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More than two decades ago, the San Diego County Water Authority heard a clarion call from the region’s ratepayers – a call demanding better water supply reliability. A call to never again let our region – our communities, our friends, our neighbors, our businesses – be vulnerable to crippling water shortages, as when the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California cut water supplies to our region in 1991 by 31 percent for more than a year.

Wildlife experts at the Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge have found alarming evidence that the salinity of the sea has reached a point where the fish are not breeding. Biologists noticed that among the dead fish washing up on the shores of the sea this summer, there were no small ones. They were all full-grown. This means the fish are not breeding. And there’s more bad news. Audobon California Policy Director Mike Lynes says the diminishing habitat is hurting the birds.

 

Some 600,000 residents of Tijuana and Rosarito Beach can expect to see their water deliveries shut off as soon as next weekend as a major aqueduct undergoes repairs.The shutdown, which could last from two to five days, will affect just less than one-third of the area’s 1.8 million water users living in 332colonias, or neighborhoods, across the western and southern parts of Tijuana and northern Rosarito Beach, according to the Baja California Public Service Commission, or CESPT.

San Diego’s two largest utilities are at odds over power, both literal and figurative.The San Diego County Water Authority hopes to save millions in coming years by generating hydroelectric power for itself and by buying electricity from sources other than San Diego Gas & Electric, the local power monopoly. The Water Authority, however, says SDG&E is standing in the way of its plans.The two agencies are, respectively, the region’s major suppliers of power and water. And their dispute echoes struggles both utilities are already having within their respective industries.

The Salton Sea is in big trouble and plodding state officials are to blame, local authorities and environmentalists say. The California Legislature appropriated money to start designing projects to restore wildlife habitat and control dust at the steadily receding salt lake in 2010. But lawmakers did not approve funding to actually begin construction on those conservation efforts until June of this year, when they included $80.5 million in the state budget for a few modest habitat projects scheduled for sometime next year, state officials said.