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When you visit your local coffee shop and hand over $5, the barista gives you the drink you paid for. If you only got coffee half the time you paid, or you got saddled with bills for other customers, you would quickly find another café. The same approach must now be applied to a complex challenge with statewide implications — the water reliability and environmental issues in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Bay-Delta.

 

La Niña, a phenomenon marked by the cooling of water in the equatorial Pacific, is a major driving force behind weather around the globe. Just last month, the forecast was neutral, which meant chances of Los Angeles getting its average of 15 inches of precipitation looked good. But the new report points to a 70 percent chance of La Niña development in the fall, sloping to 55 percent in the winter. That might mean a drier, warmer winter in the southern tier of the U.S., which doesn’t bode well for SoCal as it enters its sixth year of drought.

Despite the state’s ongoing exceptional drought, a recent report shows conservation efforts are easing, particularly along the southern coast. In April 2015, governor Jerry Brown signed an executive order targeting a 25-percent reduction in water use. Initially, those efforts were met, with the state using 27 percent less water in August 2015 than the same month in 2013. By August 2016, however, water use rose to the point that there was just a 17.7 percent reduction over the 2013 baseline. In the state’s south coast region, which includes much of San Diego County, conservation was even lower at 15.4 percent.

Until recently, most people weren’t familiar with the Salton Sea. But as California’s largest lake has rapidly receded over the last several years, it has begun to grab national headlines as the site of several doomsday scenarios for public health, the environment and the economy.

As the water level drops, miles of lake bed are exposed. The parched earth gets kicked up into hazardous dust storms that contribute to the highest asthma-hospitalization rate in the state. Left unabated, the Salton Sea lake bed could become the largest source of particulate air pollution in North America, threatening the health of hundreds of thousands of people in California and the Mexican state of Baja.

The former director of binational affairs for the city of San Diego is the newest member of the board of directors of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.

Elsa Saxod, who was installed during Tuesday’s board meeting at MWD headquarters in Los Angeles, is the city of San Diego mayor’s appointee to the San Diego County Water Authority, where she has served since 2008.