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Gov. Brown Pitches Nearly $100 Million In Spending To Prevent Wildfires

/in , /by /Los Angeles Timesby Liam Dillon

Gov. Jerry Brown plans to add $96 million to next year’s spending plan to address threats of wildfires and climate change. Brown made the announcement in an executive order issued Thursday. Among other changes, the state will double the land currently managed for vegetation thinning, controlled burns and reforestation from 250,000 acres to 500,000 acres, boost education programs for landowners on forest fires and expand grants to improve watersheds.

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Fallbrook Home Loads Up On Colors Of The Desert

/in , /by /The San Diego Union-Tribuneby Nan Sterman

Ring the entry bell to Patrick Anderson and Les Olsen’s Fallbrook, California, garden, and the tall, redheaded Anderson is likely to greet you wearing teal-colored trousers and a melon orange shirt. His colorful persona, both inside and out, is only a hint of what’s to come. Anderson’s tour starts at the streetside garden he designed a few years ago. The gated driveway is flanked with angular planter beds stuccoed dusky sage green. The structure and geometry play off mass plantings with a limited plant palette. Still, each bed is filled with a dramatic combination of succulents and cacti.

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OPINION: Proposition 68 Will Leave California With More Unnecessary Debt. Vote No.

/in , /by /The Orange County Register

The California Legislature is about as spendthrift a legislature as one can find anywhere in the country. State revenues and expenditures continue to hit record levels, with Governor Brown’s budget proposal for the coming fiscal year calling for over $131 billion in General Fund spending, compared to $91 billion in General Fund spending for 2012-13. Yet for all this growth in revenues and even a projected surplus, the Legislature never gets around to prioritizing the basics. The addiction to doling out money left and right never seems to apply to things like the water, flood protection or parks.

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‘Raw Water’: Californians Paying Big Bucks For Oregon Tap Water

/in , /by /KOIN 6 (Portland, Ore.)by Gabrielle Karol

Unpurified, untreated water is available for sale – for $16 a jug. The so-called “raw water” trend, as initially reported in The New York Times, made it even easier to call Californians crazy. The newspaper reported that the untreated spring water, bottled in glass, was so popular at San Francisco’s Rainbow Grocery that it was often out of stock. The company behind the product – Live Spring Water – says on its website that its “spring water is collected from Opal Spring in Central Oregon.” The website promises that the unfiltered water “goes directly into triple washed and rinsed 2.5 gallon lead free glass jugs.”

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California Grid Operator Sees Tight Power Supplies For Summer

/in , /by /Reuters

California’s electric grid operator has forecast power supplies will be tight this summer due to below average hydropower production and reduced generation, according to an assessment released on Wednesday. The California Independent System Operator (ISO), the grid operator, said the system’s capacity to serve consumers will be tight in high-load periods in the summer months, especially during the evenings of hot days when solar power dissipates.

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OPINION: State Law Recognizes Rivers And Groundwater Are Connected — Now What?

/in , /by /The Mercury News (San Jose)by Dave Owen, Alida Cantor and Michael Kiparsky

For years, Californians have mismanaged the aquifers that supply the state with about 40 percent of its water supplies. Declining water levels from over-pumping have left less water for agriculture, urban, and other uses in many areas of the state. But the problems do not stop with groundwater users. Groundwater and surface water are closely connected, so declining groundwater can reduce streamflow at critical times of the year, and can devastate rivers, streams, and wetlands.

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Precipitation Whiplash And Climate Change Threaten California’s Freshwater

/in , /by /The Washington Postby Lauren Tierney and Monica Ulmanu

Imagine the snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains as a giant reservoir providing water for 23 million people throughout California. During droughts, this snow reserve shrinks, affecting water availability in the state. Researchers fear global warming will cause the Sierra Nevada snowpack to lose much of its freshwater by the end of the century, spelling trouble for water management throughout the state.

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6 Charts From New Report Show How Much California’s Climate Has Already Changed

/in , /by /The Sacramento Beeby Dale Kasler and Sharon Okada

Warmer days — and nights. Rising sea levels. Less water available in summer. A report released Wednesday by state officials says climate change is affecting California’s ecosystem already in ways great and small. The document looks at 36 indicators that measure aspects of climate change, including human-influenced causes of climate change such as greenhouse gas emissions and the impact of the changes on people and wildlife.

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Long Drought Makes Outlook For Tucson’s Share Of CAP Water Grim

/in , /by /Arizona Daily Starby Tony Davis

Longer-range outlooks for Lake Mead and the Central Arizona Project are increasingly grim due to this year’s bad runoff, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation said Wednesday. The result is that the bureau is pushing hard for states in both the Upper and Lower Basins of the Colorado River to reach agreement this year on drought planning to ease the pain of future shortages, after negotiations have so far failed.

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Mexico, 2 US States Could See Colorado River Cutback In 2020

/in , /by /Associated Press by Dan Elliott

Mexico and the U.S. states of Arizona and Nevada face a better-than-even possibility of getting less water from the Colorado River in 2020 because of a persistent drought, water managers said Wednesday. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the river, released projections showing a 52 percent chance the river’s biggest reservoir, Lake Mead in Arizona and Nevada, will fall low enough in 2020 to trigger cutbacks under agreements governing the system.

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