California’s beleaguered farmers had their hopes for a better 2017 rekindled as landmark water legislation delayed for years finally passed Congress. But the political cost to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a key supporter, has been high, with outgoing Sen. Barbara Boxer digging in her heels against the bill and pushing for White House opposition. The strife has underscored the difficulty California Democrats have had in smoothing over internal disagreements over core policy issues that have risen to the surface of contention after years of all but one-party rule in the state. 

“A rough five years in the making, the $558 million bill approved by the Senate early Saturday morning steers more water to farmers, eases dam construction, and funds desalination and recycling projects,” McClatchy reported. For state farmers, the bill promised a greater inflow of water from Delta pumps, drought relief and a dose of federalism.

Curtis Creel, Water Agency General Manager for Kern County, told Bakersfield Now the rule requiring an increased role for state and local officials mattered most. “It instructs the (Federal) Fish and Wildlife Service to coordinate with state and local agencies who have expertise in dealing with science related to the Delta, as well as operations of the water projects,” he approvingly explained. 

For its part, the Golden State has stuck to a neutral position for now. “In California, the state’s Natural Resources Agency is staying out of the fray and declined comment on the bill,” according to the San Jose Mercury News. 

Long wait

Central Valley farmers have held out for measures like the water bill’s for decades. “All sides agree the California water package marks the biggest federal shift in the state’s water use since the 1992 Central Valley Project Improvement Act, which focused more on protecting the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta,” McClatchy noted. “Farmers hated the CVPIA but, in a mirror image of this year’s water bill, it was included in a bigger package that rolled right over one of the state’s protesting senators.”

“The Republican senator who was left standing alone in fighting the 1992 bill, John Seymour, was subsequently defeated by Feinstein. One of the other big losers in that earlier legislative fight, the Westlands Water District, is among the victors in this year’s bill, after spending more than $1 million on lobbying in the last two years.”

Democrats divided

In an ironic twist, Feinstein herself has now found herself at the center of controversy among fellow Democrats. In the unusual position of defending her decision against environmentalist fears, “Feinstein’s office claimed that the legislation does not violate the Endangered Species Act, because it contains a ‘savings clause’ that dictates that nothing in the provision shall violate the act,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported. “House Democratic aides countered that the courts have ruled that direct instructions from Congress, in this case on how much water can be pumped from rivers, always supersede more general clauses declaring that nothing in the legislation violate bedrock environmental law.” Boxer has suggested that the legislation’s fate will have to be settled in the courts. 

But the momentum in Washington favors its passage, even with President Obama’s cautious disapproval of its current language. Through his press secretary Josh Earnest, President Obama declined to throw Feinstein a political lifeline, but did little to shore up Boxer’s position. “Based on what we know so far, we don’t support the kinds of proposals that have been put forward to address some of the water resources issues in California right now,” Earnest said, as CalWatchdog previously noted. “So, we don’t support that measure that’s being put forward, but we’ll take a look at the bill in its totality.” But the White House did not raise the prospect of a veto — possibly managing expectations in the face of strong support in Congress for the bill’s broad infrastructure reform. 

Good news for Brown’s twin tunnels project

Good morning. Happy Hump Day. 

The California Supreme Court cleared a big obstacle to Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan to tunnel more Delta water out of Northern California, allowing the Southland’s Metropolitan Water District to proceed with the purchase of estuary islands that would be key to speeding up construction.

CalWatchdog has more.

In other news:

• “Orange County congresswoman Loretta Sanchez let loose on President Obama for endorsing her rival in California’s U.S. Senate race, accusing him of being part of the ‘entrenched political establishment’ that has failed California voters,” writes the Los Angeles Times. 
• Premiums for health insurance plans purchased through state-run “Obamacare” exchanges are projected to rise more than 13 percent statewide next year, with some premiums doubling in certain areas of the state. The San Jose Mercury News has more.
• “(Gov. Jerry Brown) has proposed legislation to streamline approval for housing with units for low-income residents. The state Building and Construction Trades Council, which represents ironworkers, roofers, electrical workers and other construction unions, wants Brown to force home-builders to pay construction workers at rates often equivalent to union wages to qualify under the plan, something the governor is resisting,” reports the Los Angeles Times.
• The California Republican Party confirmed that the staffers who fell ill this week at the Republican National Convention in Ohio had norovirus — also known as the winter vomiting bug — but reported there have been no new outbreaks in the past 24 hours.

Legislature:

• Gone ’til August.

Gov. Brown:

• No public events announced.

