Good time to fix the water use rights for farmers. The current “use your allotted amount or lose it” is ridiculous.
Also ban the growth of high water intensity crops owned by foreign owners who immediately export these products overseas. Looking at you Saudi Arabia.
For now. Remember when California had a budget surplus as well?
This won’t last, and California should prepare for the next drought instead of “mission accomplished” style celebrating.
A rate hike is coming despite the good news.
Even without figuring in climate change, the California pattern tends to be a few very wet years followed by several very dry years, with only very occasional “average” years. It’s certainly been that way in my six+ decades, and if you look at the historical rainfall graphs for Los Angeles it’s pretty similar since at least 1887. https://www.laalmanac.com/images4/chart-rainfall-LA-1887-2022.jpg
(Note: 1883 was the year Krakatoa erupted.)
It’s always been that way. Even month to month, we’ve had very dry spells in wet years. And in the 87-92 drought there was a “Miracle March” in 1991. The histogram of rainfall has two humps: dry, or wet. The average precipitation is quite unlikely. This year is the closest to average we’ve had in a long time. The worst is they often use the word “normal” instead of average, but there’s nothing normal about the average.
So when are the water companies going to stop charging drought level prices?
They won’t, and will probably claim we are in a drought again so they can raise them.
An even better reason than claiming drought:
‘The additional revenue will be used to “cover the costs of importing and treating water, as well as finance climate change adaptations to infrastructure and make up for declines in revenue due to widespread conservation efforts,” according to the Times.’
Yes… All that conservation we did (if you did of course), earned us more expensive water.
https://ktla.com/news/local-news/water-rates-taxes-to-increase-l-a-times-reports/
