Nortek Security & Control LLC has moved its headquarters to a new, 82,000-square-foot building in the Atlas at Carlsbad complex in Carlsbad, where it operates its research, engineering, product development and executive offices. The company is a leader in smart connected devices and systems for residential smart home, security, access control, AV distribution, and digital health markets.
Like a bad penny, a plan to tax water keeps turning up in Sacramento. That’s right: under two proposals circulating in the Capitol, California would start taxing the most fundamental resource on the planet. Such taxes would needlessly drive up costs for families already struggling to make ends meet and undermine the very goals that proponents profess.
San Diego Unified found lead in water where it definitely should not be: coming from faucets with water filters on them. Last year, San Diego Unified found 38 schools with elevated levels of lead in their water. The district began replacing plumbing and fixtures and, in some cases, installing new water filters designed to remove lead. Lead is unsafe at any level and is especially damaging to children’s brains. Recently, though, the district has gotten results that show lead in newly filtered water. Samer Naji, a spokesman for the school district, said the results are a “head-scratcher.”
The Santa Fe Irrigation District board got a look on Thursday, May 17, at the water agency’s proposed budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1, a spending plan that calls for $30.8 million in operational costs and $10.4 million in capital projects. A public hearing is set for June 21 when the board can approve the final budget for the coming year. The budget anticipates an 8 percent increase in water sales, to 10,170 acre feet. The total includes 450 acre feet of recycled water. (An acre-foot is equivalent to 325,851 gallons).
It’s one thing to streamline environmental reviews for a major project, which happened for the Golden 1 Center in downtown Sacramento. It’s entirely another to dismiss any environmental lawsuits and prevent others from being filed. That’s what a Southern California congressman is trying to do, to clear the path for the highly contentious $17 billion Delta tunnels project. It’s an outrageous overreach on a slippery legal slope. Congress should reject it.
The Friant Kern Canal provides much of the water to valley crops, and it’s sinking. The November bond measure would pump 750 million in for repairs. The sinking has cut the canals carrying capacity in half. Fresno County has endorsed the measure. Supervisor Buddy Mendes says unlike Prop 1, the 2014 bond measure which failed to deliver enough funds to build Temperance Flat Dam, the funding in this plan is clear. “It’s specific language, and it has a series of what it will do, and one of the things is fixing of the Friant Kern Canal.”
The second and final phase of reconstruction continues at the Oroville Dam spillways. This year, contractor Kiewit Infrastructure West Co. is rebuilding the top 730-foot portion of the main spillway and using structural concrete to rebuild the walls and resurface the chute in the middle. A flight over the location last week during a break in Butte County Sheriff’s Office helicopter training exercise, showed that much original concrete at the top of the chute has been removed, along with the walls.
Chris Sayer pushed his way through avocado branches and grasped a denuded limb. It was stained black, as if someone had ladled tar over its bark. In February, the temperature had dropped below freezing for three hours, killing the limb. The thick leaves had shriveled and fallen away, exposing the green avocados, which then burned in the sun. Sayer estimated he’d lost one out of every 20 avocados on his farm in Ventura, just 50 miles north of Los Angeles, but he counts himself lucky.
The high-ranking lawmaker who wants to block judicial review of a massive California water tunnels project calls his maneuver something close to standard operating procedure. And, like it or not, he’s right. In the latest example of a controversial tactic, the chairman of a key House panel included language blocking judicial review of California’s WaterFix project in a fiscal 2019 Interior Department funding package. The bill would also block court scrutiny of several gray wolf decisions.
“Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated” is a quote made famous by Mark Twain upon hearing rumors that he had died in 1897. This is the same thought that we had in reaction to news that the most important project for securing a long-term water supply for the Central Valley, the construction of Temperance Flat Dam, was not fully funded by the California Water Commission.
