A pair of California bills aimed at curbing water use for landscaping has cleared the California State Assembly.
On Wednesday, AB 1573, which requires the use of California native plants, and AB 1572, banning the use of potable water for irrigation on non-functional turf, passed onto the Senate.
For decades, Western cities like Las Vegas and Tucson, Ariz., have embraced water conservation and recycling as a means of preparing for a multidecade drought like the one we’re experiencing. Despite our best efforts, our neighbors in Southern California, Northern Arizona and Utah have not always followed our lead. Cities like Phoenix, Los Angeles and St. George, Utah, have been allowed to grow at an explosive pace with little planning for where water would come from or how long the supply would last.
The Fallbrook and Rainbow water districts have pushed back on an Assembly bill that would require a countywide public vote to approve their exit from the San Diego County Water Authority, accusing the city of San Diego of attempting to increase its power.
The two rural districts said in a statement that the city is “trying to make it harder — if not impossible” — for other districts in the county get less expensive water.
“For those of you who figure out that maybe college isn’t what you want to pursue, there is a ton of opportunity outside of college,” said Richard Johnson, general manager at Action Air Conditioning, Heating & Solar.
Johnson was speaking to about a dozen seniors from Twin Oaks and Mission Hills high schools who were gathered at Action’s San Marcos warehouse to get an up-close look at one of the many non-college career options available to them.
The Lake Hodges dam is old — over 100 years old, in fact. It opened in 1918, so it has dealt with some wear and tear over the years, and recently needed critical repair work to keep it up and running.
Now, it has been reopened to the community.
“It opened yesterday and will remain open through October. We’re open for recreation Wednesday, Saturdays and Sundays, sunrise to sunset,” the San Diego Public Utilities Department’s Drew Kleis said on Friday.
A new underground mapping technology that reveals the best spots for storing surplus water in California’s Central Valley is providing a big boost to the state’s most groundwater-dependent communities.
The maps provided by the California Department of Water Resources for the first time pinpoint paleo valleys and similar prime underground storage zones traditionally found with some guesswork by drilling exploratory wells and other more time-consuming manual methods.
The curling of the jet stream — an atmospheric stream of fast-moving air with speeds over 100 mph that travels thousands of miles — over the Pacific Ocean has triggered recent shifts in California’s spring weather patterns. Californians have seen leaps from snowmelt-inducing heat waves in the Sierra Nevada to marine layer clouds that stretch from the Bay Area to Sacramento.
Arizona has determined that there is not enough groundwater for all of the housing construction that has already been approved in the Phoenix area, and will stop developers from building some new subdivisions, a sign of looming trouble in the West and other places where overuse, drought and climate change are straining water supplies.
The California State Senate passed Senate Bill 583, Wednesday, May 31, authored by Senator Steve Padilla (D-San Diego). The bill creates the Salton Sea Conservancy to unify the state’s efforts to expedite preservation project delivery, protect residents’ health, and foster ecological recovery in the area, according to a recent Padilla press release.
A bill in the state Assembly would make it harder for local water districts to leave their regional partnerships if they’re seeking cheaper water rates. That’s what two small, North County farming communities have been fighting to do for the last three years.
