The Rainbow Municipal Water District board approved the district’s strategic plan at the Jan. 26 board meeting.
A 3-0 board vote, with Jack Griffiths abstaining and Bob Lucy having resigned prior to the meeting, adopted the strategic plan.
When it comes to finding new sources of drinking water for residents of a coastal state mired in drought, some say desalination gets little respect in Sacramento.
“Desalination should be a priority,” said Assemblywoman Ling Ling Chang, R-Diamond Bar, who introduced a bill last week that would write first-time goals into the state water code for a percentage of drinking water originating from the ocean.
The Metropolitan Water District, the primary water supplier for nearly 19 million people in Southern California, announced this month that its popular turf replacement rebate program may not be continued next year, even though the program provides visibility for non-traditional water conservation and improves drought awareness. When asked about why the program might be canceled, MWD Water Resource Management manager Deven Upadhyay said, “It was a one-time thing to try to ramp up attention on having more drought-tolerant landscapes while we’re in the drought.”
The rebate program certainly did just that. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and the MWD teamed up to offer a budget of more than half a billion dollars for conservation to span two years. Many of these programs, like the turf removal rebate, were effective. The funding for the MWD turf removal rebate itself was exhausted in late 2015 due to overwhelming demand. However, the MWD should continue offering rebates for water-wise landscaping in Southern California.
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.
The Rainbow Municipal Water District board approved the district’s strategic plan at the Jan. 26 board meeting.
A 3-0 board vote, with Jack Griffiths abstaining and Bob Lucy having resigned prior to the meeting, adopted the strategic plan.
Last Sunday, I had a column that asked what I thought was a simple question: How much more development can our water supplies sustain?
I figured planners must be looking at this issue considering the drought and new groundwater legislation that requires a holistic attitude toward our basin as opposed to the “I got my straw, go get your own” way we’ve always done things.
Nope.
Even with about 58,000 new homes either in some phase of construction or approved to be built in and around Bakersfield, no one is looking at how all that new demand will affect our aquifer.
For Carrie Wassenaar, a modest single-story house for sale a half a mile from the Burbank-Bob Hope Airport had the landscaping she was looking for in a home: tidy green lawns front and back, and trees, including an iconic orange tree. The greenery virtually sealed the deal for the Wisconsin native before she ever stepped through the front door.
Today, the animation producer’s front yard is a part of the California water revolution.
Here at one of the snowiest places in the country, Ed Bischoff marveled at a view that had been absent for years.
A number of early winter storms, strengthened by El Niño conditions, had covered the northern Sierra Nevada in white. Fresh snow weighed down towering evergreens along Interstate 80. On local roads, street signs peeked out of snowbanks more than 7 feet high.
The winter rains finally arrived in Southern California, bringing drenching relief this week to a part of the nation suffering one of the worst droughts in history. But the El Niño storms brought something else as well: a reminder of lost opportunity, on display in this coastal city, as millions of gallons of storm water slipped down the usually dry Los Angeles River and out into San Pedro Bay.
After a year in which Californians cut water use by 25 percent, storm water has become the next front in what amounts to a fundamental restructuring of Southern California’s relationship with its intricate water network. More than 200 billion gallons of storm water, enough to supply 1.4 million households for a year, could be captured statewide — but instead end up spilling down sewers, drains and into the ocean, as was on display Thursday, in the hours after the rainfall had ended, at the spot where the Los Angeles River ends
