Contractors constructing a wall around the San Joaquin Marsh Campus, which includes the Audubon House, Duck Club, Learning Center, Sea and Sage House and the Marsh House Visitors Center, have begun building a foundation for a gate that crosses the access road into the campus.

Access into the campus will be limited to pedestrians as there will be a trench dug across the entry to build the new foundation.  This condition will exist for a few days.

More than 300 people, including many IRWD residential customers, attended a landscape open house event at the South Coast Research and Extension Center in Irvine. IRWD and the University of California Cooperative Extension hosted the open house on October 2 in an ongoing effort to help our customers be always water smart.

Visitors were able to meet with gardening industry experts, attend landscaping presentations, tour the UC Extension demonstration landscapes, sample unusual fruit, participate in a planting activity for the kids, and have a garden tool sharpened for free. Twenty exhibitors had interactive displays where customers could learn about California Friendly plants and lawn alternatives, mulch and composting materials and high efficiency irrigation products. The UC Extension landscapes demonstrated to the visitors that they could have colorful and beautiful gardens using native and drought-tolerant plants, while saving money on the their water bills and improving the quality of the watershed with reduced runoff from irrigation.

For helpful landscaping, conservation, and use-efficiency tools and tips please visit www.alwayswatersmart.com.

Customers will soon benefit from a change in state law that will allow IRWD to use the District’s overall strong credit rating to obtain low interest general obligation bonds for funding infrastructure projects. IRWD’s infrastructure includes all facilities used to treat, store and deliver water to its customers including items as ordinary as pipelines and reservoirs to larger, more complex infrastructure such as water recycling plants. IRWDs infrastructure costs are funded with revenue from property taxes, general obligation bonds and connection fees. Senate Bill 613, authored by California State Senator Tom Harman and sponsored by IRWD, was signed into law by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger during the 2010 state legislative session. When SB 613 becomes law on January 1, 2011, it will help IRWD minimize its cost of debt and contribute to keeping IRWD rates among the lowest in the county.

For more information on IRWD’s current infrastructure projects, please visit: www.irwd.com/about-us/construction-projects

 Jim Hyde of IRWD's Water Quality Department, on the left and Christian Kessler of IRWD's Water Resources Department, assist students with their science fair questions at the annual Ask-a-Scientist Night at Rancho San Joaquin Middle School. The science fair will be held in March. IRWD Water Quality professionals will be among the judges.