But it seems safe to say the rail authority didn’t expect implacable, unyielding opposition from this group: Wealthy equestrians. For months, they have targeted plans to put the tracks for high-speed rail in parts of the San Fernando Valley that are beloved by horse owners and riders.

Attempts to reassure the equestrians that the effects would be minimal blew up in the rail authority’s face in March. The authority touted a study from the San Jose State-based Mineta Transportation Institute that said the bullet train would have little effect on horses and riding along the Tujunga Wash and other communities in the Santa Clarita-Sunland area.

Leaders of the equestrian communities in the north San Fernando Valley —  home to an estimated 10,000 horses — dismissed the report as untrustworthy because rail authority Chief Executive Jeff Morales and former bullet-train board member Rod Diridon serve on the institute’s board.

Bullet-train board chairman Dan Richard further undermined confidence in rail authority claims at a March public meeting when he noted that in Europe, cows have become used to the noise of passing bullet trains. The comparison of cows to horses — considered an unusually high-strung animal — prompted laughter and disbelief.

‘Environmental justice’ move not paying off

The bullet-train route was changed in ways that outraged equestrians in response to criticism that previously planned routes would bisect working-class, largely Latino communities in more populated parts of the San Fernando Valley. Richard likened this decision to “environmental justice” at the March public meeting. But the route change hasn’t won much praise from opponents of the previous alignment, who still see the bullet train as more trouble than it is worth.

Now rail authority officials find themselves caught in an unexpected crossfire from both wealthy and working-class critics in the San Fernando Valley. A recent Los Angeles Times story treated the rich equestrians’ grievances with the same sympathy that previous coverage had shown for protesters from Pacoima and Sylmar:

Dale Gibson grimly shook his head, his white cowboy hat blocking out the bright afternoon sun.

“How about this mess,” he said, walking through his Sunland ranch in the shadow of the San Gabriel Mountains.

Gibson, a rodeo cowboy and stuntman who has performed in more than five dozen films, was pondering the prospect of 220-mph bullet trains rocketing about 100 feet from his competition arena along the Big Tujunga Wash. He boards about 100 horses on 5 acres and, on many days, is out teaching children and actors the finer points of riding.

“It would be like trying to ride your horse down the runway at LAX,” Gibson said. “We will be done.”

Study seeing minimal effect widely ridiculed

Meanwhile, the Mineta Institute study’s findings continue to draw mockery from equestrians who see it as confirmation that they’re not being taken seriously. The study stated that compared to humans, “horses are somewhat deaf.”

The assertion outrages Gibson who, to prove his point, made a kissing sound to a horse about 50 feet away. The animal raised its head. “Does he look deaf to you?” asked Gibson, who serves on the Los Angeles Equine Advisory Committee.

“Deaf?” he said. “I don’t think so.”

That’s also from the recent Times account.

The only conceivable way to placate both the equestrian community and residents of San Fernando, Sylmar, Pacoima and neighboring towns is to build a 20- to 24-mile segment of the bullet train underground. But given that studies suggest it costs nine times as much to build underground tracks as above-ground tracks, that could balloon the cost of the estimated $64 billion project by at least $20 billion.

The state government presently doesn’t have enough money to complete the project’s initial $21 billion segment in the Central Valley. The prospect it may have to spend far more than expected to bring the bullet train to the Los Angeles region could make it even more difficult to attract the private investors that the rail authority has been hunting for without success since 2008.

Water districts themselves have wound up at the front of the line petitioning for a redress of grievances. Cuts imposed under Gov. Jerry Brown’s watch have led to sharp fiscal challenges for the utilities. “Seven months after state regulators drew up their plan to achieve a statewide reduction in urban water use, Yorba Linda Water District and its counterparts will get their first formal chance to ask for relief,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

“Under the regulations, water districts with a history of high residential use were told to cut back as much as 36 percent, while other less thirsty cities and towns were required to cut as little as 4 percent. The board and its staff took heat at the time for not considering factors such as climate, population growth and water conservation efforts prior to 2013,” the paper added. Yorba Linda and others have planned to resubmit their request for allowances, appealing to changes like the coming rainy season. With a new desalination plant about to come on line, the San Diego Water Authority has raised its hopes for a reprieve.

