U.S./Mexico water negotiations closely watched

Good morning. Happy Hump Day. A deal between the U.S. and Mexico on how to apportion Colorado River water in drought conditions expires next year and negotiators are in overdrive to renew the pact before President Barack Obama leaves office on Jan. 20.

The talks are being closely watched by California officials. The Golden State relies heavily on Colorado River water, with an entitlement to 4.4 million acre-feet a year. That’s enough to supply nearly 9 million households, though a big chunk of the supply is used to irrigate the hundreds of square miles of agricultural fields in Imperial County (pictured) and the Coachella Valley.

Why the rush? Because U.S. and Mexican officials believe a new deal is crucial to preserving fragile Colorado River supplies. 

CalWatchdog has more. 

In other news:

• “California officials are pushing back on SEIU Local 1000’s plans for a one-day strike next week, warning employees that they could be subject to disciplinary action if they participate in what the state regards as an unlawful walkout,” writes The Sacramento Bee.

• “The state Supreme Court last week agreed to hear an appeal of a groundbreaking ruling that allows cuts in the pensions earned by current state and local government workers, including judges,” reports Capitol Weekly. 

• “A San Francisco supervisor is proposing more money for lawyers to defend immigrants who face possible deportation under a Trump administration. KCBS radio reports that San Francisco Supervisor David Campos will introduce legislation Tuesday setting aside $5 million from the city’s budget to help pay for lawyers to represent people in deportation proceedings.” The Los Angeles Times/Associated Press has more. 

• And in case you missed it: What a Democratic supermajority in the Legislature in the upcoming session may mean for the state. CalWatchdog has more. 

Legislature:

• Gone till December.

Gov. Brown:

• No public events announced. 

Tips: matt@calwatchdog.com

Follow us: @calwatchdog @mflemingterp

New follower: @richardsstarr

But almost none of the coverage has reflected the fact that formal, official planning has been going on for years for one of the world’s largest desal plants along the coast of the Camp Pendleton Marine base in north San Diego County. Any construction is years off, but necessary preparatory work is well under way.

The image above of a proposed desal plant there comes from a 2010 presentation by the San Diego County Water Authority. It shows how sky-high water planners are on the potential of the 17-mile Camp Pendleton coast. Attention is now focused on a site in the southwest corner of the 125,000-acre base, just north of Oceanside and about 20 miles north of the Carlsbad desalination plant that is scheduled to open in coming months.

The Carlsbad plant will be the biggest in the Western Hemisphere and is expected to produce 50 million gallons of water a day — 7 percent of the San Diego region’s needed supply.

The Camp Pendleton project would be far bigger, with desalination experts saying 150 million gallons of water a day is realistic. That would make it one of the largest desal plants in the world.

A Saudi Arabian desalination plant will produce 264 million gallons a day when its first phase is complete, Bloomberg News reports.

A 2009 San Diego County Water Authority report didn’t take it for granted that the Pendleton project’s supplies are needed. It spoke of only expanding the project to the full 150 million gallons a day “as supply and demand conditions warranted.”

After four years of drought, there’s not much doubt that California needs far more reliable water sources — especially in the San Diego region, given that local water officials have spent 20-plus years fighting with the giant Metropolitan Water District over supply and costs.

The water mega-wholesaler has long opposed San Diego’s efforts to diversify its water supply by partnering with Poseidon, a private company, to build the Carlsbad plant and by striking a deal to shift Colorado River water from agricultural uses in Imperial County to supplies for homes and businesses in San Diego County.

By Wayne Lusvardi

The word arid has two meanings: insufficient rainfall to grow trees or dull and boring.  The second meaning seems to characterize the level of intelligence that’s on display in the recent media water war that has broken out between the major newspapers in Los Angeles and Phoenix.

This e-water war was provoked by William deBuys’ op-ed article in the March 14 Los Angeles Times, “Phoenix’s Too Hot Future.” The Phoenix-based Arizona Republic newspaper retorted on March 15 with an editorial, “Los Angeles More of a Water Vacuum than Phoenix.”

DeBuys is the author of the book: “A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest.” He is a Ph.D.-holding environmentalist who lives on a farm in New Mexico.  His book adds to the growing number of recent gloom-and-doom books on water that give predisposed pessimistic and fearful readers what they want to hear.  But deBuys’ provocative article is meant to set back the real progress that has been made between California and Arizona in its longstanding war over Colorado River water.

This is why deBuys inserts into a discussion of water references to the culture war between California and Arizona over the controversial topic of immigration and contentious Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.  Many of the online commenters take their cues from deBuys’ provocations and aim emotional potshots at each other without gaining any new information on the water issues between the two states.

