Lawmaker targets Uber’s self-driving vehicles in new legislation 

Good morning! TGIF. One lesson for the day: If you want to do something in the state, don’t try to get around the permitting process. 

It’s not enough that Uber killed its unpermitted, self-driving-vehicle pilot program in San Francisco just a week after it started; an assemblyman wants to squash any further attempts to test vehicles without a permit as well. 

Assemblyman Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, introduced legislation requiring the DMV to revoke registrations for self-driving vehicles in violation of the state’s Autonomous Vehicle Tester Program. The bill is a response to Uber, which last year began testing its vehicles without a permit, even picking up passengers, violating state regulations. And one of the vehicles ran a red light. 

Under Ting’s bill, law enforcement would have the authority to impound violating vehicles and the DMV could fine as much as $25,000 per vehicle per day. 

“I applaud our innovation economy and all the companies developing autonomous vehicle technology, but no community should face what we did in San Francisco,” Ting said in a statement. “The pursuit of innovation does not include a license to put innocent lives at risk.”

CalWatchdog has more. 

In other news:

• “The Coastal Commission’s stated concern that a proposed Huntington Beach desalination plant’s intake pipes pose a threat to small and microscopic plankton has been rebutted in a letter from three prominent California marine biologists.” CalWatchdog has more. 

• “Consumer Watchdog collects millions, but does it lower your insurance rates?” The Sacramento Bee has the story. 

• “Jerry Brown doesn’t want to give doctors a cut of the new tobacco tax money,” writes The Sacramento Bee. 

• “Days after Governor Jerry Brown called for an extension of California’s signature greenhouse gas reduction program and threatened to withhold money it generates until that happens, Assembly Democrats introduced legislation.” Capital Public Radio has more. 

Legislature:

• Assembly is in at 9 a.m. to vote on the appointment of Xavier Becerra as state attorney general.

Gov. Brown: 

• No public events announced. 

Tips: matt@calwatchdog.com

Follow us: @calwatchdog @mflemingterp

New follower: @ChrisLevinson

Anthony Koslow, Eric Miller and John McGowan — marine biologists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla — were responding to comments made at a Dec. 1 panel about ocean desalination in Ventura County by Tom Luster, the agency’s lead staffer on the desalination issue.

Luster actually had cited Koslow, Miller and McGowan’s research in arguing against open intakes given a 75 percent reduction in plankton off Southern California since the early 1970s. Citing the Scripps research Luster said it would be “hard to maintain and enhance marine life like the Coastal Act requires in a situation like this and so open intakes have a hurdle to overcome.”

In a sternly worded Dec. 29 rebuttal letter, Koslow, Miller and McGowan said Luster’s comment reflected “an inaccurate understanding of our research,” adding that their paper showed “many of the taxa are predominantly distributed offshore but share the same trend as more coastal taxa.” 

“It is therefore not reasonable to attribute this decline to the impact of coastal development or nearshore power-plant intakes,” the scientists wrote. “We ask that you refrain from repeating your Ventura forum comments, or anything similar, as it presents an almost exactly opposite conclusion to that obtained by our research.”

The Scripps researchers’ conclusion was that large-scale ocean forcing, not local coastal processes, are behind changes off the Southern California coast since the 1970s. They added that they hoped their science could “inform regulatory decisions wherever applicable, but the science needs to be interpreted correctly.”

In an emailed response, Luster said his point was that the decline in plankton populations had made it difficult for the new proposed project, which he said “would represent an additional adverse effect to meet the Coastal Act’s requirement to maintain and enhance marine life productivity.” But Miller — one of the Scripps researchers — reiterated that their study, which found that environmental forcing had reached tipping points in 1976 and 1989, “did not detect an influence of power plant cooling water intakes on nearshore fish populations.”

“It’s a mystery to me how my quote was misinterpreted,” Luster said, in an interview.

The question at issue is no mere academic matter. The future of the Huntington Beach desalination plant isn’t just about one proposed facility, but about the statewide future of a technology that turns saltwater into drinking water. That’s a particularly important question as the state begins to emerge from a long-running drought. Decisions by the commission and other state agencies on the Huntington Beach plant will help decide whether developers pursue a number potential plants up and down California’s coastline.

A desalination plant went online last year in the north San Diego County city of Carlsbad, but the makeup of the Coastal Commission and state regulations have changed since the approval process for that facility. As the Los Angeles Times reported, the state water board “directed desalination plants to install wells — offshore or on the beach — or another type of subsurface intake that the state says would naturally filter out marine organisms.” However, the plant’s supporters point out that state laws require subsurface intake technologies to be technically, economically, socially and environmentally feasible.

