A proposed water rights settlement for three Native American tribes that carries a price tag larger than any such agreement enacted by Congress took a significant step forward late Monday with introduction in the Navajo Nation Council.
Twelve years after California became the first state in the nation to declare a “human right to water,” achieving this basic societal goal of securing clean water for all 39 million state residents is more daunting than ever.
It’s the most frustrating part of conservation. To save water, you rip out your lawn, shorten your shower time, collect rainwater for the flowers and stop washing the car. Your water use plummets.
And for all that trouble, your water supplier raises your rates. Why? Because everyone is using so much less that the agency is losing money.
We’re all in hot water.
Sometimes there’s not enough water, sometimes too much. Either way, water costs for San Diegans will increase to sticker-shock level and maybe beyond, if that’s possible. And using less won’t help much.
Long before my role as president of the American Public Health Association, I was a normal woman from Flint, Mich.
Flint is home. It is where I committed myself to public health over the last 40 years, started a family, developed rich friendships and found my voice. It is where I learned to speak the truth clearly and directly, and it is why I believe that our nation’s inability to fix lead in our water systems is slowly killing us all.
This summer, when the temperature hit 110 degrees Fahrenheit or above in Phoenix for 31 straight days, many were fretting about the Southwest’s prospects in the age of climate change. A writer for The Atlantic asked, “When Will the Southwest Become Unlivable?” Bloomberg wondered, “How Long Can We Keep Living in Hotboxes Like Phoenix?”
An agreement between San Diego’s major water agency and two others in Southern California is expected to save millions of dollars and conserve millions of gallons of water in the Colorado River, which has been threatened by years of overuse and drought.
Noah Cross, the sinister plutocrat of the movie
“Chinatown,” remarked that “politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.”
He might have added public works projects to that list: If they get talked about long enough, sometimes they acquire the image of inevitability. That seems to be the case with the Sites Reservoir, a water project in the western Sacramento Valley that originated during the Eisenhower administration.
What goes in the toilet, and what goes in the trash? It’s the kind of discussion one has with a 2-year old, and is all the more delightful because it’s a topic generally regarded as taboo in polite conversation. You get to say things such as only “the three Ps” — pee, poop and paper — go in the toilet. Everything else goes in the trash can. Right?
In modern American politics, voters at the local and state level are asked to weigh in all the time on ballot measures involving public policy. What’s strikingly consistent across the nation is just how contrary voters are and how ready they are to object to anything. In San Diego, for a local example, an utterly mundane 2016 measure to change the City Charter’s language on municipal bonds so that it conformed with the state Constitution and changes in state law drew the objections of 21 percent of voters. Very lopsided results are extremely rare.
