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California is also suffering a ‘snow drought’.

The State Department of Water Resources says that while 60 percent of the state is in a severe or extreme drought, the water content of the Sierra snowpack also comes up short.

Record warm temperatures have created an early and below-average runoff from melting snow that was in large part absorbed by parched soil before ever reaching California’s reservoirs.

The forecast for Water Year 2017 is uncertain since La Nina has replaced the rain-bearing El Nino.

Escondido’s latest plan to build a recycled water treatment plant in the center of the city is drawing protests from residents in a nearby retirement home and other neighbors. The new site, at the southwest corner of Washington Avenue and Ash Street, is surrounded by mostly commercial properties, but is right next door to a retirement facility called The Springs of Escondido, where dozens of residents have signed a petition objecting to the city’s plans.

With Lake Mead receding year after year and the threat of a shortage looming, the overallocated Colorado River seems to be approaching a breaking point.

But John Fleck argues this crisis doesn’t necessarily mean we’re headed for a future in which conflicts flare and communities run dry. In his new book “Water is for Fighting Over,” Fleck focuses on success stories, including multiple examples of cities and farms reducing water use, and a deal that briefly revitalized the parched Colorado River Delta in 2014 during an event called the “pulse flow.”

A plan to build two huge tunnels to shunt fresh water around the Sacramento Delta is supposed to be funded entirely by the people who receive the water. But taxpayers may end up paying a substantial amount of the tab. That’s according to documents obtained by the Stockton-based environmental group Restore the Delta that discuss the cost of the California WaterFix project, which is projected to cost at least $16 billion to build.

The forests of San Diego County that have shaded 500 generations of local people and provided pine needle bedding, oak woodland and spiritual renewal could disappear. Overly intense fires in quick succession, along with drought, borer insects and climate extremes are laying waste to trees and creating a hostile environment for regrowth. Beloved local places — the Laguna mountains, Cuyamaca Rancho State Park, Palomar Mountain — could convert to chaparral or even to grasses. Some scientists mention even the Torrey pines as possibly at risk.