According to Poseidon Vice President Scott Maloni, the harm to plankton is minimal.

“There are estimated to be 115 billion larva in the source water of the desal plant,” he said. “Our estimated entrainment is 0.02 percent. Put another way, for every 10,000 fish eggs the desal plant is anticipated to entrain two. That means that 9,998 fish eggs are not at risk. This entire debate is over the potential loss of two out of 10,000 fish eggs in the desal plant’s source water, 99 percent of which die of natural mortality.”

The latest fracas over the Huntington Beach desalination plant bolsters Coastal Commission critics who believe the commission’s problems with the plan stem more from its hostility to growth than any real concerns about the fate of the food chain’s lowliest members.

Steven Greenhut is Western region director for the R Street Institute. Write to him at sgreenhut@rstreet.org.

Poll: State higher education is too darn expensive

Good morning! TGIF. Californians are concerned over the cost of the state’s public colleges and universities, just as two of the state’s three higher-education systems are considering tuition increases.

In fact, only 13 percent of Californians say it’s not a problem, while 57 percent say it’s a big problem, according to a poll released Thursday night by the Public Policy Institute of California. 

Just below half of Californians think affordability is the biggest issue facing California’s higher-education systems, while only 15 percent think quality is the top problem. 

CalWatchdog has more. 

In other news:

• “President Obama has decided to side with Sen. Barbara Boxer and California environmentalists in their battle with Sen. Dianne Feinstein and House Republicans over Golden State water policy,” writes CalWatchdog. 

• “Following the election, Baird, a leader of a longstanding and improbable effort by several Northern California counties to secede from California, warned fellow property owners about water-related environmental policies he feared ‘are going to heat up’ in the spring. Meanwhile, Baird was preparing to sue the state over its dearth of lawmakers representing rural, sparsely populated counties. The effort is a longshot, but the sentiment underpinning it reflects lingering discord between California’s heavily Democratic population centers and more conservative, rural areas of the state. As California marches on Trump, Republicans in the state’s interior are hunkering down.” Politico has more. 

• “Monday’s legislative swearing-in ceremonies made it official: Democrats had restored their two-thirds supermajorities in both houses of the Legislature. The achievement rested heavily on millions of special-interest dollars moving to and from political party campaign committees, state filings show, effectively avoiding candidate contribution limits and obscuring the true source of the money.” The Sacramento Bee has more. 

• “For decades, some Malibu property owners have made it hard for the public to reach public beaches. On Thursday, the California Coastal Commission fined two of those property owners more than $5.1 million for denying surfers, sand castle builders, kite flyers, sun bathers, yoga enthusiasts and other beachgoers access to the sand that is theirs by state law.” The Los Angeles Times has more. 

Legislature:

• Gone till December. 

Gov. Brown: 

• No public events scheduled. 

Tips: matt@calwatchdog.com

Follow us: @calwatchdog @mflemingterp

New follower: @erinrhickey

At an event held Monday at the oceanfront facility 30 miles north of San Diego, speakers praised the wisdom of the San Diego County Water Authority in teaming with project developer Poseidon Water in building the plant over the objections of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. They said the desal plant should inspire construction of similar facilities across drought-plagued California.

But Poseidon’s bid to build a $900 million desal plant in Huntington Beach shows that the drought hasn’t necessarily changed anything in terms of making the legal and regulatory obstacle course easier to navigate. As the OC Weekly points out, Poseidon has been trying to secure support and approval for the Orange County project for at least as long as it pursued the Carlsbad project, first proposing a design for a desal plant there in 1998.

How far have company officials gotten? An August story in the Orange County Register noted that there is not even established acceptance of the proposed location of the facility:

The push to look at other locations is reflective of a perception among anti-Poseidon activists that the company has foisted its project upon an unwitting public, that it’s proposing a plant no one asked for, and that the plant isn’t even needed in these times of conservation and water-use cutbacks. Recycling technologies are improving, they point out, and there’s talk of storing storm-water for later use as drinking water.

 

Poseidon has good reasons for locating its proposed plant near the AES power plant in Huntington Beach. There’s already an open ocean intake pipe at the location, a pipe used to bring in seawater to cool down the power plant.

