Environment

Regional Water Agency Starts Fiscal Year With Bigger Budget

By Alison St John / Reporter

Published July 1, 2013 at 3:00 AM PDT

This story was published more than 10 years ago.

Regional Water Agency Starts Fiscal Year With Bigger Budget

San Diego County Water Authority starts this new fiscal year with a $1.5 billion budget that includes modest rate hikes on the price it charges member agencies for water. The increases are because more water is being used in San Diego and the cost to get it here is growing.

San Diego’s County Water Authority (CWA) supplies water to 24 smaller water agencies around the region. The authority’s budget for the coming year increased 5 percent — that’s compared to a 16 percent cut in last year’s budget from the year before. The agency has had to eliminate 30 staff positions, which have not been restored.

Capital costs for the authority are down, now that an expansion of the San Vicente Dam is complete, creating capacity to store enough extra water to supply 300,000 families for a year.

But the cost to import water from outside the county will rise between 5 and 10 percent — 5 percent from the Metropolitan Water District and 10 percent from the Imperial Valley.

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This year, the CWA will increase wholesale water rates for treated water by more than 3 percent. But that rate hike is considerably less than wholesale water rate hikes over the last six years, some of which were as high as 20 per cent.

The wholesale rate increase will likely translate into 1 or 2 percent rate hikes on water bills for households, depending on local water agencies, which may have other costs of their own to add.

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Alison St John currently serves as a general assignment reporter and occasionally co-hosts KPBS Midday Edition. She fell in love with KPBS Radio when she arrived in San Diego in 1985 and first heard NPR. She has been a voice on KPBS Radio since 1989, and has served as a news reporter for radio, TV and the web, as well as anchoring, hosting, producing and editing. Alison has reported on stories about North County and was based in the KPBS' North County Bureau. Alison covered the metro beat during the critical period of the San Diego City pension crisis, and the education beat while Alan Bersin was the controversial Superintendent of San Diego City School District. She covered health when the industry was converting to managed care and told welfare reform stories in the late 1990s when Clinton was “ending welfare as we know it.” She has covered land use issues extensively, looking at the challenges of meeting a growing population while preserving community character, and developing a better transportation system to meet environmental concerns. She has done many stories on the military in San Diego, and the series she edited on the challenges veterans face returning from active duty to civilian life won “Best of Show” from the San Diego Society of Professional Journalists. She occasionally hosts the KPBS Roundtable and KPBS Midday Edition. Alison has won awards from the San Diego Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press TV and Radio Association, and the California Golden Mike Awards. Alison was born in Tanzania, brought up in Scotland, and earned her degree in psychology and sociology from Durham University in England. Her postgraduate diploma is in student counseling. She worked in England, Nigeria, Switzerland, Belgium, India, and Japan before moving to the United States in 1981. She now lives in Oceanside and enjoys how her community is growing and changing.