Residents are starting to fall behind California’s mandatory 25 percent water conservation target, state officials said Thursday. As of January, water users in California’s cities and towns have used 24.8 percent less water since mandatory conservation began last year, the State Water Resources Control Board said. The latest numbers mean that for the first time since June, urban Californians missed the overall mandatory water-conservation target.
Water district officials from California’s Central Valley are looking to a deeply fractured Congress for relief from what they expect to be a third straight year of no federal allocations.
Westlands Water District general manager Tom Birmingham compares the drought-related water shortages bedeviling valley communities to the drinking water contamination crisis in Flint, Mich.
While some growers may see the emerging new state groundwater regulations as a potential burden, Helm, Calif., farmer Don Cameron sees them as an opportunity.Few growers understand California’s groundwater crisis better than Cameron, who farms almonds, walnuts and about two dozen other crops on 7,000 acres on the north fork of the Kings River in the San Joaquin Valley.
Cameron’s Terranova Ranch isn’t in an irrigation district, so he relies entirely on groundwater pumping. In 2011, he used a federal conservation grant to start using flood water from the river to replenish the aquifer beneath his sandy property, and he hopes to someday flood more of his ranch during wet winters to recharge the groundwater supply.
Residents in the San Diego Water District are currently tasked with slashing water use 28 percent under state-mandated rules, but this target could be lowered to 20 percent.
General Manager Bill O’Donnell at the district’s Feb. 17 board meeting said the state might lower the district’s target based on a credit for districts that have developed local water supplies since 2013 — in this case, the Carlsbad Desalination Plant that recently opened.
Following a national search to select its top legal officer, the San Diego County Water Authority Thursday named local attorney Mark J. Hattam as general counsel.
A partner in the San Diego office of Allen Matkins, a California-based law firm specializing in real estate, litigation, labor, tax, land use and business law, Hattam will begin his new post March 14.
A drier February is having an impact on the snow pack in the Sierra Nevada.
The State Department of Water Resources said Tuesday the statewide snow pack water content is 7 percent below normal despite the fact that precipitation since October 1st is only about 5 percent above average.
The water industry in the west has an impressive history of building dams, moving water hundreds of miles to where it’s needed, removing contaminants to assure public health and safety, and developing distribution systems that have set the international standard. These accomplishments aside, twentieth century solutions are becoming less and less viable as disruptors to the status quo fundamentally challenge the way we operate. The types of incremental improvements the industry is used to aren’t adequate to address the twenty-first century challenges we are facing.
With California on the verge of “bankrupting” some of its most important aquifers, state officials Tuesday reiterated the responsibility local water agencies have in enforcing the state’s new groundwater-monitoring laws.
During a legislative oversight hearing, state officials updated implementation plans for the newly enacted Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, telling lawmakers it will largely be up to local communities to monitor and prevent further depletion of California’s vital underground water supply.
There is a lawsuit in San Diego County that is as old as “I Love Lucy.” It was filed the same year a disc jockey coined the term “rock ‘n’ roll,” a gallon of gasoline cost 27 cents, and turn signals were still optional in cars.
And it is still being waged in San Diego federal court today.
In 1951, the U.S. government sued thousands of landowners in and around Fallbrook in a move to secure Camp Pendleton’s water rights. It is the oldest, ongoing civil case in the county.
Road safety, government regulations and corruption, high-speed rail, medical marijuana and state-mandated water restrictions were just some of the topics brought up at Sen. Joel Anderson’s community coffee Thursday evening.
The state senator said the money that is being spent on the state’s high-speed rail, which is supposed to run from the Silicon Valley to the Central Valley, would be better spent on new technology for vehicles, road infrastructure or water projects.
