It’s something we’re reminded of every so often; we live in an arid climate and droughts are a reality of life. Add in the unpredictable element of climate change, and the difficulty of planning for a stable water supply becomes evident.
On Tuesday morning, the San Diego County Water Authority provided an update on our water situation. Senior Water Resources Specialist Efren Lopez began with snowpack levels in the northern Sierra.
“Currently, the northern Sierra snowpack is at 108% of normal with more snow in the forecast later this week," Lopez said.
That’s very good news because the northern Sierra provides a lot of the state’s water. The situation closer to home is not quite so robust.
“We are currently at 48% of normal conditions for rainfall this water year," said Lopez.
But that's not a big deal, according to Lopez. He said that’s thanks to years of planning, building out and maintaining our water infrastructure.
“It doesn’t really have an impact on how much water we can use on a day to day basis, and really, we can go through several droughts and it won’t have an impact on the San Diego region," he said.
But getting to that level of resilience has not come cheap. Over the last few decades, the Water Authority has invested many, many millions in expanded storage and the water desalination plant in Carlsbad, which provides a drought-proof source of water.
While county water customers can take some solace in the fact that we’re not running out of water (at least not anytime soon), there are also those higher rates, and more to come. But the water authority says they’re working on that too.
Water Authority officials said we have so much water, that we’re actually in the process of selling a limited amount to other regional water purveyors.
Those funds, they said, will eventually help local ratepayers. They’ve allowed the Water Authority to create a rate stabilization fund.
“A rate stabilization fund is a mechanism for us to smooth out those rates over time. Because of the two wet years and lost water sales, we’ve had to use that rate stabilization fund to mitigate rates, or they would’ve been even higher," Denham said.
As it is, the Water Authority’s rates went up 14% last year. Dan Denham said they won’t know how much rates will go up this year until mid-summer.
