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The San Diego County Water Authority board of directors on Thursday voted to raise rates 6.4 percent for untreated water and 5.9 percent for treated water in 2017.

The water authority cited increasing expenses for imported water and the need to pass on higher costs for water from the desalination plant in Carlsbad. The water authority, which delivers water to 24 local agencies and districts that distribute to customers, also cited the impact of state-mandated conservation on its budget.

Coachella Valley residents have slashed their water use nearly 25 percent over the past year in response to California’s historic drought. Now they face a new conservation mandate: zero percent.

No, the drought isn’t over: The entire state is abnormally dry and 43 percent of it suffers from “extreme” or “exceptional” drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. But with California’s reservoirs and snowpack in better shape than last year after a moderately wet winter, Gov. Jerry Brown ordered the state water board to relax the strict conservation targets it imposed last June.

The thousands of acres burning across Southern California this week foreshadow what’s expected to be a severe wildfire season, the head of the U.S. Forest Service said.

Chief Thomas L. Tidwell predicts certain parts of the country — including Southern California and Arizona, where four large, uncontained fires are burning this week  — will have active fire seasons, like Washington and California did last year.

Last year was one of the worst wildfire years since at least 1960, according to records kept by the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. More than 10.1 million acres were charred in 68,151 incidents.

Municipal water agencies across California are required to report to state officials by midnight Wednesday on whether they have enough water to withstand three more years of drought. If they don’t, a new state conservation plan requires them to calculate how much they need to start saving to meet anticipated demand.

Officials with the State Water Resources Control Board are calling it a “stress test.”

But what if many of the state’s 400-plus local water agencies don’t find much stress?

Baja California’s state government has selected a bidder for the construction of a massive desalination plant in Rosarito Beach that eventually could supply water to San Diego County.

The winning bid, announced last week, came from a consortium of two foreign companies — Nuwater of Singapore and the French company Degremont — as well as a Mexican company, NSC Agua, which is a subsidiary of Cayman Islands-based Consolidated Water.