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City To Expedite Audit To Answer Why Hundreds Of San Diego Water Bills Are So High

/in /by /KPBS

The audit of the city utilities department’s water billing procedures is being fast-tracked and expanded, Mayor Kevin Faulconer announced Thursday, as officials seek more answers about how 343 residents were overcharged by as much as $420 due to one employee’s misreading of water meters. Residents began raising questions about their bills with city officials at the start of the year and, disappointed with the response, many went to local media in an effort to get more thorough answers. Some were told by the Public Utilities Department that there was nothing erroneous about their bills.

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Hundreds Turn Out To Public Forum To Discuss Skyrocketing Water Bills

/in /by /The San Diego Union-Tribuneby Joshua Emerson Smith

Hundreds of frustrated and angry residents turned out Thursday night for a city-held public forum at Mira Mesa Senior Center to address surging water bills — a long-simmering controversy that has now reached a boiling point. For more than three hours, one resident after another stepped to the microphone to address officials with the Public Utilities Department. Nearly all had stories of being charged for water they didn’t use, causing their bills to skyrocket by hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars.

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OPINION: The Case For California WaterFix

/in /by /City Watch (Los Angeles)by Tony Butka

As I have previously written, Los Angeles and its DWP pays to import most of our water from Metropolitan Water District sources. This is in addition to the water we obtain from the Owens Valley aqueduct, which is owned by the DWP (and was the subject of the movie Chinatown). After last year’s record precipitation, most of my friends thought that the drought was over and became uninterested in the Delta Tunnels “WaterFix” project.

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NBC 7 Responds Puts San Diego’s Water Department To The Test – Part One

/in /by /NBC San Diegoby Tom Jones, Consumer Bob, and Erica Byers

When San Diego city water customers receive a water bill, and they feel the bill is charging them for more water than they used, their options for challenging the bill are limited. One of those options is to have their water meter tested. NBC 7 Responds wanted to know if the city’s water meter testing is treating San Diego customers fairly. After sharing the test results and the city’s water meter testing process with one of the country’s meter testing experts, he said he could not say the tests performed by San Diego’s Public Utilities Department were done accurately.

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NBC 7 Responds Puts San Diego’s Water Department To The Test – Part Two

/in /by /NBC 7by Tom Jones, Consumer Bob and Erica Byers

Homeowners in the city of San Diego who find their water bill is overblown have limited options. The city tells them to check for leaks and if the homeowners find none, their last option is to have their water meter tested. NBC 7 Responds wanted to find out if the city’s water meter testing procedure is fair to customers. After filing public records requests for all water meter testing results performed by the city, NBC 7 Responds found the results were incomplete and an expert said those results could not prove if the meters actually passed or failed the tests.

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What GFOA Is Warning On Alternatives To Advance Refundings

/in /by /The Bond Buyerby Brian Tumulty Quoted: Lisa Marie Harris

The Government Finance Officers Association’s federal liaison center is warning some members against using interest rate swaps and derivatives as alternatives to advance refundings. In a recently published alert, GFOA noted that the tax law changes enacted in December prohibit the use of tax-exempt advance refundings as of Jan. 1, 2018. As a result, issuers are looking for alternatives. “Issuers should work with their advisors to understand potential new risks and other considerations that may accompany these alternatives,” GFOA said in the alert, adding it, “cautions many entities against entering into swap or derivative agreements.”

OPINION: Dreading ‘Day Zero’ As California Drought Resumes

/in /by /Daily Breeze (Torrance)

On hearing that Day Zero just got pushed back a couple of months, the casual news consumer might be forgiven for confusing this with a bulletin from the Doomsday Clock scientists who predict the likelihood of worldwide nuclear devastation. But no, that metaphorical clock is still set at two minutes to midnight. Day Zero is the coming time when Cape Town, South Africa will essentially run out of municipal water for its 4 million residents — and for the visitors, too, who have long flocked to the beautiful, cosmopolitan city with a Mediterranean climate startlingly like our own.

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Supervisors Adopt New Climate Plan Over Widespread Opposition From Green Groups, Residents

/in /by /The San Diego Union-Tribuneby Joshua Emerson Smith

The county of San Diego is bracing itself for the next chapter in a years-long legal saga over its plans to limit greenhouse gases. The board of supervisors unanimously approved on Wednesday its latest iteration of a so-called Climate Action Plan — once again drawing the ire of environmental groups and concerned residents who say elected officials aren’t taking the issue seriously.

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Even With Pledges To Fight Global Warming, You’d Better Brace Yourself For More Extreme Weather

/in /by /Los Angeles Timesby Karen Kaplan

Scientists have some sobering news about the future of our planet: Even if humans manage to meet the temperature target set forth in the Paris climate change agreement, record-breaking weather events will become increasingly common around the world. And that’s the good part. The Paris plan seeks to keep Earth’s global average temperature within 2 degrees Celsius of pre-industrial levels by getting people to reduce their carbon emissions. According to the United Nations, 174 countries have signed on to the agreement.

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5 Things To Know About The Plan To Ship Water To Southern California

/in /by /89.3 KPCC (Pasadena)by Sharon McNary

Earlier this week, KPCC learned Southern California’s largest water importer, the Metropolitan Water District, was considering more than doubling its investment in a plan to reconfigure how supplies are diverted from one of the region’s most important sources of water: the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta just east of San Francisco. Three MWD board members have floated the idea of spending an additional $6 billion to revive a plan to build two giant tunnels under the delta.

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