Grabbing land

But the water districts themselves have come under intense suspicion by farmers, for whom collective memories of California’s “Chinatown”-era water wars have not faded away. But old ghosts did not discourage the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California — America’s largest drinking water distributor — from snapping up a huge tract of land in the Palo Verde Valley, according to the Associated Press. The play, “along the Arizona line, tapped a deep distrust between farm and city that pervades the West over a river that’s a lifeline for seven states and northern Mexico,” the wire noted.

The stretch of land carries outsized significance because of its prime positioning to receive flows from the Colorado River. Desperate to irrigate their crops, Central Valley farmers have been reduced to using groundwater — utilizing a pumping process that has taken a dramatic toil on the ecology of their own land. “According to Jay Famiglietti, a water scientist at NASA’s jet propulsion lab in Pasadena and a professor at UC Irvine, two-thirds of the lost water has been sucked out of aquifers in the Central Valley, causing parts of the valley to sink,” the Guardian observed. “In some parts of the valley, the land has been dropping by almost 2 inches a month, according to NASA satellite measurements.”

Rainwater over rail

Few have held out hope for across-the-board reform in California’s complex water rights law. In a new study, the Public Policy Institute of California claimed that “the growing demand for water makes it imperative to reform the state’s system of allocating this essential resource,” as KQED noted, calling the state’s water rights system “fragmented, inconsistent and lacking in transparency and clear lines of authority.” But the water rights regulations underlying California’s complex system were unlikely to change any time soon; “since making that change would require legislative action, don’t hold your breath,” the network concluded.

In part for that reason, attention has turned to how the state’s current infrastructure budget has been allocated. One target of opportunity has been California’s high-speed rail endeavor. “A few urban Californians will benefit from high-speed rail, but we all pay the price for inadequate water storage. Since our state’s half-finished and aging water infrastructure was built 50 years ago, our population has doubled,” wrote Board of Equalization vice chair George Runner and state Sen. Bob Huff, R-San Dimas.

“Even with the benefit of El Niño, most of the rain we receive this winter won’t be captured and will end up in the ocean. Many cities need expensive projects to meet federal and state mandates to capture, treat and recycle storm water runoff. But neither Congress nor the Legislature appropriated funds to pay for these projects, anticipated to cost billions,” they cautioned.

The funds come from California’s $7.5 billion Proposition 1 Water Bond, approved by the voters last year.

Although it is unlikely that all of the $287.5 million will be used for water purchases to benefit the environment, the Wildlife Conservation Board and the Department of Fish and Wildlife still have yet to determine what they will do with their respective $200 million and $87.5 million bond funding allocations.

The last time California tried a pilot program of purchases of environmental water, it didn’t work out so well.

Interest adds up

Starting in 2000, state and federal water agencies purchased farm water for fish and wildlife using bond funds under a now-defunct state-federal program called CALFED. The Environmental Water Account project was aimed at improving water supply reliability and protecting the Delta ecosystem.

The project followed a major allocation by Congress in 1991: a one-time allotment of 800,000 acre-feet for salmon runs plus another 400,000 acre-feet annually for wildlife refuges without payment for the water. (See page 15). An acre-foot of water – enough to cover one acre of land to a depth of one foot – can supply two to four urban households per year, depending on whether it is a normal or drought year. That same amount can support about one-third an acre of cropland per year.

The use of general obligation bonds to buy water for the environment is controversial because actual financing costs would typically be double the principal amount once interest is included.

Calwatchdog.com spoke with Wes Strickland, a water rights attorney in California and Austin, Texas, about the results of the EWA project. Strickland said EWA was a lose-lose-lose-lose deal for every group involved:

• For environmentalists it did not allocate enough water to alleviate ecosystem stress.
• For farmers it drove up spot market water prices because of reduced supply.
• Southern California cities were thwarted from buying water to bank for dry years.
• State and federal water agencies didn’t accomplish their environmental goals even as the state ran up its budget deficit and exhausted water reserves going into a 2007-2010 court-ordered limit on water pumping.