Surfrider group: Orange County project ‘the worst offender’

While the California Coastal Commission ended up siding with Poseidon in approving the Carlsbad plant, it’s not clear if the commission is prepared to do the same with the Huntington Beach proposal. Environmentalists assert the desalination plant poses significant risks to offshore marine life in Orange County. The Surfrider Foundation’s Newport Beach chapter is leading the charge, calling the proposed project the most damaging yet proposed in California:

There are a number of desalination technologies, and if it is not done properly, the seawater intake process can unnecessarily kill marine life.  Desalination also produces a highly concentrated brine discharge that degrades water quality and marine life habitat if not properly diluted. …

 

There are numerous ocean desalination facilities being proposed in California, all in various stages of planning or permitting. Many of the proposed facilities have not been designed to minimize degradation to marine habitats and water quality, nor are the proposals being thoroughly evaluated by any government agency for their cumulative impacts statewide. The California State Water Resources Control Board is currently in the process of collecting scientific data on the adverse impacts of ocean desalination, and how best to minimize those impacts. But some proposals are moving forward without having adopted the recommendations of the science community – Poseidon’s project proposal is the worst offender.

Nevertheless, the project has bipartisan political support, and has begun to make the sort of process gains that Poseidon did with its Carlsbad proposal several years ago. The Los Angeles Times has details:

In May, the board of the Orange County Water District approved a non-binding term sheet with Poseidon to negotiate the price of water from the plant and to determine who would be responsible for various aspects of the project.

 

[Poseidon Vice President Scott] Maloni said he expects the Orange County district to negotiate a 50-year deal with Poseidon should the project be approved by the California Coastal Commission sometime in the spring.

 

A key part of the term sheet is that Poseidon must prove to the Orange County district that the Carlsbad plant can operate without a hitch for 90 consecutive days.

 

“We’re probably a year away from executing a final water purchase agreement [with the Orange County Water District],” Maloni said. “Carlsbad would be in operation for a good amount of time.”

But 2015 has shown improved attendance over 2014’s lows. Now the San Diego SeaWorld venue is benefiting from sympathy over the incredulous reaction from some local residents to the California Coastal Commission’s Oct. 9 decision to condition accepting an expansion of a swimming tank on SeaWorld officials preventing killer whales, known as orcas, from breeding. Here’s a sampling from online comments and letters to the editor:

When did the California Coastal Commission become the Planned Parenthood of aquariums and marine parks? What’s next, requiring SeaWorld to teach abstinence to dolphins?

 

Big brother is once again misusing law to get their way politically. The Coastal Commission may not be “precluded” from applying this law to captive animals, but it is certainly wrong.

 

Let me get this straight – the Coastal Commission can regulate who and what breeds in its jurisdiction if it grants you permission to remodel?

Activists say SeaWorld controls all breeding

Many online commenters responded that San Diego SeaWorld already controls the breeding of its orcas and that its actions would have no effect on normal orca procreation at the venue because there is none. But commission officials, aware of the mocking their decision was taking, responded more formally as well. In an op-ed in Friday’s Union-Tribune, commission Vice President Dayna Bochco, a lawyer, defended the decision:

While passions ran high in the hearing room, the commission’s 11 to 1 vote to add these conditions to the project was substantively grounded in Coastal Act policies that protect marine resources and species of special biological significance – which surely describes orcas. These policies are routinely applied to marine mammals in the wild, but the law does not preclude their application to captive marine mammals.

 

This was not a power grab. The commission is not pre-empted by any federal law, and no other state agency is addressing issues related to captive whales. We were faced with making our decision in a regulatory vacuum.

 

The commission has always been forward-thinking in its protection of the environment, and the Coastal Act is a broad law. Over the decades it has been interpreted in ways that were controversial at the time but have since become important foundations for coastal protection.

In what appeared to be a coordinated campaign, soon after the op-ed was posted online, dozens of animal-rights supporters from around the nation posted praise for Bochco, the wife of centimillionaire Hollywood producer Steven Bochco, and the Coastal Commission. But there was still incredulity:

Is the CC now going to regulate how I treat my dog and pet hamster if I live in the coastal zone?

On Thursday, SeaWorld announced it would appeal the decision.

Jobs’ modest family home, where he and Woz started Apple in the garage, now is a kind of shrine to techies and in 2013 was designated a historical site by the Los Altos Historical Commission. (Picture above.)

California, especially Silicon Valley, has become so expensive the middle class is being squeezed out. KQED reported:

The nonprofit Joint Venture Silicon Valley has tracked local economic trends for the last 20 years. This year’s Silicon Valley Index reported the income gap is wider than ever, and wider in Silicon Valley than elsewhere in the San Francisco Bay Area or California.

