The San Diego County Water Authority’s board on Thursday approved a wholesale water rate increase for 2026 following a public hearing. Officials with the Water Authority said they were able to minimize impacts on ratepayers through a number of cost-saving actions as the board also approved the agency’s recommended budget for the next two fiscal years.
Wholesale water rates in San Diego County — a key factor in how much local residents and businesses pay for water — will rise next year by less than half of what officials were predicting last winter: 8.3% instead of 18%. But the Jan. 1 increase, which the county water authority’s board of directors approved Thursday after months of debate and negotiation, is still a substantial hike that brings the cumulative two-year increase to 23.1%.
Indoor toilets were once considered a health hazard. Electric lighting sparked fears of deadly fires. Air conditioning was dismissed as an unnatural threat to human health. It seems absurd now, but each of these technologies—now fundamental to modern buildings—was initially met with widespread skepticism and resistance.
It’s not uncommon nowadays to fill a glass of water from your tap and wonder what chemicals and contaminants may be lurking in there. That’s because research has increasingly revealed that heavy metals, radioactive substances, and harmful PFAS (“forever chemicals”) are present in our water systems.
“It turns out millions of people have PFAS in their drinking water,” Tracey Woodruff, director of the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at the University of California, San Francisco, tells Fortune.
For the last few decades in California, the conventional wisdom has been that farmers and urban water consumers have to improve efficiency and reduce consumption. To the fullest extent possible, rain and snow falling on watersheds must proceed unimpaired from the mountains to the ocean, and if water is reserved in reservoirs, releases of the stored water must prioritize maintaining flow in the rivers over diversions for agriculture or urban consumption.
Beginning January 1, 2025, the “Making Conservation a California Way of Life” regulatory framework requires urban retail water suppliers — not individual households or businesses — to adopt a series of “urban water use objectives.” And beginning January 1, 2027, the regulations require urban retail water suppliers to annually demonstrate compliance with those objectives. The objectives are calculated based on indoor residential water use; outdoor residential water use; commercial, industrial and institutional irrigation use; and potable reuse. Implementation of the objectives includes setting and meeting specific targets for reducing water use per capita, improving system efficiency, and reporting progress to state regulators.
Buckle up for another potentially dangerous peak wildfire season in the San Diego area.
“We’ve only had about 50% of the normal rainfall, and temperatures are expected to be warm as we get into this summer,” Brian D’Agostino, meteorologist and vice president of wildfire and climate science at San Diego Gas & Electric, said Monday.
A year of average precipitation gave California’s groundwater supplies a significant boost, according to a state analysis released Tuesday.
California’s aquifers gained an estimated 2.2 million acre-feet of groundwater in the 12 months that ended Sept. 30, the state’s 2024 water year. That’s about half the storage capacity of Shasta Lake, California’s largest reservoir.
THERE’S NOTHING LIKE A GOOD CRISIS: The situation on the Colorado River — the water supply for 40 million Westerners and half of all Californians — is dire. The waterway’s flows have shrunk 20 percent since the turn of the century and climate scientists say it’s not unreasonable to think that another 20 percent could be lost in the coming decades. To cities, farmers, tribes and industries from Wyoming to Mexico — but especially in legally vulnerable Arizona — that looks like pain. To the Los Angeles-based water company Cadiz Inc., that looks like opportunity.
Jason and Taylor McAllister may just have the most beautiful landscaping on their cul-de-sac block in Santee. For Jason in particular, being able to show off the couple’s home is particularly meaningful because he grew up in it and had helped work on the yard as a teenager. Jason moved away in December 2000 but returned for good in February 2020, the year his mom died and he inherited the home. She had been sick for quite a while and the house clearly needed updating. The landscape — both front and back — had gone to nothing but weeds and also needed a lot of love.
