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Jeremiah Keller toddled around, clad only in his last diaper, the hot, smoky air surrounding him. His mother — exasperated from two days of fleeing, seeking help, wondering about the future — struggled to stop the 18-month-old from running into the parking lot. The family has done a lot of running in the past few days. As wildfires closed in on towns across California, they and thousands of others had to evacuate, leaving the fates of their homes and their neighbors a mystery as the fires blazed through dry lands.

A period of historic drought in the West might be over for now, but the war over water never is. From Colorado to California, a snowy late spring finally broke through what was left of the drought’s fierce grip. Soil is saturated again, reservoirs are full and water worries have temporarily receded as farms return to their full productive capability. Even so, wrestling over water during the recent shortages was a wake-up call for agricultural leaders who are now putting heightened importance on developing better outreach to the public while still pushing long-term resource planning.

Brian LeNeve has been fishing for almost 70 years, but he hasn’t dropped a line in his hometown river for the last 15. He says fishing in the Carmel River isn’t worth the risk of harming a steelhead trout – a threatened species. But this winter’s pounding rains, coupled with the 2015 removal of the San Clemente Dam, have given hope to LeNeve and other local fishermen that steelhead could make a comeback on their beloved river.

 

The price of almost everything is on the rise, but we tend to shrug off inflation in goods and services we can cut back or do without. Not water, the rising cost of which is looming as a defining economic problem in coming years. In California and across the nation, concern about water affordability has been spreading, with good reason. Few basic commodities are under as much cost pressure.

 

A few weeks ago, the governor and other state politicians ran victory laps proclaiming their passage of California’s new record budget. The behemoth budget — the largest spending plan in our state’s history — provides $183 billion to fund many diverse programs and projects deemed necessary to the people and government of California. Their speeches forgot, however, to mention a crucial item the Senate, Assembly and Governor Brown left out: funding to addresses California’s chronic water deficit. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.