From this failed experiment, Strickland said California should have learned to make small, incremental water purchases during rainy years to support the environment during years of drought.

$193.4 million

The state and federal taxpayer bill came to $193.4 million for the EWA project, which lasted from 2000 to 2007. More than 2 million acre-feet of water were purchased for environmental uses. (See table below.) According to the California Department of Water Resources:

• $16.8 million came from Proposition 204, a 1996-voter approved state water bond.
• $101.2 million was from Proposition 50 voter-approved state water bond.
• $50.1 million was from the state general fund in 2001.
• $25.3 million came from federal coffers.

Under the program, the government came to dominate the spot market for water.

On average, water purchases under the program made up 43 percent of all spot-market purchases of water each year. By the final year of the program, the government’s purchases comprised 87 percent of all water bought on the spot market.

The average price of water purchased over the seven years was $96 per acre-foot, without bond interest, compared with the current going price of $700 per acre-foot for water transfers from farmers.

At the lower price, the $287.5 million under Prop. 1 would be enough to purchase about 3 million acre-feet of water. As the table below shows, in 2007 California bought 477,000 acre-feet of water for fish runs, and that was deemed insufficient to help migrating fish get to the ocean.

Will there be any water to buy?

Because Lake Oroville has been drawn down below 50 percent of its storage capacity, water cannot be sold by the farmers along the Feather River, which flows into the lake.

The EWA project ended just before the Natural Resources Defense Council filed suit to protect the Delta smelt, prompting court-ordered limits on the amount of water drawn from the fish’s habitat.

Environmental Water Account Purchases, 2001 to 2007

###

By Katy Grimes

First there was the bullet train to nowhere. Now there are the tunnels to nowhere.

Gov. Jerry Brown is hell-bent on creating a legacy. Unfortunately, it also appears that most of California’s legislators make decisions based on legacy as well.

But lawmaking by legacy rarely bodes well.

Water wars

Brown announced Wednesday that the state intends to build two large tunnels to move water under the very fragile Delta, from Northern California to Southern California.

Where is Jake Gittes when you need him?

Gittes was the hard-boiled private investigator in “Chinatown,” the 1974 movie about the historical California battle over water. Set in Los Angeles in 1937, “Chinatown” was inspired by the California Water Wars, the historical disputes over land and water rights that raged in southern California during the 1910s and 1920s.

Gittes, played by Jack Nicholson, discovers that water is illegally being diverted, and that that agents of the water department have been demolishing farmers’ water tanks and poisoning their wells.

“Either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water,” Noah Cross says, played by John Houston. Cross was the movie’s villain, and tried to gain control of all the water in Los Angeles.

It appears that like a character out of the movie, Gov. Jerry Brown has reignited California’s North-vs.-South battle over fresh water.

Water water everywhere, but not a drop to drink

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar  and Brown held a Sacramento news conference at the California Natural Resources Agency to announce a massive, multibillion-dollar water diversion plan, which many are saying is only another version of the peripheral canal plan that voters rejected in 1982, 30 years ago, during Brown’s last run as governor.

Brown is acting like a woman scorned. “Analysis paralysis is not why I came back 30 years later to handle some of the same issues,” Brown said. “At this stage, as I see many of my friends dying… I want to get s— done.”

How eloquent.

Brown called the plan “a big idea for a big state.” But the plan to funnel water from the Sacramento River to pumps that supply water to parts of Southern California, the Central Valley and the Bay Area, has many worried that Northern California will be faced with shortages.

Farmers, fishermen, and environmentalists, oppose the plan, and rallied at the Capitol. They say diverting Northern California water would be the final death blow to the fragile Delta.

Water Politics

Devastating environmental litigation resulted in cutbacks on one third of all water deliveries to California’s Central Valley, causing agricultural production losses, thousands of jobs, and hundreds of millions of dollars in crops.

