The headline on an Aug. 31 Voice of San Diego story about the San Diego County Water Authority’s efforts to navigate complex operational challenges was, well, all wet. VOSD proclaimed that “Water Officials Hope to Drive Up Water Usage” – an idea that runs counter to decades of water-use efficiency and conservation efforts by our agency. In fact, the Water Authority is not trying to drive up water usage. Rather, we are developing strategies to accommodate changes in water use, specifically demands that remain well below pre-drought levels. Those are two very different things.

A standard question often asked people in charge of important things (such as being responsible for the water and wastewater needs of 26,000 people as well as hundreds of businesses and farms in our service area), is “What Keeps You Awake at Night.” My answer: The literal army of state legislators and bureaucrats working hard to dream up ways to micro-manage anything and everything your water agency does, how much water you can use on a daily basis and take your money to solve other people’s problems making your monthly water bill more expensive without providing you or our community any benefit.

California’s lengthy drought has prompted state, regional and local officials to take a series of steps in recent years to restrict water use. One of the first measures lawmakers adopted was an urban conservation plan to ensure that future consumption in California’s cities would not outstrip a dwindling supply. Modeled on tough goals that had been passed to reduce energy use and limit the release of greenhouse gasses, the 20 x 2020 Water Conservation Plan aims for a 20% per capita reduction by 2020.

Local and regional officials appear intent on driving a stake through the heart of a plan to build a hydroelectric power system with components in the Santa Ana Mountains, Lakeland Village and Lake Elsinore. The Riverside County Board of Supervisors this week joined the city of Lake Elsinore and the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District in condemning the resurrection of the Vista-based firm Nevada Hydro‘s application for the Lake Elsinore Advanced Pumped Storage project with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Two of San Diego’s biggest water treatment plants are in North County. Both are having some problems. First, there’s the desalination plant in Carlsbad. It’s the largest facility of its kind in the country that takes ocean water and makes it drinkable. Over the last year, the privately owned Carlsbad plant failed to deliver nearly a fifth of the water the San Diego County Water Authority ordered from it. Why?