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Local public agencies realized an important victory in a more-than-decade-long, who-should-foot-the-stormwater-bill battle — a battle focused on a permit issued by the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board to the County of Los Angeles and more than 80 local agencies, or “co-permittees.” The lengthy battle was not over the requirements themselves or whether state agencies had the authority to issue them. At the crux of the conflict was the question: Who’s picking up the check? The answer from the California Supreme Court — California — is welcome news to local agencies.

The helicopter landed in the western hills above the San Joaquin Valley and out of the dust walked President John F. Kennedy. It was Aug. 18, 1962, and the sun would not let go. In the hollow of the mountain, where California was about to build its newest reservoir, the air felt like a blast furnace. Summer had baked the earth to a tan and shrunken form. The hills turned to hide. Though not a drop of rain had fallen from the sky since spring, no one in the assembled crowd, certainly not the cotton kings, thought of this as drought.

It’s only a beginning. But it’s a strong beginning, and it offers at least a rain gauge’s worth of hope to a state enduring its fifth year of drought. The National Weather Service said Monday that the rainy season in the northern Sierra Nevada is off to its wettest start in 30 years. Mountain conditions are critically important to monitoring the drought because a major share of the state’s water supply is stored for months as snow.

The report’s findings were unequivocal: Given the current pace of water diversions, the San Francisco Bay and the Delta network of rivers and marshes are ecological goners, with many of its native fish species now experiencing a “sixth extinction,” environmental science’s most-dire definition of ecosystem collapse.Once a vast, soaked marsh and channel fed by the gushing San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers, the Delta has diminished dramatically over the previous century as those rivers and their mountain tributaries have been diverted to irrigate farms and Bay Area urbanity.

California is a big diverse place. California probably will experience droughts this year of different types in different places, and no drought at all in some places, simultaneously.  Even if conditions this year are very wet, with flooding, parts of California will have drought issues. (This is what makes California a great place to work on water problems.) The first two months of this new water year have been wetter than average in the north and much drier than average in the south.  But it is still early days.