CalWatchdog has repeatedly tried to get Caltrans to provide an estimate of its three-phase “borehole mitigation” plan — from both a spokesman as well as through a public records request — but no such luck yet, even though the data should be made immediately available under the state’s sunshine law. 

CalWatchdog found one funding request online showing at least what Caltrans is requesting for the next fiscal year, around $6.6 million, which is nearly triple the amount Caltrans estimated in January. The funding request references a “five-year estimated plan,” but Caltrans has not provided that either.

One spokesman said an estimate would be available in Gov. Jerry Brown’s revised budget, which is scheduled to be released this week. 

Number of holes doubled

Caltrans told CalWatchdog earlier this year it lost around 10,000 holes statewide since 1990. The new funding request estimates the number around 20,000 holes. 

Caltrans said many holes won’t need to be sealed as part of negotiations with local agencies (mostly counties) and many more may be covered up by existing structures (roads). Caltrans won’t provide an estimate on what the target percentage is.

Caltrans estimates the cost to “resolve” one of these four-inch to six-inch holes that go as far as hundreds of feet into the ground is between $25,000 to $60,000 per hole. This figure includes the cost of implementing the new drilling policy, which now adheres to the law.

To date, Caltrans estimates it has spent around $3.6 million to “resolve” only a fraction of the holes — between 7 percent and 15 percent. Since 1990, Caltrans lost 523 holes in Sacramento County (Phase 1) and at least 5,737 holes statewide for “active and planned projects” (Phase 2).

Phase 3 will be the remaining 14,000 or so holes from completed projects between 1990 and 2014. 

Meanwhile, Sacramento County, which helped bring the issue to light, is threatening to fine Caltrans as much as $5.23 million per day for not obtaining permits, licenses and inspections — against state and local law — for 523 wells drilled from January 1990 to May 2014. However, the compliance date has passed without Sacramento County announcing its next step.

The state’s Water Code, and subsequent state and local laws, regulates drilling practices in or near groundwater to protect against contamination. Local agencies chased Caltrans employees around for years trying to get them to comply.

In June 2014, Caltrans Director Malcolm Dougherty sent a memo to Brian Kelly, the secretary of the California State Transportation Agency, stating that Caltrans now agreed with Sacramento County and other local agencies about following local procedures.

Dougherty admitted to Kelly that the lack of documentation, combined with an “ill-defined business process means Caltrans cannot represent that we have adequately protected groundwater during our drilling operations as required” by state law.

The tiff began when the CPUC “hired outside lawyers as federal and state investigators probed allegations of official influence-peddling and improper deal-making with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and other utilities,” as the San Francisco Chronicle reported. As NBC Bay Area reported, the tab for those attorneys reached $5 million.

That led legislators in Sacramento to cut $5 million from the CPUC’s annual budget in retaliation. “If the commissioners are doing something wrong, they should pony up and say this is what we’re doing wrong and take the brunt of it,” said state Sen. Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo, according to NBC.

Picking a fight

“Lawmakers didn’t specify where the commission had to make budget cuts, however,” the Chronicle added. So the agency — in what seemed to be a calculated effort to make lawmakers look bad — “took the money in part from efforts to implement antiterrorist legislation.” Not by coincidence, CPUC Executive Director Timothy Sullivan chose to postpone implementation of Senate Bill 699, authored by Hill himself. Signed into law last year, the bill “ordered the state’s power providers to draw up security plans to harden the electrical grid against saboteurs,” according to the Chronicle.

Hill’s legislation was no bit of precautionary housekeeping. “The law was passed in response to the sabotage of the PG&E Metcalf substation in April 2013, the day after the Boston Marathon attacks,” as AllGov recalled. In that incident, one or two assailants — officials never determined which — “entered two manholes at the power station just southeast of San Jose and severed fiber optic cables. 911 service was cut to the area and AT&T cellphone service was disrupted. Someone then shot up the place with a high-powered rifle, pumping more than 100 rounds into several transformers. Cooling oil leaked out and the overheated transformers shut down. No one was injured and the disruption of electrical power was minimal. But power had to be rerouted.”

National fears

Although the attack was never formally connected to a terrorist organization, the precision and efficacy of the strike put state and federal officials back sharply on their heels. “Shooting for 19 minutes,” the attackers “surgically knocked out 17 giant transformers that funnel power to Silicon Valley. A minute before a police car arrived, the shooters disappeared into the night,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

“Utility executives and federal energy officials have long worried that the electric grid is vulnerable to sabotage. That is in part because the grid, which is really three systems serving different areas of the U.S., has failed when small problems such as trees hitting transmission lines created cascading blackouts. One in 2003 knocked out power to 50 million people in the Eastern U.S. and Canada for days.”

