Mona Rios, a National City councilwoman for 12 years, told Voice of San Diego Tuesday that she won’t be seeking reelection. In fact, she said she’s departing politics altogether in part, to have more time to take care of her elderly parents.
“I think it’s time for me to allow other voices to be at the table,” Rios, 69, said.
In the rolling hills around San Diego and its suburbs, the rumble of bulldozers and the whine of power saws fill the air as a slew of new homes and apartments rise up. The region is booming, its population growing at a rate of about 1 percent a year.
This, in spite of the fact that Southern California, along with much of the West, is in the midst of what experts call a megadrought that some believe may not be a temporary, one-off occurrence, but a recurring event or even a climate change-driven permanent “aridification” of the West. The drought is so bad that last year federal officials ordered cuts to water provided to the region by the Colorado River for the first time in history.
Water officials in San Diego, though, say they are not worried. “We have sufficient supplies now and in the future,” said Sandra Kerl, general manager of the San Diego Water Authority. “We recently did a stress test and we are good until 2045” and even beyond.
The late-season burst of snow and moisture that blanketed Northern California in April helped make a small dent in drought conditions, experts said, but the majority of the state is still far below where it needs to be as it heads toward the hot, dry months of summer.
Several storms arrived weeks after the final snow survey of the season on April 1, in which state officials reported that statewide snowpack had dwindled to just 38% of average for the date after a bone-dry start to the year.
A proposed California desalination plant that would produce 50 million gallons of drinking water per day failed a crucial regulatory hurdle on Monday, possibly dooming a project that had been promoted as a partial solution for sustained drought.
The staff of the California Coastal Commission recommended denying approval of the Huntington Beach plant proposed by Poseidon Water, controlled by the infrastructure arm of Canada’s Brookfield Asset Management.
Because of the megadrought that’s gripping the southwestern United States, the federal government is cutting back how much water it delivers to California, Arizona and Nevada by a lot, about as much as Las Vegas uses in a year. It’s something water managers never thought they’d have to do. Alex Hager reports on the Colorado River from member station KUNC in Greeley, Colo., and joins us now to explain what’s going on. So decades ago, the U.S. built huge dams on the Colorado River specifically to store water as insurance against droughts. Why isn’t that system working now?
With parts of the North Coast facing what forecasters say is shaping up to be “extreme drought” this year, the region’s water managers are busy exploring near- and long-term options.
But new large reservoirs like Lake Sonoma and Lake Mendocino aren’t among them.
Even as the first of seven large reservoirs funded by the 2014 $2.7 billion California water bond is set to get under construction elsewhere in the state, agency officials and local lawmakers say the regulatory and political environment has shifted dramatically from decades ago when the Golden State’s big water catchments were constructed.
The concern over drought over the past couple of years has focused on the Western Slope and much of southern and southeastern Colorado, but water watchers said on April 19 that a lack of precipitation is now a factor for the Eastern Plains, as well, just when farmers are getting ready to plant.
Colorado’s drought situation is a little better than it was a year ago, but warm temperatures, windy conditions in April and almost no precipitation in parts of the state means the snowpack is melting a couple of weeks sooner than most water watchers would prefer.
Lake Mead’s “bathtub ring” is set to become even more pronounced this year.
The lingering drought is the overriding reason that the lake’s water level will fall again in 2022, but it’s also because less water will be released upstream on the Colorado River from Lake Powell.
This month, the seven Colorado River Basin States — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — agreed with federal officials’ recommendations to institute a 480,000 acre-foot reduction from Glen Canyon Dam on Lake Powell to reduce the risk of the lake declining below 3,490 feet.
The Olivenhain Municipal Water District recently completed the Manchester Avenue Potable Water Pipeline Project. In total, 3,700 linear feet of aged potable water pipeline was replaced along Manchester Avenue, Rancho Santa Fe Road and Encinitas Boulevard.
The pipelines previously serving water in this area were installed in 1961 and were approaching the end of their lifespan.
In a letter sent Friday, the seven states that use the Colorado River agreed with the U.S. Department of Interior and recommended that federal water managers take an emergency action aimed at stabilizing a dwindling Lake Powell, one of the main storage reservoirs on the river.
Earlier this month, federal water managers warned the states, including Nevada, that they were considering an emergency action to hold water back in Lake Powell, an attempt to stabilize the reservoir at serious risk of losing the ability to generate hydropower and deliver water to Page, Arizona, a city with roughly 7,500 residents, and the LeChee Chapter of the Navajo Nation.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
