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The weighted vote entitlement at San Diego County Water Authority (SDCWA) meetings will decrease for the Rainbow Municipal Water District and the Fallbrook Public Utility District. The SDCWA board approved the weighted vote entitlement for 2017 at its Dec. 8, 2016 board meeting. The member vote entitlement is calculated based on the total cumulative financial contribution from each agency since the SDCWA was created in 1944. The contribution amount includes all taxes, assessments, fees, and charges paid to or on behalf of the SDCWA by property located within the member agency’s boundary through the June 30 end of the previous fiscal year.

Defining drought in California can be a tricky business, especially when five years of severely dry conditions are abruptly followed by torrents of rain, flooding rivers and blankets of mountain snow — as residents have seen in the past few weeks.Amid the ongoing succession of storms, water managers up and down the state are urging regulators in Sacramento to permanently cancel historic, emergency drought rules that have been in place for 18 months.

Though it’s still early, this year’s storms have brought increased precipitation, including heavy snowfall in the Sierras. Our real problem isn’t lack of rain, it’s a lack of water storage capacity. Despite voter approval of the $7.1 billion water bond in 2014, including $2.7 billion earmarked for new dams and reservoirs, few projects are currently under way. This week I toured the $4.4 billion Sites Reservoir project north of Sacramento, which is an exception. The Sites project has been studied for decades and engineering studies are underway.

With another round of winter storms hitting California this week, the question isn’t just how much rain and snow they will dump, but how cold they will be. The coldness of storms can make the difference between one that adds to the fast-rising snowpack — an essential source of water for the state — and one that also leaves a wet mess. Northern California was pulled out of a five-year drought by a series of storms over the last few weeks that deposited huge amounts of snow over hundreds of miles of the state’s greatest mountain range, the Sierra Nevada.

A series of three storms, the first arriving late Wednesday, is expected to drench Southern California — but one group that’s welcomed California’s recent wet weather is citrus growers. The drought has had a big impact on the state’s citrus industry, but now Bob Blakely with California Citrus Mutual, an advocacy group for the state’s citrus growers, says that this year’s wet weather has been a big positive.