Joint Venture divides the workforce into three different “tiers.” For high-skilled, high-wage jobs, Tier 1 in Silicon Valley, the median wage is $119,000 a year. For low-skilled, low-wage jobs, or Tier 3, the median is $27,000.

“Thirty percent of our population is living below the self-sufficiency standard,” says Joint Venture Vice President Rachel Massaro. “That means they can’t survive without public or informal private assistance.”

The main problem is that state policies severely restrict building adequate new housing. It’s simple supply and demand: Demand rises faster than supply, so prices go up.

In particular, the California Coastal Commission now limits construction in coastal areas, which has a ripple effect inland for at least 50 miles, raising the price of everything.

Then there are the LAFCOs: local area formation commissions, that also limit construction.

The latest crisis to hit California is that its massively high cost of living is pushing seniors out onto the streets. Social Security checks, small pensions and food stamps might cut it in Michigan, but not in California.

The Contra Costa Times reports:

OAKLAND — Yolande Cole played by all the rules.

She always worked, as a temp doing administrative work and later as a caregiver for the elderly. She didn’t drink or do drugs and paid her bills.

Yet in the 68th year of her life — a time Cole had long looked forward to finally slow down — she found herself homeless after a live-work situation in San Francisco didn’t pan out.

In one moment, Cole lost not only her job, but also a roof over her head. She moved in with friends, but after several months of couch surfing, she found herself filling out an application at a homeless shelter in West Oakland.

“I felt like I was stepping off a cliff, like there was no bottom,” recalled Cole, who grew up in New York City and attended San Francisco State University at one point.

The culprits:

Skyrocketing housing prices, together with cuts to food stamps and other programs as well as increased longevity, have resulted in more seniors becoming homeless, said local advocates.

In Alameda County, 9 percent of people older than 65 live on less than $12,000 a year, the federal threshold for poverty, according to the latest figures from the U.S. census. Calculating the number of homeless is more difficult, because many without permanent shelter stay with friends or significant others, while others are simply not located.

As I’ve mentioned before, the main causes are the California Coastal Commission, the Soviet-style bureau that severely restricts housing construction along the coasts, with a massive ripple effect flowing inland at least 50 miles.

And LAFCOs — Local Area Formation Commissions, which also severely restrict construction.

So people like Yolanda Cole built this country, and state — but now are forced by bad policies to live out on the street.

Los Angeles County is the second-least affordable housing market in the country for a middle-class family….

That’s according to a new report out Tuesday from real estate website Trulia, which found that a household earning the median income of $54,000 can afford just 22% of homes in L.A. County on 31% of their income or less. Only in San Francisco, at 15%, can fewer middle-class families afford to buy. Six of the seven least-affordable markets in the nation are in California, including San Diego (25%), Orange County (26%) and Ventura County (33%).

Why is this? A couple of reasons.

First, the California Coastal Commission wields dictatorial powers over coastal building, severely restricting new housing. This ripples inland at least 30 miles. This year, the Legislature and Gov. Jerry Brown gave the CCC the power to assess fines itself, something that in free societies is carried out by court actions (except for such relatively minor matters as traffic violations).

Second, local restrictions are repressive. According to a CATO Institute study:

In the 1960s, California was growing much faster than it is today, yet housing was no more expensive than in most other parts of the country. California was growing so fast that cities often competed with one another over which would get to annex (and collect taxes on) land suitable for development.

To minimize such competition, in 1963 the California Legislature created a local area formation commission (LAFCO) for each county. These commissions could approve or veto the formation of new cities or special service districts and annexations to those cities or districts. Most commissions were dominated by representatives of the city councils in each county.

The cities soon realized they could use LAFCOs to keep most taxpayers within their boundaries. No longer could a developer build houses on vacant land outside of a city’s limits and incorporate a new city or service district to provide the water, sewer and other infrastructure needs for those homes.

After eliminating the competition from such developments, cities could impose costly and time-consuming planning restrictions that further drove up housing costs. What was portrayed in public as a war on sprawl was, in reality, a war on taxpayers seeking to escape the high tax rates imposed by cities.

Third, California’s high-tax and anti-business environment keeps down wage increases that would allow regular folks to afford the high-cost housing.

None of this is likely to change.

It’s simple Econ. 101: Restrict supply and the supply rises.