Author won’t let facts, history get in way

DeBuys charges that Phoenix is creating too much global warming that will suck water out of the Colorado River, leading to hydroelectric power shortages and Katrina-like natural disasters.  DeBuys claims that Phoenix’s high-profile dust storms are caused by its contribution to climate change.

But it is deBuys’ total omission of the history of the Colorado River Compact and the famous California vs. Arizona U.S. Supreme Court case that makes his argument arid.  If it weren’t for the obstreperous W.S. Norviel of Arizona, California and the other Lower Basin states in the Colorado River Compact that was finalized in 1944 probably would not have been allocated half of the river’s available water.  And if Arizona had not shorted itself of its full entitlement of water over the past few decades, California would have been shorted of bonus water.  But deBuys prefers to use clichés that incite resentment and reverses the historical record: “If cities were stocks, you’d want to short Phoenix.”

Now that Phoenix is taking its full river water allotment by building the Central Arizona Project, California is finally the state this is shorted.  This is why California is proposing to spend up to $39 billion to shift from depending on Colorado River water to tapping wet year water surpluses from the Sacramento Delta. California has been living off the good graces of unused Arizona water surpluses for decades. Now Phoenix has decided to put its water surplus into sustainable water banks. But deBuys charges that it is Phoenix — not Los Angeles — that is unsustainable.

No, Phoenixians aren’t on the brink of frying

DeBuys also is scientifically challenged. He contends that the urban heat island effect from the paving of the Arizona desert will fry Phoenixians.  As Stanford University climatologist Mark Jacobson has pointed out, combating warming near the ground surface will result in the dreaded inversion layer that traps air pollution.  Jacobson states that efforts to reduce global warming would be a “public health disaster waiting to happen.”

In other words, if there is going to be a Katrina-like disaster in Phoenix, it is likely to be caused by efforts to combat global warming.  So much for deBuys’ fear-mongering.

The entire federal water storage and hydraulic conveyance system in the Southwest was put into place precisely to lessen the natural droughts caused by “climate change.”  By building a regional water works system spreading over several states and watersheds, local droughts could be overcome and urban civilization could thrive in arid areas.  The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation were 100 years ahead of the negative environmental prophets of today in building a sustainable water system that would withstand “climate change.”

If you want an informed discussion about water shortages and climate change, avoid the false pop prophets of water decline and catastrophe.

By Wayne Lusvardi

Dan Walters, call your office!  Or call a reputable economist for therapy.

Walters writes that a marginal tax rate increase amounting to $9 to $10 billion in new revenue would reflect only 0.5 percent of the total state Gross Domestic Product.  And it would increase state revenues by only 6 percent from $160 billion to $170 billion.  A marginal tax rate is the rate you pay on the taxable income that falls into the highest tax bracket you reach: 8, 9, or 10 percent, etc.

Why a tax increase?

But during Jerry Brown’s recent trip to New York. he blurted out that the state GDP had increased by $90 billion, or 4.75 percent, increase in 2011.  That should have increased tax revenues by $9 to $10 billion without having to raise the existing income tax rates on millionaires — Brown’s tax proposal; or income tax rates on everyone but the very poor — Molly Munger’s tax proposal.

The top tax income tax rate in California currently is 10.3 percent. This is the second highest rate in the nation, after Hawaii at 11 percent.

California recently let its temporary sales tax increase expire in July 2011. Thus, the state sales tax has been reduced from 8.25 percent to 7.25 percent — still the highest state sales tax rate in the United States. Local governments can add 1.5 percentate points to the base sales tax rate.

And California has the highest corporate tax rate of 8.84 percent of all Western states (excepting Alaska).

Subtract the $4.5 billion lost tax revenues from the expiration of the 1 percent temporary income tax rate increase and California would still have about $5.5 billion in new net taxes remaining.

The state legislature recently diverted $1.4 billion of excess redevelopmentagency monies from the state general fund back to local redevelopment agenciesfor “affordable housing.” This doesn’t even count the $2 billion in “excesscash” leftover from redevelopment agencies before they were phased out ofoperation.  This signaled that thelegislature is not serious about plugging the state budget deficit.

New tax revenues and excess redevelopment funds would add up to about $7.5 billion in new tax revenues without need of an income tax rate increase.

Untouchable Luxury Public Goods

The remaining budget deficit could be solved by cutting or suspending the provision of luxury public goods — such as redundant:

* Affordable housing;
* Stem cell research;
* High-speed rail;
* Green power;
* Cap and trade pollution credits;
* Useless energy research funded as a surcharge on utility bills;
* “Waterless” water bonds;
* “Categorical” public school ancillary jobs programs;
* Perchlorate regulation;
* Mandated elimination of ocean water cooling for coastal power plants at enormous cost to protect a few sea mammals and fish larvae while thousand of birds are killed by wind turbines; and
* Unneeded state commissions for termed-out state legislators.

