The Olivenhain Municipal Water District and Vallecitos Water District approved entering into a partnership agreement March 19 allowing Vallecitos to install communication equipment at Olivenhain’s Denk Reservoir site in Carlsbad.
Residents in a Poway neighborhood are expressing frustration with the San Diego County Water Authority’s ongoing First Aqueduct Facilities Improvement Project, citing poor communication and design choices that they claim are negatively impacting their properties.
Sweetwater Authority officials said they have enough water to serve customers through 2025 after the recent storms. The agency announced that it began transferring about 2 billion gallons from its Loveland Reservoir near Alpine to its Sweetwater Reservoir ahead of rainfall earlier this month.
Today, the Joint Powers Authority (JPA) for the Water Conservation will meet to weigh opens for long-term funding and stability of the Garden at Cuyamaca College. At its Feb. 25 meeting, the board discussed future funding options after the City of San Diego’s representative Nicole Beaulieu DeSantis announced intent for San Diego to withdraw from the JPA in light of the city’s budget crisis.
Starting Sunday night the City of San Diego Public Utilities Department will begin construction at the intersection between Clairemont Dr. and Clairemont Mesa Blvd. The night work will take place from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. each night, and will continue for six weeks. The intersection will be closed to traffic during those hours with detours available for travelers, but is expected to be fully open during non-working hours.
To understand how San Diego County — with its erratic, unreliable natural water supply — ended up with too much water, you have to look back in time. Over the decades, drought after drought taught San Diego water officials an important lesson: the region can’t rely on just one source or agency to meet its water needs.
We also broke down San Diego’s soaring water rates and discussed Councilmember Marni von Wilpert’s surprising suggestion that the city of San Diego should consider leaving the San Diego County Water Authority.
Even with heavy rain coming down this week, San Diego County remains in a drought, highlighting how much more is needed to replenish the region’s water resources. In the past two days alone “we saw really anywhere from one to three inches of rainfall in the valleys, coastal areas, the hills outside of the mountains and then up in the mountains we saw a significant amount of snowfall,” according to Samantha Zuber, meteorologist with the National Weather Service San Diego.
People in San Diego are already feeling higher costs from food, housing and electricity. Now, water rates will also soar.
This week, the San Diego City Council voted to approve a 5.5% water rate increase.
The periodically heavy rain that spread across San Diego County on Tuesday afternoon will give way to a far more powerful and potentially damaging storm late Wednesday night, packing snow and rain that will last into late Thursday, with a third drenching possible late Sunday, the National Weather Service said. Collectively, the three storms could drop more than 1.5 inches of precipitation at the coast, twice as much inland, and 2 to 4 inches of snow above the 4,000-foot level, mostly on Thursday, when temperatures will be about 10 degrees below average throughout much of the region.