In a December 2013 regulatory hearing of the Energy and Commerce Committee, then-ranking member Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., tried to raise the alarm. “It is clear that the electric grid is not adequately protected from physical or cyber attacks,” Waxman said, Foreign Policy reported. “He called the shooting at the the San Jose facility ‘an unprecedented and sophisticated attack on an electric grid substation with  military-style weapons. Communications were disrupted. The attack inflicted substantial damage. It took weeks to replace the damaged parts. Under slightly different conditions, there could have been serious power outages or worse.'”

Abuse of power

Given the revelations surrounding the CPUC’s once-secret conduct, its willingness to dawdle on improving grid security seemed likely to backfire. “The lawmakers’ action, while ostensibly tailored to the outside legal bills incurred by the CPUC, was meant as a general rebuke to the commission’s cozy relationships with the utilities it regulates,” AllGov noted. “Critics have long complained about the public’s business being done behind closed doors, but the release of emails last year during a federal court proceeding exposed unethical behavior that could very well prove to be illegal.”

Under the hard-fought agreement, the UCs receive “a 4 percent general-fund spending increase and a large contribution toward its underfunded pension system,” as U-T San Diego’s Steven Greenhut observed. In a sign of their priorities, officials proceeded to increase executive compensation by 3 percent — topping out at $991,000 for the best-compensated, according to Greenhut, with a net price tag of $14 million per year.

Gov. Jerry Brown had labored to keep education spending under relative control. In January, he touched off protracted negotiations after offering the UCs nearly $100 million less than they’d sought.

More international

In one concession to Brown, the UCs put a two-year freeze on tuition for California residents. But the agreement allowed hikes for nonresident tuition as high as 8 percent a year. And as the talks wore on, administrators had already doubled down on that kind of approach in order to draw in more income. Over the past several years, the UCs have orchestrated an influx of high-paying foreign enrollees. Describing international students as a “cash cow for the system,” the San Francisco Chronicle noted that the percentage of California residents making up the UC student body dropped by almost 10 percent over the past eight years. “Meanwhile, international enrollment increased nearly fivefold over the same period, from 1.8 percent to 8.5 percent of the student body.

The number of domestic out-of-state students grew by just under two percentage points. “This year,” added the Chronicle, “an even higher percentage will be coming from overseas and across state lines. Non-resident admissions for the fall semester increased by about 13 percent UC-wide, with Santa Cruz, San Diego, Irvine and Davis experiencing particularly large jumps.”

Top dollar

Critics have questioned why so much UC revenue has flowed toward salaries. Last year, when the board of regents hiked salaries for university chancellors, objections to the sometimes eye-popping figures were met with warnings that the UCs risked brain drain at the hands of out-of-state competitors.

“At first I was concerned about how this will look to the general public,” compensation committee member Bonnie Reiss told the Chronicle. “But she said she changed her mind after recalling that UC Irvine lost its chancellor, Michael Drake, last year when he quit to run Ohio State University, where the base pay was $851,303, the nation’s highest for a public university.”

Although university leaders have countered that high salaries are essential to attracting and retaining competitive talent, some compensation packages have been so generous that observers have suggested some other motive is at work.

The case of Mark Yudof, Napolitano’s predecessor, has attracted special attention. Citing custom and precedent, the board of regents justified paying Yudof $591,000 the year after he left the UC presidency and geared up to return, albeit briefly, to a professorship.

Although some legislators responded to the controversy by trying to limit UC payouts, those efforts have come to naught. As the Sacramento Bee reported, “Assemblyman Roger Hernández, D-Baldwin Park, introduced a bill shortly afterward that would have capped compensation for any UC employee at $500,000. That bill is stalled in committee; it last came to a vote in April.”

Last year, out of some 200,000 jobs systemwide, 28 were paid at least $1 million, 35 grossed $500,000 or more, and over 3,000 received salaries in excess of $100,000, according to data reported by the Orange County Register.

Minimum wage battle

Adding to the friction between the UCs and the Brown administration, Napolitano recently announced that “several thousand workers would have their salaries increased to $15 an hour by 2017,” according to the Los Angeles Times. Although Brown declined comment through a spokeswoman, the Times noted that his finance department came out swinging last month against the latest bill angling to increase minimum wages statewide. “Officials said the wage hike would increase costs to state agencies by $393 million this year, nearly $1 billion next year and $3.4 billion the year after, with about half coming from the state general fund,” the Times reported.