Outsiders Are Wary of San Diego’s Multibillion-Dollar Pipeline Plan
Opposition is building against San Diego’s dream of erecting a $5 billion pipeline to the Colorado River in the name of resource independence.
Opposition is building against San Diego’s dream of erecting a $5 billion pipeline to the Colorado River in the name of resource independence.
A full complement of 15 members of the Valley Center Community Planning Group Monday, meeting via Zoom, took up several items, all of them informational, rather than voting items.
They listened to a report by Kirk Whitaker of the San Diego County Water Authority on the Hauck Mesa Storage Reservoir that will be constructed over the next couple of years on a location formerly occupied by a much smaller water tank once owned by the Valley Center Municipal Water District.
The SDCWA is the big agency that sells water to Valley Center. It was created by an action of the state legislature in 1944 and provides most water in the county, selling to municipalities.
The Rainbow Municipal Water District will be conducting a test of cured-in-place lining for water transmission pipe.
A 4-0 Rainbow board vote Oct. 27, with Helene Brazier not able to participate in the meeting, approved the professional services agreement with Sanexen Water, Inc., for $74,800 and appropriated that amount from the water capital fund for the project’s budget.
The Friant-Kern Canal has received the approval from the federal government to fix a sag in the canal.
The Bureau of Reclamation gave its approval Tuesday – signing a Record of Decision giving environmental clearance for the project – following action from the Trump administration to invest about $5 million to study and begin pre-construction work on the canal.
A declaration suit filed in Superior Court in Sacramento by attorneys for some of the leading environmental groups in America accuses the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) of trying to prevent anyone in California from filing a court action challenging the bonds after the bond sales are underway. Referring to the DWR’s court filing in August, the environmental groups’ Oct. 29 suit says it amounts to the DWR writing a “blank check” to finance the project.
It is no secret that the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the water industry. Revenue shortfalls from a decline in commercial and industrial water use and some residential customers struggling to pay bills are affecting utilities across the country. The service must go on, but in some cases the revenue lags. Conservative estimates from the National Association of Clean Water Agencies suggest the industry as a whole is expected to lose at least $12.5 billion due to the coronavirus when all is said and done.
Water use in the San Diego region was one of the positive trends in the 2020 Quality of Life Dashboard report released today by the Equinox Project. The Quality of Life Dashboard measures and benchmarks environmental and economic trends throughout the region. Half of the 16 indicators used to measure San Diego County’s quality of life were either positive or neutral in 2019.
The Delta Conveyance Project is a necessary investment to secure California’s water future. Let’s face it, our climate is changing rapidly and becoming more unpredictable – wildfires are larger and more frequent, the seas are rising, droughts are lasting longer and storms are fiercer. The need for this project has never been clearer.
Los Angeles Department of Water and Power officials Friday announced the beginning of the environmental review process of a project that would control water flow from Grant Lake Reservoir in the Eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains.
DWP officials said the undertaking of a new spillway gate structure to control flow from the lake through Rush Creek and into Mono Lake will be one of the largest environmental restoration projects in the Mono Basin.
Lobbing another hurdle at California’s $16 billion plan to tunnel underneath the West Coast’s largest estuary, environmentalists on Thursday sued to freeze public funding for the megaproject championed by Governor Gavin Newsom.