These days, while the almond orchards are kept a perfect green, the surrounding landscape is a dull brown, and the yards in front of most of the houses are little more than dirt and weeds. At least 25 families have seen their wells go dry in recent months. Many others are rationing what little water remains. Those lucky enough to be on the city’s system still have to strictly conserve to keep the town’s only well from going dry. — thenation.com

Santa Barbara City Council members on Tuesday unanimously approved spending $55 million to reactivate a mothballed desalination plant that could provide the city with nearly a third of its drinking water. [...]

“Desalination has been a last resort,” Mayor Helene Schneider told The Times Tuesday night after the vote. “The way the drought has continued these last four years, we are really getting at that last resort.”

The California Water Commission, responding to a fourth year of drought, approved sharp new limits on the amount of water that can be used on landscapes surrounding newly constructed buildings, such as houses, businesses and schools.

The revised ordinance will limit grass to about 25% of a home's combined front, back and side yards in all new construction. [...]

Additionally, grass will be all but banned in landscapes of new commercial, industrial and institutional buildings. — latimes.com

Balconies in Berkeley must now pass a safety inspection every three years, and new ones must be built of rot-proof wood or steel, under measures passed Tuesday as the campus community addresses the deaths last month of six young people and grave injury of seven more. [...]

With pressure from one council member and the lawyer for one of those killed in the June 16 tragedy, the City Council agreed to shorten the time between mandatory inspections [from five] to three years. — latimes.com

an administrative judge recommended that the ride-sharing giant be fined $7.3 million and be suspended from operating in California. [...]

Uber has not complied with state laws designed to ensure that drivers are doling out rides fairly to all passengers, regardless of where they live or who they are. — latimes.com

These have been boom times for companies that rip out lawns and replace them with drought-tolerant landscaping, but now their business might be drying up.

The Metropolitan Water District said Thursday it would no longer offer rebates to entice homeowners to get rid of their lawns because the agency ran out of money much sooner than it expected.

That is bad news for [...] landscape contractor in Los Angeles. Grass removal has become about 40 percent of his business, driven by the rebates. — scpr.org

While a golden brown lawn is seen as a badge of honor to some residents of drought-stricken California, in fact, they are doing more harm to the environment than good, says UC Agriculture and Natural Resources turf expert Jim Baird. [...]

maintaining lawns rather than letting them die or replacing the grass with synthetic turf, concrete or so-called drought-tolerant plants offers important ecological services. [...]

“The more we let our grass lawns die or go away, the hotter it's going to get” — ucanr.edu

Todd Conversano never thought he'd be able to enlarge the 1950s ranch-style home he and his wife bought a decade ago. Two previous geological reports on the property north of Beverly Hills suggested that it would cause drainage problems or, worse, destabilize the steep slope above the lot.

Instead, he came up with a smarter, cheaper and less intrusive solution. [...]

"I figured out how to do it without touching the building," — latimes.com

Californians in May shot past Gov. Jerry Brown's water conservation targets in response to the drought emergency [...].

New numbers, released Wednesday, show that the state's ambitious conservation campaign is working, with statewide residential water use declining 28.9 percent in May from its baseline 2013 levels. The figures surpassed Brown's order in April to cut water use statewide by 25 percent. — mercurynews.com

[...] the drought is a gusher for a growing number of tech startups in the emerging world of the Internet of Things, the buzzy term for the trend of connecting devices and data in the physical realm to the Internet. Getting more sensors into the environment will help thousands of farms, businesses and cities figure out where water is going and how it can be diverted for the most efficient use. Agriculture is the area most ripe for collecting more and higher-quality data. — forbes.com

'His signature style helped bring Palm Springs to the international stage and his body of work is still as fresh today as when first created...' — The Desert Sun

These are strange days in San Francisco, where the clamor to build needed housing — especially at affordable levels — is matched only by the self-righteous vigor with which actual proposals for that housing tend to be opposed...But if we want a well-planned city with distinctive new buildings for all its citizens, projects like this show that good design and good policy can go hand in hand. — San Francisco Chronicle

What would you do about the drought if you were Jerry Brown? A new 2-3 player board game by Bay Area-based graphic designer Alfred Twu allows you to play the politics of water in California.

Twu specializes in designing games that try and have fun with complex issues. Currently, he is developing one called “California Housing Crisis” that deals with San Francisco’s runaway housing costs, and he previously designed a fantasy map for a U.S. national high speed rail system that went viral. — blogs.kcrw.com