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Southern California is seeing one of its driest starts to the water year in decades, the National Weather Service said Wednesday. Since the start of the water year on Oct. 1 through Dec. 31, downtown Los Angeles has received just 0.12 of an inch of rain. That is tied with 1962-63 for the fourth-driest start to a water year since record keeping began in 1877, the weather service said. “The start of the storm season has been exceptionally dry,” said Ryan Kittell, forecaster with the National Weather Service in Oxnard. “It’s one of the driest in history.”

The new year begins with a minimal snowpack in the Sierra Nevada as measuring stations across the state report an average Wednesday of 2.3 inches — just 21 percent of normal. “The survey is a disappointing start of the year, but it’s far too early to draw conclusions about what kind of a wet season we’ll have this year,” said Frank Gehrke, chief of the California Cooperative Snow Surveys Program. “There’s plenty of time left in the traditional wet season to reverse the dry trend we’ve been experiencing.”

 

More San Diegans are coming forward with outrageously high water bills that in some cases are more than $1,000. But they say the city is brushing off their concerns. Now, they have a new strategy to get different answers to their expensive questions. “It’s too hard, sometimes, to fight it,” said Joyce Abrams, a La Jolla resident whose last three water bills doubled to nearly $500 each. “You can’t not pay because then they turn your water off.”

The weighted vote entitlements for San Diego County Water Authority agencies at 2018 San Diego County Water Authority meetings were approved by the CWA board Dec. 7, and the shares for the Rainbow Municipal Water District, the Fallbrook Public Utility District, and Camp Pendleton will all be less than those agencies’ 2017 weighted vote. Rainbow’s share will decrease from 4.04 percent to 4.00 percent. The FPUD weighted vote was 2.35 percent for 2017 meetings and will be 2.32 percent during 2018. Camp Pendleton had a share of 0.10 percent of the weighted vote in both 2016 and 2017 and will account for 0.09 percent of the 2018 vote total.

When the largest farm-to-city water transfer was approved in 2003, the state of California gave itself a 15-year period to find a solution to the receding Salton Sea waterline — an environmental disaster waiting to happen. Those 15 years are up. The mitigation water the Imperial Irrigation District was obligated to divert to the Salton Sea has come to an end, and it’s expected the lake’s receding water rate will speed up starting this year, increasing the risk of developing respiratory diseases through the Imperial and Coachella valleys.