You are now in Media Coverage San Diego County category.

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.

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.

Dismantling San Diego’s biggest water broker could be what local boundary referees recommend later this year in the face of ever-rising water rates.

That’s just one of a menu of options that San Diego’s Local Agency Formation Commission, known as LAFCO, will analyze in what’s known as a municipal service review of the San Diego County Water Authority. Reviews like this can inspire further action by the commission, endowed with legislative powers to break up or consolidate cities and government services.

The Rancho Santa Fe Association board has added its voice to a growing coalition of North County neighbors seeking answers from the state about the future of Lake Hodges and its 106-year-old dam.

At the board’s Sept. 4 meeting, they heard a presentation from Raise Lake Hodges, a grassroots group that would like to see the lake raised 13 feet, from the state-restricted 280 feet to 293 feet, to refill and cover what is now an exposed, dry lakebed and help keep the region safe from the risk of the wildfire.