“I do think we’re better prepared, and I think we are continuing to be better prepared [for dry conditions],” he said.

But other water capture and storage efforts have been slower to get off the ground, including the Safe Clean Water Program, passed in 2018 as Measure W. The program allocates $280 million a year toward projects that convert asphalt and other hard surfaces into porous materials that allow water to percolate in the ground, among other efforts. It added only 30 acres of green space to the county in its first three years, a recent report found.

Mark Gold, director of water scarcity solutions for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said L.A. residents were right to be frustrated by the billions of gallons of stormwater that were funneled into the Pacific Ocean through the L.A. River, Ballona Creek and Dominguez Canal during this winter’s storms.

“The potential of what we can do is just so much more,” he said.

In fact, though L.A. has made progress on some projects over these two wet years, Gold said too much of the work is too far from completion. He’s not convinced the city is more prepared for the next drought than it was the previous one.

“There’s nothing magical that’s happened in two years that helps us be more resilient to this huge climate variability,” he said. “We’re certainly not in a much better place today than we were prior to this wet season.”

Among his biggest concerns is slow progress on the plan to transform the Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant from a wastewater treatment facility into an an advanced water purification facility, which could boost local supplies by more than 200 million gallons of water per day, or nearly half of the city’s water demand.

Part of a partnership with L.A. City Sanitation, that project had been billed as Hyperion 2035, but it’s way behind schedule and unlikely to be fully complete until at least 2045 or even the 2050s. The reclamation plant has also been plagued by infrastructure issues and maintenance problems— including a major 2021 sewage spill— partly induced by overflow and debris from strong storms.

“We’re very, very concerned that additional major improvements are needed at the Hyperion treatment plant to just do the basics of treating wastewater to secondary treatment levels, especially during extreme storms, but even year-round,” Gold said. “And now that the city is in a growing budget crisis, that concern, which already existed, is being elevated.”

L.A. City Controller Kenneth Mejia recently warned residents that the city is facing a projected budget deficit of $476 million.

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