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When Karen Fleck and her family moved into a larger home in 1990 from the one they lived in down the street in Santee, the idea was that it would be temporary — a stopgap before buying a home in the proposed Fanita Ranch development. The house had the benefit of having a swimming pool for her two young sons.

The embattled development, however, has yet to be built, and over the years, her boys grew up and her husband passed away. Nine years ago, Fleck met and married Tom Clarke. The two live in the home now with their cat Frankie. Both are now retired: Fleck from the position of vice present of marketing and business development for a credit union, and Clarke, a longtime chef at UCSD before becoming a senior project manager for purchasing for the university’s department of housing and dining.

Officials at the Rincon del Diablo Municipal Water District on Thursday formally unveiled plans to build a solar canopy array and battery energy storage project at the Harmony Grove Village Water Reclamation Facility in Escondido.

The reclamation facility runs up a power bill of about $5,000 each month and the solar-plus-battery project will help offset the wastewater treatment center’s energy costs.

There’s a debate over whether the city of San Diego should or could build a smaller sewage-to-drinking water recycling project than originally planned.

If fully built out, the project costs would top $5 billion. And the City Council is desperate to save ratepayers money. But the city probably can’t build a smaller Pure Water project, even though some want it to, because recycling wastewater is something the city promised to do – or risk being sued by environmentalists.

Every month, a group meets to debate what should be done with our toilet water. Right, now they’re arguing about the fact that there might not be enough for everybody to reuse.

Three years ago, I wrote about how the city of San Diego was at war with a bloc of Eastern County cities over the region’s wastewater supply. Both wanted to treat it and supply it to residents as drinking water. But their systems are intertwined, and when East County rolled off to do their own thing, it left costs to support the region’s wastewater system on the backs of other cities.