The Del Mar City Council voted Feb. 20 to proceed with a public noticing period for potable water and wastewater rates increases that, pending approval by the City Council, would take effect July 1.
To say it rained a lot this year is an understatement and the reservoirs in the City of San Diego have been filling up. To get a better idea on that we talked with Drew Kleis, San Diego’s public utilities assistant director. He said he likes the impressive rainfall totals.
Record rainstorms across the county have forced the City of San Diego to release hundreds of millions of gallons of water from Lake Hodges dam in recent weeks. The city of San Diego is under a state order to keep the water level low in the lake — at about 30 percent of capacity — due to safety concerns over Lake Hodges dam. It’s more than 100 years old.
The Water Conservation Garden will run out of money as early as mid-December, the nonprofit organization Friends of The Water Conservation Garden stated at an October 24 meeting of the Water Conservation Garden Joint Powers Authority, the consortium of public utility and governmental entities that oversees the Friends.
Years of complaints about billing mistakes and hours-long customer-service hold times have prompted San Diego officials to make sweeping changes to the city’s Water Department.
The changes include a new billing system, switching customer service software, new call routing, more payment options and a new policy alerting customers when their bill is being withheld for a leak investigation.
The city is also hiring more customer service workers, paying them more, expanding their training and putting new leaders in charge of their efforts.
Crews building San Diego’s Pure Water sewage recycling system continue to pass major milestones, including finishing key stretches of pipeline across the city, tunneling work under Interstate 805 and breaking ground on treatment plants.
But they’ve also been faced with some major hurdles and setbacks, including delays caused by lingering supply chain issues and a two-year-old flooding problem on Morena Boulevard that still hasn’t been fully solved.
San Diego was ranked the “greenest” city in the United States, thanks largely to clean energy sources and environmentally friendly policies, in a new study by WalletHub.
The Miami-based personal finance website compared the 100 largest cities using 28 indicators ranging from greenhouse-gas emissions per capita, green job opportunities and public transit to organic farms, bike lanes and air quality.
Reacting to the City Council’s recent approval of his amendment to spread out an approximately 19% increase in water rates Citywide over a longer period, District 1 Councilmember Joe LaCava (above) said it was necessary to soften the financial blow.
Engineers with the city of San Diego say local neighborhoods are always one rainstorm away from disastrous flooding. They say it’s because our storm system is decades past its lifetime. And right now, they say, the city doesn’t have enough money to set aside to fix problems that keep them up at night.
After three years and a contentious fight, ratepayers in Fallbrook and Rainbow will finally have their say on whether to leave the San Diego County Water Authority in November’s special election.
But for a while, that vote was in jeopardy.
When the San Diego County Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO) approved the detachment in July, there was a bill making its way through the California Legislature that could have upended that.