Three years ago, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service ordered major pumping cutbacks into the California Aqueduct that delivers water to the state’s farms, based on arbitrary concerns that the giant water pumps killed the Delta Smelt, a tiny fish not even indigenous to the Delta. The Fish and Wildlife Service ordered 81 billion gallons of water, enough to put 85,000 acres of farmland back into production, to flow out to the ocean each year, instead of feeding California’s Central Valley farms.

Instead of fighting to feed California’s crops and farm families, and to repair the state’s agricultural lifeblood, Brown has created another public works project to feed unions and high-cost union jobs.

This is the second giant public works project deal this month that Brown has sealed.  Just two weeks ago, he signed bills to authorize spending to begin on the phony high-speed rail project, which will tear up valuable Central Valley farmland.

Brown’s political vanity is taking precedence over reforms; his need for a legacy is apparently more important than the 37 million residents of the state. Brown should have done the right thing instead.  Because as Chinatown’s Noah Cross is also famous for saying,”Course I’m respectable. I’m old. Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.”

By Katy Grimes

The Legislature appears to have killed one more attempt to reel in the out-of-control high-speed rail checkbook. But despite facts, numbers and alternatives to the nearly $100 billion project, Democratic lawmakers appeared to be useful tools in the high-stakes game of rail bucks.

After spending more than $500 million on nothing, the plan no longer represents what the voters approved in 2008.

AB 1455, by Assemblywoman Diane Harkey, R-Dana Point, was on the agenda Monday in the Assembly Transportation committee. And once again, open disdain for any accountability of rail spending was obvious, despite her urging fiscal responsibility for the health of everyone in the state.

“This is deja vu–I was here one year ago with a similar bill,” Harkey said. Calling the rail plan “Cocaine for the train,” and “crack for the track,” Harkey once again explained that there is no funding source for the train system and it is just a nifty idea.

“The original $43 billion price tag has more than doubled, there is no private money, and the feds are not coming through,” Harkey said. “All that remains is a restricted bond, of which $950 million is allocated to regional rail, and $9 billion for high-speed rail.”

“The federal government and Democratically controlled Senate are not sending us high-speed rail money,” Harkey said. “Cap and trade revenues don’t exist, which is supposed to be about emission reductions anyway.”

“There is no ridership model,” Harkey continued, “no cost analysis, and the High-Speed Rail Authority claims that it will cost 10 cents a mile, when in Europe the cost is 40 cents per mile.”

Harkey added that there are no right-of-way agreements, a crucial step in the building process. For land owners in the way of the track, purchase agreements must be made to buy the land. But Harkey has repeatedly said that no such agreements exist yet.

Agreements with existing rail companies also need to be worked out.

“The Legislative Analyst’s Office, the State Auditor, and U.S. Government Accounting office warn against it,” Harkey added. “And, it needs a subsidy. All trains have subsidies.” But the legislation and bond initiative promised “no state operating subsidies.”

Harkey reminded the committee that Californians can get high-speed travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles on Southwest Airlines.

“What we need is water, power, roads and dependable rail from county to county. It won’t pay for itself,” Harkey said. “This will create more unemployment in the Central Valley–there is no reason to cut through prime farm land. Send the bill back and ask voters if they want to spend the money for regular rail instead.”

AB 1455 would “reduce the amount of the indebtedness authorized by the act to an amount not less than the amount contracted at the time of the reduction or to repeal the act if no debt has been contracted. This bill would reduce the amount of general obligation debt  authorized for high-speed rail purposes.”

According to Harkey, the bill makes use of a little known section of the California Constitution, Article XVI, which allows the Legislature to repeal uncontracted bond debt.  AB 1455 would repeal the remaining $9 billion in available state debt funding for the project, but allow $950 million to be used for local and regional rail projects.

 The voters were sold a lemon

“The voters were deceived,” Harkey said. “The project lacks sufficient private, public or debt funding to complete even a requisite operating segment, as required under Proposition 1A.”

