Los Angeles County Looking for Ways to Fund Stormwater Management

At the 2017 VerdeXchange Conference in Los Angeles, County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl announced that she plans to introduce a motion "in the next couple of months" to develop a countywide funding measure to pay for distributed stormwater capture facilities.

The point of this is for us all to start to think together … It’s like when the railroads were being built from the east and from the west, and then connected by the golden spike: We have to all think together about recycling, reusing, and recharging. We have to do regional governance and integrated planning—otherwise we’re going to be stepping all over each other.

The announcement was part of a panel on how the Southern California region can collaborate on water issues, including stormwater capture and drought.

Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia spoke about the unique challenges Long Beach faces as a coastal city at the end of the Los Angeles River, while Los Angeles Chief Sustainability Officer Matt Petersen shared L.A.'s progress on its year-old Sustainable City pLAn.

Jeff Kightlinger, who heads the Metropolitan Water District, charted a course for water management in California, which may soon partner with Arizona and Nevada to manage parts of the Colorado River.

"Never have we had the opportunity to have wastewater, flood control, water supply, and urban greening folks work together at the level that they are now," State Water Resources Control Board Chair Felicia Marcus told the room. "We are poised at a moment to actually break through the gridlock on this issue that we’ve been talking about for a good two decades."