With COVID now behind us, no more bills like AB 1910 in the immediate offing, and the game’s drought response cum coping mechanisms in high gear, we plan to pivot back toward municipal golf in 2023.

The atmospheric rivers that began pummeling California right after Christmas have produced more than enough snow in the Sierra Nevada and rain everywhere else to provide relief to those parts of the state dependent upon Mother Nature and the State Water Project for the bulk of their water needs – not permanent relief, but a timeout to regroup after the three driest years on record.

As 2023 opens, there is some good news, some bad news, some interesting news, and some no news to report.

As we suggested a few months ago, it was not a matter of whether but only of when the Metropolitan Water District’s (MWD) emergency drought order would be extended beyond the original 6 million state water project dependent customers that have been under severe restrictions since June 1 to the 13 million MWD customers with access to imports from both the state water project and the Colorado River Basin.

Our Northern colleagues conduct their version of a “golf & water summit” December 7 at Boundary Oak Municipal Golf Course in Walnut Creek.

When the subject is golf in California, and that’s the subject of our concern, what happens at the national level has little impact. Most of what affects the game in California happens at the state, regional, and even much more so, the local level.

We haven’t reported much if at all on the following subject, but there is more at stake in California’s 2022 election than most have been led to believe

As the weathercasters inform us that this precipitation year looks like another La Niña pattern with its warmer and drier conditions for California and we wait to see whether they’re right, please remember that it’s never the last 100 days of a calendar year that matter.

Yesterday four of California’s key water districts – Metropolitan Water District (MWD), Imperial Irrigation District (IID), Coachella Valley Water District (CVWD), and Palo Verde Irrigation District (PVID) – pledged to cede 400,000 acre-feet of their current allotments back to the Colorado River Basin.

The first Monday in October is a phrase synonymous with the beginning of the next session of the United States Supreme Court, which much like the last session, promises to be a substantive one.