The San Diego City Council is set to vote next week on a series of water rate increases that could raise the average household bill by about $18 per month. Rates would then continue climbing by roughly the same amount each year for the next three years.
That’s a 63% increase over four years. But City Council President Joe LaCava said support for the plan might be slipping.
San Diego County Water Authority General Manager Dan Denham was seated today as the Water Authority’s newest representative on the board of directors of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.
Denham brings more than two decades of water industry expertise, as well as a deep knowledge of the relationship between Metropolitan and the Water Authority. He succeeds Gail Goldberg, who served on Metropolitan’s 38-member board since 2019.
San Diegans owe a privately-owned desalination plant over $35 million for water the company couldn’t make.
That water will only grow more expensive the longer the San Diego County Water Authority waits to buy it. And the tab came due as the region frets over ever-growing water prices and debates whether it even needs this water at all.
A titan in San Diego’s local water world is retiring and will be replaced by former city of Oceanside’s public utilities director, Lindsey Leahy.
Gary Arant has been general manager of the Valley Center Municipal Water District for over 36 years. When he arrived in the sleepy eastern San Diego County town, its vast avocado groves were the second-biggest water user in San Diego.
Large thunderstorms produced lots of rain and lightning Thursday in parts of San Diego County, especially from Palomar Mountain to Borrego Springs, where dozens of lightning bolts were reported, the National Weather Service said.
The wild weather was tied to former Tropical Storm Mario, which sent a big, unstable plume of moisture into Southern California.
Heading into the final months of this year, residents in the San Diego area should prepare for a potentially combustible peak wildfire season.
“The outlook is not good,” Cal Fire/San Diego County Fire Chief Tony Mecham said Wednesday, citing a lack of rain in recent months that has left vegetation parched. “The fuels are receptive, they’re ready to burn, and then it’s really a matter of what happens with the weather … We could have major fires this year.”
Following a hot and dry start to the week, humidity and rain chances climb starting Wednesday in San Diego County as a post-tropical storm sends clouds and showers across Southern California. Tropical Storm Mario has been brewing over the eastern Pacific Ocean, moving north for days now. As it nears the Southwestern edge of the country, it will send its decaying outer bands of dense clouds and at times some rain toward us.
Tropical Cyclone Mario made the transition from a Tropical Storm on Tuesday morning to a Tropical Depression on Tuesday afternoon. On Tuesday night, Mario officially became a post-tropical system as it weakened in cooler ocean waters. It is churning in the Eastern Pacific as a strong low-pressure system.
A warmup is in store for the county at the beginning of the workweek, with tropical moisture entering and bringing a chance for showers.
By Tuesday, the coast and valleys will run about 5 to 10 degrees above average for this time of year. Daytime highs will be several degrees above average on Tuesday across the county.
Ramona Copley has lived in her Encinitas home since 1976, sharing it with her husband, David, who died last year. Their grown daughters live nearby. Today, her 16-year-old Chihuahua mix Cookey is her constant companion. Before David’s death, the couple had been planning the relandscaping of their front and backyards. They let the lawns die and David installed brick planters and concrete. They got rid of a cypress and ants destroyed white birch trees, Ramona said. Once he was in hospice and then passed, the landscaping project obviously was put on hold.
Within months, Ramona Copley, in her 80s and retired from being a seamstress for the San Diego Chargers, began to reignite the ideas that she and her late husband had put together. She had help from her stepdaughter Michelle in choosing plants that would be drought tolerant, hired a gardener after taking several bids and, in one month, had a front landscape anchored by three, four-trunk king palms that she’d been fixated on to provide shade over a dry creekbed and a variety of variegated agaves, mat rushes and dymondia lining it.
The Rancho Bernardo Community Council has added its support to a local effort to get the water level in Lake Hodges raised by 13 feet above its current maximum to decrease the potential for wildfire.
A majority of the council agreed at its Sept. 4 meeting to send a letter to the San Diego County Water Authority board expressing strong support for not only restoring the Lake Hodges Dam, but maintaining the lake at a 293-foot operating level “to reduce wildfire risk.”
