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At the depth of California’s four-year drought, water-use experts found plenty of stark images to illustrate the urgent need to conserve. They pointed to half-empty Folsom Lake or once-floating boat docks aground on caked clay. Fallow fields and dying orchards echoed the dire message: Save water or perish.

Motivated by such examples, many residents got the message and turned off their taps. Homeowners let their lawns die and retooled their irrigation. They took shorter showers and converted bathrooms with low-flow toilets.

At first glance, a proposed initiative to reallocate bond funds from the controversial high-speed rail project to fund water storage projects seems tailor-made for Northern Californian water leaders who have been pushing for such projects, particularly Sites Reservoir, for decades.

But the North State has staunchly opposed the proposal being circulated for signatures to qualify for the November ballot, saying it would not only delay projects such as Sites Reservoir for years, but would also change the state constitution in a way that would jeopardize the Sacramento Valley’s mostly senior water rights.

Californians are doing an outstanding job conserving water, reducing urban water use by nearly 26 percent during the last seven months of 2015, compared with the same period in 2013, exceeding Gov. Jerry Brown’s 25 percent reduction mandate.

California’s investor-owned water utilities, together serving approximately 6 million people, are partnering with their customers to achieve those savings. The State Water Resources Control Board has recognized many of our members among the state’s water conservation standouts.

On a hot summer afternoon, California farmer Chris Hurd barrels down a country road through the Central Valley city of Firebaugh, his dog Frank riding in the truck bed. He lurches to a stop in front of Oro Loma Elementary School, which was built in the 1950s to accommodate an influx of farmers’ and farmworkers’ children.

“All three of my sons went here,” Hurd says, as we walk through overgrown weeds toward the shuttered building, closed in 2010. “I was on the school board, the grass was green, kids were running around. Now it’s a pile of rubble.”

“You can’t always get what you want but if you try sometimes you just might find
You get what you need,” Rolling Stones (1969, Let It Bleed album)

The ongoing California drought has many lessons for water managers and policy-makers. Perhaps the greatest lesson is how unimportant a drought can be if we manage water well.