“California is struggling with long term deficits and debt,” Harkey added. “The governor claims we need more taxes; our existing infrastructure is in dire need of extension and repair; and voters are suffering from buyer’s remorse.”

Just as happened with Republican Sen. Doug LaMalfa’s recent legislation to put high-speed rail back before voters, facts and data were not enough to pass the bill.

With the support of the City Council of San Juan Capistrano, the Kings County Board of Supervisors, the Orange County Board of Supervisors, the San Diego Board of Supervisors, Carlsbad Mayor Matt Hall,  Burlingame City Council members and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, it was clear that the momentum is there to stop the existing high-speed rail plan, and either modify it as Harkey suggests, or take the entire plan back to voters.

Testimony for Harkey’s bill was strong. “This is a poor investment,” said Michael Bronner, a Burlingame city council member. Bronner testified that he is an investment banker as well as a council member, and has to make decisions about other people’s money. “None of the current analysis was available in 2008. This is just a more comfortable trip for the wealthy from San Francisco to Los Angeles.”

“This project screws our kids,” said William Grindley, who worked extensively on the high-speed rail financial reports.

Big-Labor Opponents

Opposition was predictable. The High-Speed Rail Authority testified that Harkey’s bill would end the high-speed rail project.

“This is one of the very few ways the Legislature can create jobs and spur the economy,” said  Ray Trujillo with the State Building and Construction Trades Council, a labor union for construction workers. “Thousands of high paying jobs,” he added. “The alternatives to High-Speed Rail–runways, highways, roads–costs twice as much.”

That comment caused a stir in the audience, and several people sitting around me said that was a lie–the cost to beef up airports, highways and roads would be much less. “Waiting to build the train would only be more expensive,” said Karen Greene Ross with the HSRA.

Other opponents included the American Council of Engineering Companies of California
and the California Labor Federation, AFL-CIO, and the Teamsters.

Harkey answered opponents’ with a few more facts: “It will cost $1.96 million per job created for High-Speed Rail. This isn’t a jobs program,” Harkey said. “Instead, for $100 million, we could create 1.8 million highway maintenance jobs.”

Harkey said, “220 mph trains don’t exist. This is not a business plan, it’s an idea. We have $3.5 billion of federal stimulus dollars which must be spent before September 2017.” Harkey said that the real plan was just to build some track to get the funding. Trains aren’t even part of the picture yet.

What sounded reasonable to voters in 2008 is no longer even possible without bankrupting the state. This is a special interest project run amok.

Despite Harkey’s pleas that high-speed rail is not a partisan issue, the committee voted entirely along party lines, 3-6 against. The bill remained on call to allow the absent committee members cast votes.

Will Southern California sell its maximum annual entitlement of 2 million acre feet of water from the State Water Project for a bundle of small water projects of uncertain yield, plus $2 billion of political pork barrel projects, if voters approve the proposed $11.1 billion Comprehensive Water Package, a bond proposal known as the “Safe, Clean, Reliable Drinking Water Supply Act of 2010”?

That is a key question for statewide voters to answer by the November 2010 election. And to do this they need to understand the package of water bills (SB1, SB 2, SB6, SB7 and SB8 from 2009) that have been cobbled together before they vote out of panic given the dire curtailment of water to Central Valley farmers and Southern California cities.

Forgetting for the moment that the state is broke, the entire approach of the $11.1 billion package of legislation is to first allocate money and then find projects to fit its major co-equal goals of Delta restoration and water supply reliability. This process is backwards from that of the Gov. Edmund “Pat” Brown era where alternative water projects were first evaluated by engineers for physical and economic feasibility, quantified for water yield, and then the best project was specifically selected and the public was asked to fund it with a bond issue.

‘Ready, shoot, aim’

We have no idea today how many, if any, of the myriad of proposed statewide water projects in the Comprehensive Water Package have any physical or economic feasibility. Rather, they are like former Gov. Jerry Brown’s failed geothermal “ghost” plants built in the mid-1980s, where the funding and political approvals preceded any idea of whether they were feasible in the first place. “Ready, shoot, aim” seems to be the panicky approach of the Comprehensive Water Package.