If you’re in the middle class — and didn’t buy your house in California before about 2002 — the only way to find affordable housing is to leave.

“The California Coastal Commission can now fine property owners who illegally block public access to beaches, putting new teeth into a 38-year-old environmental law, under a budget trailer bill that Gov. Jerry Brown signed Friday.

“The commission’s new power could affect landowners all up and down California’s coast … .

“Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, had carried a bill last year to empower the commission, but it fell a few votes short of passage when some fellow Democrats got cold feet at the last minute. She finally succeeded Friday by slipping the bill through as part of the $108 billion state budget package.”

As is always the case on these issues, the PLF provided crucial context:

“Damien Schiff, a principal attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation, said landowners will now bear the burden of suing the commission if they feel a fine is improper.

“‘A lot of property owners would say the potential downside risk — the value of the penalties and the costs of litigating — could be so high that, even if that property owner was 100 percent certain that he’s right on the law, it wouldn’t be worth it to him,’ Schiff said, calling the new law ‘a significant game-changer.’ …

“Atkins called those fears ‘as of yet unfounded, and unreasonable. … I don’t think the Coastal Commission will overreach.'”

Who cares what happened in 2006? This is 2014!

This is a classic example of what people mean when they say term limits wipes out institutional memory. Anyone who’s been following state politics for more than the six years Atkins has been in the Assembly knows “overreach” is what the Coastal Commission does.

The agency was founded by a guy who literally didn’t believe in private property rights and who enjoyed mystical babbling about the needs of Gaia — an enviro religion dressed up with scientific terminology. Peter Douglas’ radicalism has animated the agency ever since. I wrote about the sort of governance that results from this mind-set in a 2006 Union-Tribune editorial:

“Consider the case of San Luis Obispo engineer Dennis Schneider, who hoped to build his dream home on a cliff above the ocean in a remote area north of Cayucos. Incredibly by normal cognitive standards, typically by Coastal Commission standards, the agency blocked his plans on the grounds that the home would be such an aesthetic affront to passing kayakers, boaters and surfers that it would violate their rights. We are not making this up.” 

Douglas resigned as Coastal Commission executive director in 2011 and died a year later, so the upper reaches of the agency remain jammed with holdovers from his long reign. We can expect these zealous bureaucrats to go overboard with their new powers.

It’s what Peter wants. It’s what Gaia (sigh-a) needs.

In the ensuing 27 years, PBC has revised its plan innumerable times only to have state regulators or local government bodies block the company from breaking ground on any construction project on any of the undeveloped land it owned.

There was a breakthrough in 2012 when PBC cut a deal with the California Coastal Commission that allowed the company to build 90 homes (as well as a 100-room hotel) in exchange for permanently preserving 635 acres of forest land it owned.

The Monterey County Board of Supervisors also approved the development plan, with the stipulation that PBC build a small affordable housing project (as opposed to paying an “in lieu” fee of $5 million, with which the county could build the affordable housing itself).

Two years later, PBC still hasn’t built the affordable housing project the county ordered. Not because the company has not acted in good faith. But because a citizens group – Del Monte Neighbors United – is determined to keep the 24-unit rental townhouse project from being built anywhere near their backyards.

It’s not that the citizens group is opposed to affordable housing, its members insist. It’s just that PBC’s townhouse project “is not in keeping with the single-family zoning and rural-lane, forested character of adjacent neighborhoods,” they explain.

And there’s one other issue, they say: The complex “will have a negative impact on property values of adjacent properties to the detriment of individual property owners and the community.”

Least affordable

This is why California has the least affordable housing on the United States mainland, according a recent report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition. It’s why an average household here in the Golden State requires annual earnings of $54,168 to afford a two-bedroom rental home.

Land use restrictions and mandates by both state and local government grossly inflate the cost of market-rate housing. And nimbyism by activist neighborhood groups limits the supply of affordable housing available to households with yearly income less than $54,168.

Yet the state’s population continues to grow at 1 percent a year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and now stands at 38 million. (Click on the chart above.)

Monterey County has an opportunity to break that vicious cycle when Pebble Beach Company’s planned affordable housing project comes up for consideration by its Board of Supervisors.

In January, the county’s Housing Advisory Committee recommended that board members give PBC its long-awaited go-ahead to break ground on the modest 12-unit development.

It remains to be seen if the board backs up the affordable housing mandate it imposed on PCB or if the majority of supervisors bow to the obstructionist citizens group Del Monte Neighbors United.