Former University of California, Berkeley political scientist Aaron Wildavsky once wrote that such bureaucratic programs don’t just exist by hoodwinking the population. There is an ideology that grows around such programs. But tax expenditures keep going up because more people benefit from public distribution of jobs and property enhancements than from private production.

What green power, cap and trade, affordable housing, eliminating coastal power plants, bullet trains and “waterless” water bonds all have in common is enhancing the values of private properties and real estate speculation. These programs:

* Reduce old, obsolescent housing with new luxury low income housing;
* Reduce air pollution by shifting it elsewhere;
* Eliminate nuisance power plants by shifting them to remote areas;
* Reduce the number of nuisance jet airplane flights and noise by shifting passengers to trains; and
* Create open space buffers around upscale residential enclaves with so-called water bonds.

The above luxury programs don’t really reduce pollution, create more water resources, reduce water pollution risks of mental retardation, protect endangered species, create magical medical cures or make housing more affordable. What they mainly do is shift those problems elsewhere or to where nobody lives. By enhancing private property values, bureaucracies bind private residents to their programs.  In the language or psychotherapy, private property owners are co-dependent on union bureaucrats and labor unions for political perks. This is why California is often described as a dysfunctional family.

The bureaucratic agencies that run the above-listed programs all preserve and protect the California Dream of home ownership.  If strong cultural values and economic interests did not desire these popular programs, they would not be so resilient to elimination or expenditure reductions.  This is what economist William Fischel describes in his book, “The Homevoter Hypothesis: How Home Values Influence Local Government Taxation, School Finance, and Land Use Policies.”

Pogo Principle: We Have Met the Enemy and They are Us!

Aaron Wildavsky called this The Pogo Principle: “we have seen the enemy and they are us.”

It is hypocritical for tax advocates to continue to want tax increases shifted to the despised “1 percent” of high-income earners — the millionaires’ tax — while leaving luxury government programs for the bulk of the middle class untouched.

Voters are rational economic actors who perceive the benefits of luxury government programs and policies to their property and wealth interests.  It isn’t the super rich or the poor immigrant who is the sole cause of the state budget deficit.

This is why California state government is dysfunctional. It is why we have a state water system with only a half year of water storage.  Even though the Colorado River system has 4 to 10 years of storage.

Meanwhile, we have spent over $18 billion in five water bonds that produced no new water storage reservoirs and have mainly funded open space acquisitions.  This is why the state unemployment fund is in hock to the federal government for more than $10 billion, but luxury “affordable housing” programs continue to be flush with cash. It’s not solely because the “1 percent” are stingy, or big banks are “greedy,” or immigrants are overburdening government services.

You get what you vote for.

By Wayne Lusvardi

Call it “thin water.” A small private company called Cadiz Inc. in Los Angeles is in the process of creating water in California’s Mojave Desert — like a magician, literally out of thin air.

By selling that water wholesale, water agencies will be able nearly to double the amount of water sold because of an administrative mechanism called an “Intentionally Created Surplus” as part of the Lower Colorado River Basin Operating Agreement.

ICS water will contribute toward avoiding the construction of new costly water-storage reservoirs anywhere in California, even though the new water “produced” will be in the Mojave Desert.

New Cadiz Plan Endorsed by Environmentalists

If this sounds too good to be true to environmental skeptics, it isn’t.  Cadiz Water’s plan to capture evaporation water losses has been endorsed by some of the most eminent conservationists, water scientists and engineers in the world.  And ICS credits have been in operation since 2007.

The Cadiz Company has many skeptics due to a failed proposal 10 years ago to sell Cadiz Valley groundwater to the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.  Critics at that time believed that Cadiz would deplete the groundwater table and would destroy the desert ecology.  But Cadiz CEO Scott Slater says recently, “They learned from that process.”

Cadiz’s new water development concept is to capture downstream groundwater before it gets to desert dry lakebeds in the Cadiz Valley.  Nature uses dry lakebeds as evaporation ponds to allow groundwater to escape back into the atmosphere.  Thus, Cadiz will take water from no one, not even the environment.  It will take water from the ground before it evaporates into thin air.

Water Conservation Credits Double Water Supply

And through a novel new administrative process called an “Intentionally Created Surplus,” it will be able to sell water conservation credits to the MWD or its member agencies.  Under the Colorado River Interim Guidelines for Lower Basin Shortages and Coordinated Operationsfor Lake Powell and Lake Mead of 2007, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation will allow the MWD to store almost an equal amount of conserved water in Lake Mead.  Thus, conserved water will produce double the potential water supplies. As as long as low water capacity conditions prevail along the Colorado River, water storage system water can be stored in Lake Mead.

Former U.S. Bureau of Reclamation water consultant Bob Johnson called ICS water a “huge breakthrough” that will mainly benefit Southern California water users.

