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Arroyo Grande residents can once again pull out their garden hoses without fear of financial penalty, though they’re still being required to restrict some of their water usage. The city declared an end to its water shortage emergency on Tuesday, following Gov. Jerry Brown’s announcement earlier this month that California is no longer in a drought. The decision removes the city’s water bill penalties, which charge users if they fail to reduce their water usage by a certain amount compared with their property’s historic usage.

California’s Tulare Lake was once the largest body of freshwater west of the Mississippi. It was shallow, and it varied in size from year to year and season to season. But it was home to lots of salmon, turtles, otters and even, in the latter half of the 19th century, a few schooners and steamboats. It was also at the heart of a 400,000-acre network of lakes and wetlands (“the river of the lakes,” the painter and naturalist John W. Audubon — John J.’s son — called it in 1849) that in wet years overflowed into the San Joaquin River to the north, making it possible to travel by boat from Bakersfield to San Francisco.

Proposed changes to a plan that is supposed to guide the Delta through the 21st century have advocates on red alert, as they worry that the new language locks in Gov. Jerry Brown’s $15 billion twin tunnels. The revised plan does not explicitly endorse the California Water Fix, as the tunnels proposal is formally known. It does, however, promote building one or more new intakes to pump water from the Delta, with a new underground conveyance system that would be operated in tandem with existing Delta channels. The twin tunnels proposal satisfies all of those criteria.

A power industry consulting firm has proposed a design for the Oroville Dam spillways which involves not repairing the current one, but building a new, wider spillway. The designer says the structure’s capacity would handle flows of 300,000 cubic-feet per second. Kenneth Viney, manager of CoastalGen Inc., based in Napa, filed suggestions Monday with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC. He said he first shared his ideas with engineers with the state Department of Water Resources about a month ago and was encouraged by FERC and DWR spokespeople to submit his plans through a FERC filing.