The board for the San Diego Association of Governments – a regional planning agency of elected leaders from around the county – is asking voters in November if they want to increase sales taxes for a host of regional transportation, infrastructure and preservation projects. The plan has drawn opposition from all sides, including one dissident group of North County leaders who argue their part of the county won’t get a fair cut.
As birds sing and lizards scuttle in the lush vegetation of the Tijuana River Valley, helicopters circle overhead, and Border Patrol agents on all-terrain vehicles comb the area looking to stop illegal border-crossers.
Two big metal fences and stadium lighting divide homes in Mexico from this largest intact coastal wetland in Southern California. Over the decades, fencing construction and associated roadwork have affected wildlife habitat along a 14-mile stretch between the Pacific Ocean and the Otay Mesa Port of Entry.
The past few day have been big for water news. First, Governor Jerry Brown announced plans to ease up on some water restrictions, then Southern California’s Metropolitan Water District said it’ll end limits on the amount of water local suppliers can purchase.
All of this comes as the U.S Drought Monitor reported that Del Norte County and parts of Humboldt and Siskiyou counties are actually drought free. This news is welcome relief after four years of brutal drought.
Santa Barbara County leaders have toured an ocean water desalination plant in Carlsbad as part of their investigation into the costs and production capabilities involved in this facility. It went on line last year.
The trip was attended recently by Supervisor Peter Adam, County Executive Officer Mona Miyasato and members of the staff. The facility is on a six-acre site and the plant is operating continuously. Operating costs range from $49-$54 million a year. It makes about 50 million gallons of water daily.
San Diego County has 54 dams, and the state judges them all to be safe, an impressive feat considering that the average dam is 62 years old.
inewsource filed Public Records Act requests with the California Division of Safety of Dams and 19 dam-owning public agencies, such as water districts, requesting the latest inspection reports and emergency action plans, if one existed. According to the reports, all 54 dams were “judged safe for continued use.” The county’s oldest is Helix Water District’s Lake Cuyamaca dam, an earthen structure constructed in 1887.
As California seeks solutions to its complex water needs, one barrier is the perpetuation of misconceptions about the differences between north and south. While there are important distinctions, there are also significant areas of common ground.
As Californians continue to face a mounting list of significant water challenges – including an aging infrastructure, growing population, degraded ecosystems, over reliance on groundwater, disjointed management of water resources by government agencies, and not least of all climate change and drought – we are clearly going to need all the help we can get to meet these challenges.
Among those involved in determining California’s water policy, Latino leaders, in particular, will need to be fully informed about our water challenges and more than that become part of the solution. The growing western states Latino demographic demands that.
Nestle Waters is pushing back against the U.S. Forest Service’s proposed rules for the five-year permit the agency is considering for the international conglomerate’s water bottling operation in the San Bernardino National Forest.
The Forest Service’s affront? Suggesting a management plan that would require the company – which last year drew 36 million gallons to bottle as Arrowhead Mountain Spring Water from the forest under a $524 annual permit that expired in 1988 – to modify its operation if it was shown that it was affecting the flow of Strawberry Creek.
I just love Gov. Brown, don’t you? Okay, that’s more than a slight exaggeration, but he did endear himself to me with his executive order regarding water conservation.
Those of you who care about such things might recall Jerry (he calls me Harry — yeah, right) standing in a mountain meadow in spring 2015, staring at bare ground where there should have been several feet of snow. It was the photo op to back up his executive order back then to force urban water users to cut the amount of water they used by 25%.
A mix of rising global temperatures, mysteriously warmed waters off Baja California and unusually far-reaching storms in the western Pacific Ocean conspired to block this year’s El Niño storms from hitting Southern California, the National Weather Service said this week.
Despite plenty of indicators suggesting that the 2015-16 El Niño rains would be as strong — if not stronger — than previous Southland El Niños, heavy precipitation failed to materialize. Instead, the storms flowed north from the Bay Area to Washington, drenching the Northern Sierra Nevada and refilling some of the state’s biggest reservoirs.
