As most of you are painfully aware, effective June 1, Southern California’s Metropolitan Water District (MWD) issued some dramatic conservation mandates to those of its 19 million customers (MWD is the purchaser/provider of imported water for 26 Southern California Water Districts) dependent entirely upon the state water project for their imported sources.

“If the state says the drought is over, act like it’s not. We’re doing a good job, but we need to live under a permanent state of water conservation because water is the final frontier – especially with aridification in the western United States.”

It's worse than 2016. It’s not worse for everybody, not yet anyway. And it’s never as bad in the Coachella Valley as it is virtually elsewhere in Southern California, although convincing Sacramento of that can sometimes be a losing proposition.

AB 1910 was held in the Assembly Appropriations Committee’s Suspense file today, killing it for the remainder of the 2022 legislative session.

When we counseled “concern, not panic” regarding recent headlines about water allocation curtailments, we didn’t mean to diminish the seriousness of the moment; we meant only to assuage the many of you who read those headlines and concluded that golf courses in certain areas of the Southland, most particularly Ventura County, the San Fernando Valley, and parts of the San Gabriel Valley, would be restricted to irrigating one day a week come June 1.

Given the thread by which this bill continues to hang, we’d be remiss if we didn’t first reiterate the status report we issued immediately after last Wednesday afternoon’s Assembly Local Government Committee meeting, followed by a verbatim transcript of the comments issued during that meeting that formed our initial assessment and the questions raised by both.

Many of you have read today’s headlines about yesterday’s announcement by the Metropolitan Water District (MWD) that the purchaser of water that serves 19 million Southern Californians has taken the unprecedented step of declaring a “water emergency” and ordering outdoor water usage be restricted to one day per week.

With 5 members voting aye, 2 members voting nay, and 1 member abstaining, the Assembly Local Government Committee moved AB 1910 out of committee today and on to Assembly Appropriations. Sort of.

After pulling AB 1910 from the April 6 docket of the Assembly Local Government Committee, bill author Cristina Garcia (D-Bell Gardens) has now set it for a hearing on April 27, which is 2 days before the deadline for bills to pass out of committee. Fiscal bills that don’t pass out of their respective policy committees of reference by the 29^th die.

After sailing through its first policy committee of reference two weeks ago (Assembly Housing & Community Development Committee per a 6-2 vote), AB 1910 was pulled from this morning’s Local Government Committee agenda by its author Cristina Garcia (D-Bell Gardens).