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A question that’s long been asked about California American Water’s proposed desalination plant – and which is brought up in several letters commenting on the project’s environmental impact report – is exactly how big it should be. What’s surprising is that, in a year as wet as this one, the plant wouldn’t even be necessary. Pure Water Monterey, a recycled water project launched by the Monterey Regional Water Pollution Control Agency and the Monterey Peninsula Water Management District, will deliver 3,500 acre-feet of water annually to the Monterey Peninsula beginning in 2018.

California’s historic five-year drought is officially over, washed away with the relentlessly drenching rains, floods and snowstorms of this winter. But just as tougher building codes and better emergency planning follow major earthquakes, the brutally dry years from 2012 to 2016 are already leaving a legacy, experts say, changing the way Californians use water for generations to come. “There’s no question that we’ll be better prepared for the next drought because of the lessons learned in this one,” said Felicia Marcus, chairwoman of the State Water Resources Control Board in Sacramento. “This was the wake-up call of the century.”

With their deadline less than three months away, local governments in many critical California groundwater basins still haven’t settled on a local entity to implement the state’s new pumping regulations, a key water official says. Counties, cities and water districts in many areas have submitted “a hodgepodge of overlapping claims” to be their region’s groundwater sustainability agency, said Pat Minturn, who is on the Northern California Water Association’s groundwater committee that’s working with state officials on solutions.

With California’s surface drought over, the state can prioritize investing in groundwater recharge and floodplain restoration to help fight one of its biggest lingering problems: groundwater overdraft. As it does so, the relatively unknown Cosumnes River watershed has emerged as a model. Roughly half of the groundwater basins in California’s Central Valley are critically overdrafted, including the San Joaquin Valley basin to the south of the Cosumnes.

A coalition of environmental groups that had warned Oroville Dam’s emergency spillway was fatally flawed long before it nearly washed away this winter is demanding that federal regulators open up dam repair plans for public vetting. In a filing Wednesday with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, a coalition of environmental groups led by Sacramento-based Friends of the River also said it was concerned that the state Department of Water Resources is only going part way in repairing the emergency spillway.