History is an increasingly unreliable teacher for water utility managers. The memory of everything that has gone wrong – floods, droughts, broken pipes, porous levees, unstable dams, or inadequate interties – and the record of how utilities fixed things and paid for the fixes – have traditionally been chapters in the textbook of rules for the future. … But climactic and political changes are rendering the 20th century textbook obsolete in the 21st century. The need to deliver clean water is the same. The weather, the financing, and the growing threat of unaffordability are not. The efforts the Santa Cruz Water Department is making to update the text parallels work being undertaken by many other utilities.

Other water management news:

• The Orange County Register (Irvine, Calif.): Region’s most powerful water job is still open with big calls about the future to make
• Sacramento Business Journal (Calif.): Insurer to California water agencies buys Roseville office building for expansion