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The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California proposed biennial budget contemplates a 9.5% increase in its rates for the next two years that it charges its 26 agencies. This is an increase from 8.5% increase over the last two years.

MWD is also proposing to maintain its current property tax rate at 0.007% on the Assessed Value of the properties located in its 5,200 square mile service territory. For a $1 million residence, the tax is $70. This tax is designed to raise $404 million for the 2027 fiscal year. In the last budget cycle, this property tax was doubled.

Deshmukh took over last month as general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, a sprawling, aging system that pipes water hundreds of miles to 19 million people in Los Angeles, Orange County, the Inland Empire and San Diego.

Roughly 20 percent of Met’s water comes from the dwindling Colorado River, over which negotiators from seven Western states are haggling in a race to strike a new deal before water-sharing rules expire at the end of the year.

California doesn’t have a water scarcity problem. It has a distribution problem, according to Nícola Ulibarrí, whose new research is reshaping how policymakers think about one of the state’s most pressing challenges.

In a report commissioned by UC Berkeley’s Possibility Lab, Ulibarrí argues that California’s existing water infrastructure already collects enough water to sustain all state residents. The real crisis, says the UC Irvine associate professor of urban planning and public policy, is that thousands of Californians remain disconnected from that abundant supply.

The mountains of the western United States are looking remarkably brown this winter. The region is facing one of its worst snow droughts in decades, and while the snowsport industry is already feeling the effects, the impacts this summer could be far worse.

Although much of the region received plenty of precipitation in fall and early winter, most of it fell as rain due to unusually warm temperatures. Then, a lengthy dry spell took hold in January, which certainly didn’t help. The lack of snow isn’t just bad news for skiers and snowboarders—it’s also a major concern for the West’s water supply, which is far more reliant on a healthy snowpack than rainfall.