Johnson says that prior to the creation of water conservation credits, the water in Lake Mead was held in common ownership by all the Lower Colorado River Basin states.  Water conservation credits have created a sort of water right within the common pool of water in Lake Mead. These water rights could disappear if greater rainfall eventually fills the reservoirs along the Colorado River system.

Johnson says an ICS water conservation credit is defined as a portion of any water conserved through farmland fallowing, lining of canals, increased system efficiency or other measures taken by Lower Basin users of the Colorado River that will result in new additional sources of water.  There is a cap on how much water surplus each Lower Basin Colorado River water user can store in Lake Mead.  Thus, there is a future risk of losing the surplus water parked in Lake Mead if high water conditions return.  But as long as low rainfall conditions prevail, there is potential water storage capacity in Lake Mead.

Categories of Water Conservation Credits

Lake Mead has four statutory priorities for storing water, in this order: flood control, water storage and hydropower.

Under the 2007 guidelines, there are four categories of ICS:

1. Tributary conservation: allows a water user to fallow water rights in tributaries of the Colorado River that were in use prior to the effective date of the 1928 Boulder Canyon Project Act and transport this water to the Colorado River for credit.  An example would be MWD fallowing 16,000 acres of farmland it owns in the Palo Verde Irrigation District along the Colorado River.

2. Groundwater-imported ICS: allows a Colorado River contract holder to convey non-Colorado River water to the Colorado River for credit. Cadiz’s plans to capture evaporative groundwater losses — or “thin water” — would fall into this category.

3.  System efficiency: allows a user to fund a system efficiency project that would conserve Colorado River water. The project must increase the amount of water in the United States and a portion of the saved water would be credited to the user funding the project.  The Drop 2 Storage Reservoir Project — also called the Brock Reservoir — will capture about 70,000 acre feet of water on average that is released from Lake Mead, but is no longer needed because of changed weather conditions.  The Drop 2 Storage Reservoir is located north of the All American Canal in Southern California and about 30 miles west of Yuma, Ariz.

4. Extraordinary conservation: Allows a water user to implement a project, such as land fallowing or canal lining, to conserve water through extraordinary measures, which would increase Lake Mead levels. Unlike other forms of ICS, extraordinary-conservation ICS is not available during declared shortages.  The Imperial Irrigation District plans to conserve 12,000 acre-feet of water for example by a main canal lining and seepage interception project.  Likewise, MWD is planning a water desalting facility that will save 56,300 acre-feet of water as part of its Palo Verde Irrigation District project.

Before the creation of ICS credits, Johnson says there was no incentive for Lower Basin users to conserve their water allocation.  It was a system of “use it or lose it.”  The new incentive system allows Lower Colorado River Basin users to now nearly double their water resources.

California Can Only Weather a Half-Year Drought

Colorado River water consultant Bob Johnson says that California “has the toughest water problems of all 17 western states.”  He pointed out that the ratio of average annual water flows to water storage on the Lower Colorado River system is about 4.0.  In other words, the Lower Colorado River has four years of storage and thus can weather a four-year drought.

The entire Colorado River system could withstand a 10-year drought according to Johnson.

Using rough numbers by comparison, Johnson said the flows-to-storage ratio for California’s State Water Project and the federally operated Central Valley Project is about 0.5.  Stated differently, California can only weather a drought for about half a year. On its own, the California State Water Project cannot manage a drought of nearly any duration.

This makes a three-to-five year drought unmanageable in California. It forces emergency conservation measures instead of water planning and management.  Thus, not only is more water storage in California needed, but the existing water system needs to be able to be managed more flexibly to make it more efficient.  ICS water credits go a long way to adding system flexibility and more efficient management of existing water supplies until more water storage can be added.

The new proposed Cadiz Water project will go one step further by creating a 100 percent multiplier effect of creating a new water supply from almost nothing.

California Voters Squandered Water Bonds

California voters have squandered about $18.7 billion in five water bonds since the year 2000, without creating any new significant water storage. (Propositions 12, 13, 40, 50 and 84.)  Most of that bond funding went to land acquisitions for open-space preservation.

A $11 billion water bond is scheduled to go before voters this November, called the Safe, Clean, and Reliable Drinking Water Supply Act of 2012.

It would provide for construction of two new water reservoirs, if they can withstand legal opposition by environmentalists. But the bond may be pulled from the ballot due to low voter support. Voters apparently are tired of paying for water bonds that are nothing more than expensive jobs programs for environmentalists. New opinion polls show voters are tiring of the Green Agenda.

If that’s the case, maybe the state finally can move on and solve its water problems with real solutions, as in the 1950s and 1960s. If not, then prepare for future droughts complete with much higher water prices, brown lawns, shuttered car washes, dirty cars and more national jokes about Californians’ incompetence.