For example, the notion that urban Southern California wastes water by letting rainfall flow out to the ocean sounds good, but proposals to capture this water are misguided. Sure, large amounts of urban rainwater flow to the ocean. The drainage plans of most coastal cities in California were originally designed to divert rainwater to the ocean via flood control channels mostly built as jobs programs during the crisis of the Great Depression. Water and power during that era were to be supplied from far away by huge Works Progress Administration dam and hydro-power projects – not from local reservoirs and canals to capture urban runoff.

But urban runoff can’t be physically and economically captured. Where would one build the reservoirs – where houses exist today? There no longer is land available in urban cities to build another Santa Fe Dam such as currently exists in Irwindale or Prado Dam near the Corona in Southern California. Neither are there any new foothill dams that could be built like Morris Dam that is upstream from the San Gabriel River in Los Angeles County.

These are pipe dream projects that can’t possibly meet the needs of a growing population state. But such projects are apparently being considered for funding by the Comprehensive Water Package under the line-item designated for “Coastal Counties and Watersheds,” as well as other line items.

The Delta Master Veto Agency

A triangular-shaped island at the ocean mouth of many rivers is named after a similar shaped letter from the Greek alphabet – “delta.” Incremental sedimentary river deposits create a delta island or alluvial fan. The word “delta” also means the amount of change from deposits of a financial investment. But the new Comprehensive Water Package will not be incremental or gradual with respect to the change it will bring to the structure of California’s water system.

The Comprehensive Water Package creates a Delta Stewardship Council that will effectively abrogate Southern California’s existing maximum annual entitlement of two million acre feet of water from the State Water Project. It would have veto powers over the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD), the State Department of Water Resources (DWR), Westland Water District, the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) and other water districts as to building any future reservoirs and canals. All future water infrastructure projects statewide would have to be vetted through the Delta Stewardship Council and its tentacle entities.

The package would create a seven-member Sacramento Delta Stewardship Council that would have quasi-judicial powers to balance the “co-equal” goals of “Delta restoration and water supply reliability.” The Delta Stewardship Council would consolidate the current patchwork of agencies and cities that have jurisdiction over the Delta.

A whole new state entity, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Conservancy would also be created under the Natural Resources Agency, to implement ecosystem restoration of the Delta. A Delta Independent Science Board would additionally be created to advise the Conservancy and Stewardship Council. And a Delta Watermaster’s office would be created and funded to assure water quality enforcement. All these new entities would be linked with a larger web of existing committees and state agencies.

The Water Package is no less than a new reorganization of state water politics and implementation with the Delta getting first dibs at water and everyone else queuing up afterward. The long-proposed Peripheral Canal to divert water around the Delta is expressly forbidden under the water bill package. Cities and farmers are hoping that by passing the water bill package that the roadblock of fixing the Delta will surmounted and the Peripheral Canal can ultimately be built. But when would that be – 2050, if ever?

And what about the problem of bait and switch? The last time Southern California got a bundle of state water projects in return for building levees in the Delta it made sure to enshrine the projects in the state Constitution so that they could not be unwound at the next session of the state Legislature. There is no such guarantee in the water bill package. The hope that the package is a prerequisite for the Peripheral Canal, Auburn Dam or other water projects is an exercise in faith.

Even if Southern California water leaders are appointed as members of the Delta Stewardship Council they effectively will end up representing the Delta, not their water ratepayers. Who would end up advocates for Southern California cities, Central Valley farmers or even the urban ecosystem? Presumably, everyone outside the Delta would end up being represented by state bureaucratic officials. The Legislature would only have authority over water projects outside the Delta that the Delta Stewardship Council did not veto.

The Stewardship Council would additionally delegate to the State Department of Fish and Game and the Water Quality Control Board the responsibility to “identify the water supply needs of the Delta Estuary.” The water supply needs of urban or agricultural users would not be on their radar screen.

