One by one, big trees are disappearing, the sound of songbirds replaced by the buzz of chain saws and crews cleaning up dead branches. According to the U.S. Forest Service, 102 million trees have died in forests across California since 2010 due to heat, drought and infestation from beetles and other bugs. Many heritage oak trees in the Santa Monica Mountains and surrounding open spaces are turning brown and falling over.
For the second consecutive year, the City Council approved its appointments to various boards and committees with little fanfare. Mayor Catherine Blakespear will represent Encinitas on the board of directors for the powerful San Diego Association of Governments. Better known as SANDAG, the county’s transportation and metropolitan planning agency oversees regional pedestrian, motor vehicle and transportation projects and has the authority to propose tax increases to support those efforts.
A water and power district east of San Diego is suing the University of California over records related to a legal opinion that supports Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan to expand the state power grid across the western United States. The lawsuit, filed last week in Alameda County, said university officials refused to turn over documents that three law professors relied on to produce the study. The opinion was commissioned in March by the California Independent System Operator, or CAISO, the government nonprofit that manages most of the the grid.
After many alternatives, iterations and tweaks, final environmental documents are to be made public Wednesday for a water re-routing project that has come to be known as the California WaterFix. Don’t expect the documents to mollify critics or to answer every question about environmental and financial costs, however — or to lessen the tension among the many interests that have a stake in the West’s shrinking supply of water.
With two winter storms set to hit the region this week, San Diego County officials reminded residents of unincorporated areas Wednesday that they can pick up free sandbags to help protect their homes, neighborhoods and streets from flooding and erosion. “The region is still suffering through record levels of drought this year,” county officials said in a statement. “Because of that, rains could trigger erosion and even debris flow, especially in areas that aren’t covered by lawns, trees, shrubs and plants.”
California entered a sixth year of drought with 102 million trees dying in its forest and a summer of wildfires that swept through communities from the San Diego border to far northern California, leaving a trail of death and destruction. But rains and snow in the Sierras gave the state hope that the drought’s grip was slowly loosening.
A North County water rights dispute that had been stuck in federal court for decades was officially put to rest last week, along with part of an even older case.The two settlements were included in a larger package of water resource and infrastructure legislation approved earlier this month by the House of Representatives and the Senate, then signed Friday by President Barack Obama. One case involved a 1951 three-pronged lawsuit over water rights to the Santa Margarita River that at one time had nearly 7,000 defendants.
Many years ago, leaders in our region came together to figure out how to ensure a reliable water supply for the future. They recognized not just the importance of water to our quality of life, but how essential it is for a healthy economy. We were in a vulnerable position, and we knew it. The region relied on imported water for 95 percent of its supply. Carlsbad was 100 percent dependent on imported water.
This water year, which stretches from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30, is on track to outpace the last two months of 2015. As of Sunday afternoon, the Saugus weather station measured 1.58 cumulative inches of precipitation for the water year, said Bonnie Bartling, specialist for the National Weather Service Oxnard office. Though the Santa Clarita Valley is still below last year’s mark when the station cleared 1.62 inches of rain by the end of Dec. 2015. But, Bartling said the area still has time to clear the hurdle.
The twin 40-foot-diameter, 30-mile-long tunnels would harvest Sacramento River water before it flows through the San Francisco Bay-Delta estuary. A vast majority of this water would be sent to Big Ag operations like The Wonderful Company in the Southern San Joaquin Valley. It will destroy the largest estuary on the West Coast of the Americas. But as the the San Francisco Chronicle recently editorialized, “The tunnel project, now marketed to Californians as WaterFix, lacks community trust and political will and is saddled with a $16 billion (and growing) price tag that appears much larger than water agencies are willing to pay.”
