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Even though it’s rained more than normal across California, most of San Diego’s reservoirs are still not full. About 41 percent of the storage space in these artificial lakes remains empty. Most of this is just the way things are in San Diego. Here, most of the region’s drinking water comes from the Colorado River and the melted snow of Northern California. Only about 5 percent of urban San Diego’s water comes from local rainfall.

A prominent open government attorney has sent a letter to the San Diego County Water Authority demanding the agency open up meetings previously held outside the public’s view. Attorney Cory Briggs on Tuesday called on the water authority to remedy “a pattern of violations” of California’s open meeting law, which limits the scope and frequency of unnoticed, unrecorded meetings. The idea is to prevent officials from conducting government business outside the view of the public.

Following the formal end of California’s drought state of emergency in April, the Glendale City Council eased water-use restrictions during a meeting last week, although Glendale Water & Power customers must still adhere to the city’s own water-conservation policies.

In 2015, Gov. Jerry Brown issued mandatory water-use restrictions across the state. The Glendale City Council quickly adopted an ordinance that limited watering to just two days a week, known as phase three of conservation.

America is due for new pipes, aqueducts and water mains, and the public is probably going to pay for it. Aging water systems will need a repair — either by prudent maintenance or in response to water main breaks — and utilities will have to pass the costs on to consumers. Exactly how much and where is the question answered by a paper published in PLOS One. The Environmental Protection Agency says that an “unaffordable” water bill is one that exceeds 4.5 percent of a household’s income. Now, about 12 percent of Americans have water bills at that level.

Last fall, months before San Diego Unified School District began testing all schools’ drinking water for lead, it did a special round of tests a Sunset View Elementary in Point Loma. The district found lead but didn’t tell parents. Rather, it told one parent – the one who’d requested a lead test. The lead was coming from a key device known as a backflow preventer. All the water the school uses passes through the device before it reaches sinks, faucets and fountains at the 480-student school.