What Your Water Bill Would Say If It Could Talk

The average San Diegan’s water bill was a little more than $43 a month in January 2007. By July of next year, for the same amount of use, it will be more than $68.

And it will only grow from there. To bring water to San Diego, officials are undertaking ever more bold and expensive efforts. We thought it was time to explain why water is getting so much more expensive, what you’ll likely be paying for it in the future and where we will get it.

In other news:

• The New York Times reported Sunday that the biotech Genentech appears to have written some of the statements that members of Congress entered into the Congressional record in support of or opposed to health care legislation.

  Randy Dotinga, who is your Morning Report host five days a week, decided to check on the local delegation to see if any of their statements contained the language the Times found. U.S. Rep. Bob Filner appears to have gotten the memo. “[A] statement by Filner, placed in the Nov. 7 Congressional Record, includes some wording that’s identical to language that Genentech reportedly provided to members of Congress,” Dotinga writes.

  Maybe we could just let the lobbyists submit the representative’s statements and save us the administrative cost.

• Rich Toscano has turned up evidence that we may actually see home prices inch higher than they were a year ago. If that is correct, you can look back in history and see that when that happens, home prices actually go in that direction for the long term. In other words, we might be on a long march back up.

  But, as always, some important cautionary notes follow. After all, if government incentives are what’s spurring this shift, can it sustain itself?

• I have a post up about Wild ERP. You’ll remember this is the costly effort the city took on to redo its entire IT infrastructure. It has been delayed. But one of the supposed bad guys in the story is now suing the city, claiming it got a rotten deal.
• And photographer Sam Hodgson has another excellent Chargers slideshow following Sunday’s win.
• Elsewhere: The Union-Tribune’s Onell Soto is on the wind beat these days. He has an interesting story about environmentalists opposing a wind power farm in East County and another one about a start-up company in Barrio Logan that is building wind turbines that rotate like a helicopter’s blades. They’re not for big wind farms but for powering equipment in isolated areas or maybe a couple of homes at a time.
• The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a dispatch from Mexico up today with a sign of the times:

  “MIAHUATLÁN, Mexico — During the best of the times, Miguel Salcedo’s son, an illegal immigrant in San Diego, would be sending home hundreds of dollars a month to support his struggling family in Mexico. But at times like these, with the American economy out of whack and his son out of work, Mr. Salcedo finds himself doing what he never imagined he would have to do: wiring pesos north.”

  Speaking of Mexico, the LA Times has an enthralling interactive page on the toll of the country’s drug wars.

• The NC Times has a disturbing update about the rise of suicides among Marines. A professor of psychiatry has been awarded $17 million from the National Institute of Drug Abuse to study the effect of methamphetamine and AIDS on the nervous system. And in Durango, Colo. a charter school is trying to follow the lead of San Diego’s High Tech High.

Finally, a local biotech is putting a new twist on brain freezes — not the kind you get when you bite into ice cream. The company, BeneChill Inc, has developed a device that, with two prongs inserted into the nose of someone suffering from cardiac arrest, will chill their brain. It may help keep them from suffering major brain damage while doctors attend to their heart.

No word on whether it’s more comfortable than the ice cream version. But investors are excited nonetheless.

— SCOTT LEWIS