Directors made the declaration Tuesday in a resolution that calls for increased efforts to maximize conservation. Metropolitan is a wholesaler to 26 local water agencies that supply a region with 19 million people.

“We need immediate action to preserve and stretch our limited State Water Project supplies,” board Chairwoman Gloria D. Gray said. “Southern California on average gets about one-third of its water from Northern California via the state project. Next year, we’ll be lucky to get a small fraction of that.”

Water years 2020 and 2021 were the driest two-year sequence on record in the state, and in August, Lake Oroville, the main State Water Project reservoir, reached its lowest point since being filled in the 1970s, MWD said.

Metropolitan has been trying to preserve State Water Project supplies by instead delivering Colorado River water to as much of the region as possible but some areas remain dependent on state project water.

Last month, Gov. Gavin Newsom expanded the state’s emergency drought declaration to include all of California, including major population centers. That order gives state water officials permission to enact mandatory water restrictions.

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SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — As California sinks deeper into drought it already has had more than 900 additional wildfires than at this point in 2020, which was a record-breaking year that saw more than 4% of the state’s land scorched by flames.

The danger prompted Gov. Gavin Newsom to propose spending a record $2 billion on wildfire mitigation. That’s double what he had proposed in January.

“Clearly we recognize we need to step up our efforts here in the state of California and that’s what we began to do early this year,” he said Monday.

California’s mountains and foothills are expected to see above-normal wildfire potential from June through August and possibly into the fall, which is the usual peak fire season, according to the National Drought Mitigation Center and the Southwest Coordination Center.

While some parts of the Southwest saw cool and moist conditions over the past month, that wasn’t the case in California. said Chuck Maxwell, a meteorologist and predictive services manager with the Southwest Coordination Center in Albuquerque. About 94% of California has drought conditions ranging from moderate to exceptional, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor that measures conditions.

This year’s fires so far have burned nearly five times as much acreage as they did last year at this time. But the 24 square miles (62 square kilometers) scarred by about 2,600 fires this year is a small portion of last year’s totals of nearly 10,000 fires and an astronomical 6,653 square miles (17,231 square kilometers) burned. The fires killed 33 people and burned more than 10,000 homes and other structures.

Last year’s epic fire season lasted so long that it slowed Cal Fire’s attempts to set its own fires — the prescribed burns that they want to make an increasing part of their long-term efforts. They’ve been able to deliberately burn about 17 square miles (44 square kilometers) through April 30, down about 40% from last year.

Even a dry winter would have allowed for the prescribed burns, but officials got a late start due to the extreme fire activity the second half of last year, said Christine McMorrow, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

“Prescribed burns are a big part of our strategy,” said Newsom, who included $50 million for them in his proposed budget.

Cal Fire Chief Thom Porter called them “our best and most cost effective tool” for clearing both overgrown areas and invasive non-native plants. But he cautioned that “not every piece of California is ready for prescribed fire yet” with “a lot of areas where it’s not safe to put fire on the ground under any circumstances.”

Smoke from deliberate burns is also an issue, he said, though the state tries not to burn near sensitive locations like hospitals. And the state can’t intentionally allow fires to burn on private land without permission and safeguards in place, Porter said, although it is trying to get blanket approval from large forestland owners to allow fires to continue in a safe manner once they’ve started.

That means in many areas officials will have to continue using hand crews, machinery or animals to clear overgrown areas.

“Once we have safe areas to burn we will reintroduce fire and that will be the primary tool in the future, but I’m talking about decades out,” Porter said. “We have to build that over an incremental basis over the next many, many years to get to the right place and the right combination.”

The budget proposal that lawmakers will consider before June 15 includes more than $48 million to phase in a dozen new Cal Fire Fire Hawk helicopters and seven large C-130 air tankers like those Newsom highlighted at a Sacramento-area firefighting airbase Monday. It has nearly $34 million to replace two state helicopter bases and create a new emergency operations center in Southern California.

More than $182 million would go for an additional 33 fire crews as the state makes up in part for a dwindling number of inmate firefighters amid earlier releases because of the coronavirus pandemic and years of easing criminal sentencing laws. The money includes hiring an additional 1.399 seasonal firefighters. That will bring the total of seasonal firefighters to nearly 4,000, augmenting nearly 3,400 permanent firefighters, Cal Fire said.

Lawmakers this year already approved $536 million so the state could quickly start approving local contracts to build fuel breaks near vulnerable communities or manage forestlands, with more money going toward efforts to make homes less likely to burn.

The rest is in the budget for the fiscal year starting July 1, although Porter said most of the firefighters already have been hired.

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SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday expanded a drought emergency declaration to a large swath of the nation’s most populated state amid “acute water supply shortages” in northern and central parts of California.

The declaration now covers 41 of 58 counties, covering 30% of California’s nearly 40 million people. The U.S. Drought Monitor shows most of the state and the American West is in extensive drought just a few years after California emerged from a punishing multiyear dry spell.

Officials fear an extraordinarily dry spring presages a wildfire season like last year, when flames burned a record 6,562 square miles (16,996 square kilometers).

The expansion comes as Newsom prepares to propose more spending on both short- and long-term responses to dry conditions. He was set to release details during a visit to Merced County, in the agricultural Central Valley south of Sacramento.

The Democratic governor last month had declared an emergency in just two counties north of San Francisco — Mendocino and Sonoma.

The expanded declaration includes the counties in the Klamath River, Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and Tulare Lake watersheds across much of the northern and central parts of the state.

The Sierra Nevada snowpack, which provides about a third of the state’s water, was at just 59% of average on April 1, when it is normally at its peak.

This year is unique because of extraordinarily warm temperatures in April and early May, the Newsom administration said. That led to quick melting of the Sierra Nevada snowpack in the waterways that feed the Sacramento River, which in turn supplies much of the state’s summer water supply.

The problem was worse because much of the snow seeped into the ground instead of flowing into rivers and reservoirs, the administration said.

The warmer temperatures also caused water users to draw more water more quickly than even in other drought years, the administration said, leaving the reservoirs extremely low for farmers, fish and wildlife that depend on them.

That all reduced the state’s water supplies by as much as what would supply up to 1 million households for a year, officials said.

“It’s time for Californians to pull together once again to save water,” California Natural Resources Agency Secretary Wade Crowfoot said in a statement.

He urged residents to limit their use, whether by limiting outdoor watering, checking for leaks, or taking shorter showers and turning off the water when washing dishes or brushing teeth.

Newsom’s declaration directs the State Water Board to consider changing the rules for reservoir releases and water diversions to keep more water upstream later this year to maintain more water supply, improve water quality and protect cold water pools for salmon and steelhead.

The declaration also allows more flexibility in regulations and contracting to respond to the drought, while speeding voluntary transfers of water between owners.

Newsom said he also wants lawmakers to spend more in the next fiscal year to both respond to the drought and build the state’s long-term water supply.

The governor is spending the week previewing highlights of the revised budget he will present to state lawmakers Friday for the fiscal year that begins July 1.

Earlier Monday in the San Francisco Bay Area, Newsom proposed tax rebates of up to $1,100 for millions of lower- and middle-income Californians, one leg of a pandemic recovery plan made possible by an eye-popping $75 billion budget surplus.

The barnstorming comes as Newsom faces a fall recall election driven in large part by frustration over his handling of the pandemic, though he noted that he also previewed his budget proposals in the past when he wasn’t facing a recall.

The governor’s fellow Democrats, who control the Legislature, have until June 15 to pass a spending plan.

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