Clearlake Oaks County Water District’s five-year rate schedule takes a home’s combined water and sewer base bill from $129.11 to $207.63 a month — while a $36 million state grant awaits a signed agreement.
Year: 2026
Clearlake weighs a Clear Lake pact that gained a seventh tribe
The Clearlake City Council takes up the Clear Lake watershed co-management agreement Thursday. The version in front of it lists 23 governments, one more than Lake County supervisors approved in July. Koi Nation is the addition.
Upper Lake wells still pumping past a 2022 state deadline
State regulators gave the Meadow Pointe water system five years to get off gasoline-contaminated wells. The deadline passed in December 2022. Since 2017, $1.3 million has gone to studies and nothing to construction.
Pulled vines piled beside a fallow vineyard block in western Sonoma County, June 23, 2026. Photo by Roger Coryell.
North Bay fuel dryness is headed past the 97th percentile
Bay Area forecasters project Energy Release Component values past the 97th percentile in the North Bay this weekend. No Red Flag Warning is in effect anywhere in California, and the reason comes down to wind.
Clearlake recruits for a sewer board seat not yet created
The city is taking applications for a public seat on the Lake County Sanitation District board. Supervisors decide Aug. 18 whether the seat exists — and a doubled sewer bill is waiting behind it.
Napa’s tourism economy broke even last year. Sonoma, Mendocino and Lake lost ground
A new Visit Napa Valley study puts the valley first in its competitive set on familiarity, perception and likelihood to visit. State data covering all four North Coast counties shows what that was worth once you subtract inflation.
Santa Rosa man gets 25 to life in wife’s stabbing death
Tunoa Meo got 25 years to life Friday for stabbing his wife to death in Santa Rosa. The district attorney’s office says Proposition 57 credits cut that to about 15 — a claim a state appeals court has rejected for murder.
Sonoma County’s earliest harvest in decades begins
Sonoma County’s 2026 winegrape harvest began July 16, nearly two weeks earlier than any start the county’s growers association has documented. The crop is light, and growers say that is the point.
A fire hydrant struck by a bus sprays water over Main Street in St. Helena. The city released the photo with its July 19 advisory on the resulting discolored water. (Courtesy City of St. Helena)
Grand jury flagged the pipes in St. Helena. Then a bus hit a hydrant
A Napa County civil grand jury said in June that decades of sediment in the St. Helena water mains had never been assessed and had no repair plan. Twenty-four days later, a bus hit a hydrant.
Trees killed by wildfire still stand above the regrowth near Middletown, in the heart of the 2015 Valley Fire burn area. (Roger Coryell, June 7, 2026)
Lake County lost more than a thousand homes to fire. Nobody will say how many came back.
Lake County gained thousands of residents and lost more than a thousand homes since 2010, nearly all in the 2015 Valley Fire. Eleven years on, no agency will say how many burned homes came back.