Earlier this year, the San Diego County Water Authority (SDCWA) completed work on a small bypass pipeline at San Vicente Dam, near Lakeside California, and a marina at the reservoir formed by the dam. Although relatively minor projects in their own right, their completion effectively brings to a close a massive effort spanning decades to ensure that the San Diego region maintains access to adequate water supplies in the event of an earthquake or other emergency, including severe drought.

A generation ago the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta tunnel project might have made a certain kind of sense. California’s lakes and rivers had been so thoroughly replumbed by dams, drains, pumps, canals and aqueducts that the state already contained the world’s most engineered water system — so why not add one more megaproject to the labyrinth? Water from the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers flows into the delta, where some of it is directed into pumps that send it south to farmers on the San Joaquin Valley’s west side and to municipal users in Southern California.

The California Wildlife Conservation Board has awarded $14 million for Salton Sea wetland habitat restoration to sustain migrating birds and the fish they eat there, state officials announced Thursday, Nov. 17. The grant of voter-approved bond funds will be used by the California Department of Water Resources to build about 640 acres of wetlands near the spot where the New River flows into the super-saline lake northwest of Westmorland, California Secretary for Natural Resources John Laird said in a news release.

We’ve known for some weeks that Donald Trump’s transition team includes attorney David Longly Bernhardt, who has been tasked with managing the post-electoral turnover at the U.S. Department of the Interior. Bernhardt will be overseeing the hiring process for Trump’s new Interior Secretary, along with a number of important subordinate positions within the Department, including heads of agencies like the National Park Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

In its commentary, “Orange County Should Learn from San Diego’s Mistakes with Poseidon Water” (Nov. 4), the Surfrider Foundation fashions an imaginary world in which the public is forced to choose between water conservation and water-supply development.

In reality, water ratepayers and water agencies can and should do both. For the past 25 years, the San Diego County Water Authority has worked on both sides of the supply-demand equation, helping reduce regional per capita water use by nearly 40% (even before the state’s emergency water-use mandates in 2015) while increasing reliable, locally controlled supplies, such as desalinated seawater.