Of likely concern to cities surrounding the Bay Delta is that each city would have to certify to the council that development and land use decisions are compatible with the Delta Plan, subject to an appeal process. This would usurp “home rule” for many Bay Area cities and counties. Imagine something like the Coastal Commission suddenly having jurisdiction over your city, leading many observers to believe that the package is a simple power grab.

Water officials contacted in the process of writing this article anonymously stated that their educated guess as to how much of its water entitlement might flow to Southern California after the Delta gets to trump all water needs in the state is about 25 percent (500,000 acre-feet, or enough for about 2.5 million people). On a wet year, Southern California typically draws down about 500,000 to 1 million acre-feet of water from the State Water Project. The last time the MWD drew close to its maximum entitlement was 2001, when it drew about 1.7 million acre feet of water during the California Electricity Crisis. However, Southern California’s cities could lose their potential entitlement to water for 7.5 million people overnight on the November 2010 election.

The Delta Stewardship Council would theoretically offer a fix to the political fragmentation and dysfunctional log jamming that characterizes about every issue in the state. But even though the council would have broad powers to fix the Delta, it would also have the power to veto other water projects statewide, leaving only the Delta immune from the political dysfunction that exists in California government.

The Comprehensive Water Package would not be incremental but revolutionary. In concept it would save the Delta, but it would be “every man for himself” for the rest of California, albeit with the aid of some subsidies for local water projects and $2 billion in pork barrel projects for key politicians.

20 by 2020

This package of bills calls for a 20 percent reduction in baseline daily per capita water use by the year 2020.  It also calls for the volume of agricultural water to be measured for the first time.

Perhaps of most interest to the average person, it establishes a target of 55 gallons per capita daily for residential indoor water use. Taking a shower can use 25 gallons alone.

The water bill package gives water agencies four options for complying with conservation goals: (1) 20 percent reduction in daily use; (2) 20 percent reduction in regional imports; (3) utilize performance standards for commercial, industrial and institutional users; and (4) a method to be developed by DWR by 2010.

Processed water from recycling would not be subject to conservation mandates. The problem with conservation is that it works on the state level by eliminating the need for new costly and environmentally damaging dams and canals. But on the local level conservation only depletes local groundwater basins resulting in more reliance on imported water supplies.

Delta Council as Climate Change Talisman

The rationales for saving the Delta from environmental crisis are often depicted in quasi-religious apocalyptic terms: rising sea levels that would flood the fresh water Delta with seawater; warming temperatures would mean more rain and less snow pack in the Sierras, resulting in more floods; catastrophic earthquakes could breach Delta levees resulting in seawater intrusion that would end shipments of imported water to Southern California; global warming and pollution are killing off salmon and smelt fish populations. Realistically, the water bill package would prevent none of these scenarios.

The Delta Stewardship Council would be empowered to review transportation and land- use plans for impacts on climate change. This would include compliance with California Senate Bill 375, the “anti-sprawl bill,” that diverts new growth and development away from suburbs and edge cities and toward coastal cities.

An obvious problem with all this anti-global-warming and anti-sprawl legislation is that the most abundant groundwater resources in California are located inland and not toward the coast. So reducing auto pollution by shortening auto commutes or shifting to light rail would in turn result in more dependence on imported water supplies. Life is full of trade-offs and ironies never acknowledged by environmentalists or politicians. It is nonetheless strange that such a highly touted package of water bills would result in more dependence on imported water all in the name of combating global warming.

Another problem is that during a prolonged drought existing environmental laws make urban, agricultural and recreational users curtail water usage to great hardship. But the sacrosanct natural environment cannot even be stressed or have any species of fish decline in population due to natural causes without some lawsuit alleging harm from cities or farms.

