Today’s Board meeting had quite a few interesting items. First was the continuation of the groundwater charge hearing, in which District staff related communications received from the community and specifically addressed some of them. The handout with the responses is not included in the supporting documents online, ironic, considering that the next agenda item deals [...]
The new District Act is getting more press. The Mercury editorializes this morning that elected directors should be limited to 12 years. Somewhat bizarrely, the editorial says: Under the bill carried by Assemblyman Ira Ruskin, D-Los Altos, on behalf of the district, the board, with part-time members, would remain at seven by breaking the county [...]
Today’s Mercury has an article and a sidebar about the proposed amendments to the District Act, the state law that empowers the SCVWD. While it spells out pretty clearly how the Board would go from five to seven elected members, Paul Rogers left out the fact that the two current at-large members would retain their [...]
Today was the meeting of the Landscape Advisory Committee. The biggest event at the meeting, I thought, was Ron Kanemoto’s motion to recommend that the Board adopt even higher groundwater charges than the 9.5% proposed (for M&I in the North County.) This was in response to the same presentation that the Board saw on Tuesday, [...]
It stands for “Other Post-Employment Benefits,” and it means retiree healthcare for life. The Government Accounting Standards Board now requires public agencies to account for the cost of these benefits when they are earned, rather than when they are used. I blogged about this last month, but yesterday I was forcibly struck with how little [...]
Back to back SCVWD meetings. This morning’s highlights: a presentation on the Delta, brief discussion on filling vacant unclassified positions, and briefer discussion on the amount of time a Board member or the CEO must wait until coming back to work for the District as an employee. When I say that the Delta presentation was [...]
This morning’s special Board meeting dealt with the District’s Capital Improvement Program, which is the District’s rolling five-year plan for large capital projects. Today’s meeting dealt with adding projects to the plan, but with the understanding that the budget process, which is about to begin, will be the final word on what actually gets built. [...]
The SCVWD Board has a number of advisory committees that consider issues relating to different aspects of the District’s activities and “assist the Board by preparing policy alternatives and implications for Board deliberation.” The Environmental Advisory Committee met tonight. District staff gave a very interesting presentation on the outlook for water supply storage and conveyance. [...]
At today’s Board Meeting, the Board adopted amendments to their policies relating to flood control to explicitly call for “the physical stability/dynamic equilibrium of streams,” “thriving populations of key species indicative of watershed health” and improved stormwater management. These were recommendations that the Environmental Advisory Committee had been working on for a long time, and [...]
I attended this morning’s special board meeting, where the board went through an unsorted list of issues to establish priorities for 2008. The experience was familiar, because of having watched previous meetings on the web. Several things strike me after 8 or 9 hours’ exposure to the current board. It is very collegial. I’ve seen [...]