “interesting” runoff season following a series of late-season storms. Officials with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation made the statements during a meeting of the State Water Resources Board in Sacramento.

“This is an area where we tend to want to be very cautious with people’s lives and livelihoods,” said Ron Milligan, operations manager for the Bureau of Reclamation’s Central Valley Project. The Bureau of Reclamation manages several reservoirs, including Folsom Lake and Lake Shasta. Both are more than three-quarters full and still rising following recent storms.

As I write this opinion from my home in the Sacramento Valley, our rivers are at or near flood stage and the reservoirs are continuing to fill. The bad news is that the water not being captured in our reservoir system is mostly blowing out under the Golden Gate Bridge with little diverted south of the Delta.

Most of us who farm up here have state or federal contracts that are the basis of our water rights, which are an integral part of our land and its value.

State regulators certified the water supply from the Carlsbad Desal Plant as drought-resilient, reducing the regional impacts of emergency water-use mandates the state imposed in June 2015. The State Water Resources Control Board’s certification lowers the regional aggregate water conservation goal from 20 percent to about 13 percent, though water-use targets will continue to vary by local water agency.

Vallecitos Water District, the only retail water provider with a direct connection to the Carlsbad plant, will have its conservation target dropped to 16 percent compared to its previously mandated 24 percent reduction in potable water use.

Southern California’s Metropolitan Water District has commissioned Xylem as part of a project at its FE Weymouth Water Treatment Plant to retrofit biologically active filtration and ozone. Xylem will supply its Leopold Type XA underdrains with IMS 200 media retainers and Leopold dual media sand and anthracite to the 75-year-old plant which treats water from the Colorado River Aqueduct and the State Project Water (SPW) California Aqueduct.