The Environmental Defense Fund’s Center for Rivers and Deltas, flush with a $100,000 blind donation in 2007 from Meg Whitman, won a court injunction against transporting water through the California Aqueduct alleging that pumps at the Harvey O. Banks Pumping Plant on the California Aqueduct were the cause of the disappearance of the Smelt. But the Smelt don’t find their habitat only near the pumps, nor do they affect them. Today, Whitman ironically is probably the only candidate for governor likely to veto the water bill package if it came across her desk on her watch.

There are other plausible reasons for the smelt’s decline, including pollution and invasive species. Prior water quality improvements in the Delta have increased the population of natural smelt predators. The Smelt, like the famous Spine Stickleback fish, could have gone into hiding to protect themselves. Cleaner Delta water could also have reduced food sources the Smelt forage on such as Krill.

The courts have never addressed the favorable treatment under California environmental laws of the natural environment to the detriment of the urban eco-system. When a dam and reservoir is built, the natural eco-system that once depended on that water is transferred downstream to an environment of urban forests, gardens and wildlife. Urban lawns, rose bushes, tree squirrels and Koi fish ponds are not valued in our culture or laws as is the Delta smelt fish, coastal sage brush and kangaroo rats. “Save the Delta” – to hell with the cities and farms seems to be the mantra.

The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), measures gross, not net, impacts on the environment. For example, CEQA only measures upstream gross impacts of a dam without considering any offset for the downstream transfer of vegetation and wildlife from the wilderness to cities and farms. Are commercial poppy fields or urban arboretums any less of the environment? The poppies don’t know the difference whether grown in the wild or on a horticultural operation. Once commercialized, poppies (the official state flower) will be sustainable and protected forever.

The Delta Scientific “Certainty Wallahs”

The presumption for the creation of the Delta Stewardship Council and Delta Independent Science Board is that it knows or will know what is best for the Delta environment. This is a dubious presumption, even from a scientific standpoint. No one knows, nor can they know, what the ramifications of tinkering with the Delta ecosystem would be. Moreover, scientists are being asked to make cultural and political values judgments not dispassionate science

For example, say that sending more water to cities in the southern half of the state results in more seawater intrusion to the Delta. So instead of fresh water fish and plant species we get saltwater fish and vegetation. The freshwater species don’t necessarily die off as much as their population is reduced. They are merely replaced by a different type of ecosystem. Scientists can’t tell us which ecosystem is preferable; only cultural and commercial values enshrined in law can. The public can be sold on aesthetic values of species based on visualized depictions of their plight. But what about ugly species or vegetation that sucks up too much water from its “neighbors?” Those are often dubiously labeled “invasive” or “non-native” species.

After spending billions of dollars under the water bill package on cleaning up the Delta purportedly to make it a natural aquarium we can’t be assured that the unintended consequences of the cleanup won’t alter the ecosystem deleteriously. Sociologically speaking, the ideology behind saving the Delta is more anti-business and anti-urban than it is truly scientific.

In any case there is no new cheap water.

According to water officials this writer spoke with, the water bill package and Delta Stewardship Council and Delta Plan won’t make much of a difference because there is no new cheap water that can be created, at least quickly, without a return of the monsoons that periodically fill our statewide reservoirs. If so, California might do just as well or better if it just waited for rain relief rather than rush the water bill package.

Many contend that more water has been over committed from the Bay Delta. Southern California is entitled to a maximum of 2 million of the 4 million acre-feet annually of the State Water Project (WSP) that is routed through the Delta. Four million acre-feet of water sounds like an over-commitment during a drought. But in a drought the state has the right to reduce a water agency’s allocation.  So the argument of over committal of water is specious and often used for propaganda.

As radical as the water bill package is, it cannot change our meteorological fortune or misfortune. The ancients believed that gods controlled the world. In modern-day society we believe we can magically control nature with legislation, with the same result.

A three-year drought is normal by conventional water planning standards. However, if the drought persists to, say, an eight-year cycle as it has in the past, California will be in even more of a crisis.

Fixing the Bay Delta at the cost of farms and cities may ring a death knell for California. The solution lies not in affluence removal or perhaps not even in effluence removal. The environment has always improved with affluence, not the other way around.