Tips: matt@calwatchdog.com

Follow us: @calwatchdog @mfleming

New follower: @RSI

These contrasting results were underlined Friday by officials with the federal Central Valley Project — the U.S. government’s elaborate system of moving water around Northern California and in the Central Valley using dams, pumps and canals. Normally, farms get at least three-quarters of this federal water, though not in times of drought, when cities are favored. As the San Jose Mercury-News reports, the feds’ interpretation of its own rules leads it to widely different conclusions about how much water goes where:

South [Bay Area] cities will receive 55 percent of their contracted water amounts this summer — up from 25 percent last year — from the Central Valley Project, California’s largest water delivery system.

 

Heavy rains in March boosted the amount of water in Northern California’s large reservoirs such as Shasta and Folsom, allowing farmers in the Sacramento Valley and wildlife refuges to receive 100 percent of their contracted amounts, while the Contra Costa Water District also will receive 100 percent, up from 25 percent a year ago.

Water allocations: Some farmers more equal than others

But the news was brutal elsewhere. In the San Joaquin Valley, federal regulators announced that only 5 percent of normally supplied water would be available. In interviews with the Sacramento Bee, farmers and their allies said the drought essentially had never left:

While a 5 percent supply is better than the zero allocation they received in each of the past two years, those farmers will again have to scramble to buy water from growers with stronger water rights – assuming the officials who monitor endangered fish in the Delta even allow for the extra water to be pumped south. The limited water shipments will put continued pressure on the valley’s groundwater basins, which in many areas have been pumped to record low levels in the drought.

 

The huge disparities in water allocations reflect California’s hodgepodge water rights system, which generally favors farmers north of the Delta. … On top of that, concerns over critically endangered fish have prompted federal and state officials to limit pumping to the south state even though Delta flows surged dramatically after March storms. The pumping restrictions drew complaints from south-of-Delta advocates who argue that stormwater flowing out to sea is being “wasted.”

 

[Federal reports] said that, in total, the federally operated reservoirs hold 86 percent of their average water for this time of year, but the south-of-Delta facilities are comparatively empty. New Melones Reservoir, which dams the Stanislaus River and is the state’s fourth-largest reservoir, is just 26 percent full – a figure so low that the Central San Joaquin Water Conservation District and Stockton East Water District will receive no water from the CVP this year.

Most, but not all, of SoCal struggling with supplies

In Southern California, meanwhile, the raw numbers illustrate the drought’s continued hold on the region:

The water level of Lake Mead, the reservoir behind Hoover Dam that stores Southern California’s Colorado River supply, stood last week at 1,081.32 feet above sea level — a recovery of about 6 feet since it reached a recent low point in June. But that’s still the lake’s lowest level in any March since 1937, when it was still filling for the first time. Mead is currently at about 39 percent of capacity. …

 

Reservoirs in Central and Southern California remain well below their averages, with Don Pedro Reservoir in the Sierra foothills at 82 percent of its average and 60 percent of capacity, and Perris Lake in Riverside County at 43 percent of its average and 36 percent of capacity. While the snowpack is calculated at 87 percent of normal overall, its depth varies widely across the state — rising over recent months to roughly 100 percent of the average in the far north of the state, but reaching only about 75 percent of the average toward the south. The U.S. Drought Monitor still shows much of Southern and Central California to be facing long-term “exceptional drought.”

That’s from an L.A. Times’ analysis calling for a “statewide approach” to address California’s continuing water crisis.

Only San Diego County is doing well in the state’s southern realms. The county water authority’s 25-year-old emphasis on seeking new sources of water independent of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California has paid off so well that two months ago, its reservoirs brimming, it had to dump some 500 million gallons of treated drinking water.

Californians exceeded the state’s 25 percent water conservation mandate in October for the fourth month in a row. That might be good news for a parched state, but it’s also drying up the coffers of many water districts, some of which have raised rates to help make up the loss.

Ratepayers are in essence being punished for obeying the state order to conserve water – something they thought would save them money. That has officials like John Laird, secretary of the California Natural Resources Agency, scrambling to explain.

“In some places people see costs go up, and think they conserved and did a great job, and yet the fixed costs are the same. And it is very confusing,” Laird acknowledged at a Nov. 17 hearing by the Select Committee on Water Consumption and Alternative Resources.

“It flies in the face of the public’s general view that if you pay more you should get more, as opposed to you might have to pay more to get what you get now,” Laird continued. “As opposed to if the system collapses because there’s no investment you might have to pay more to get a lot less. And that is a very hard concept to explain to the rate-paying public in a way that they get it.”

Water and Power Departments’ Budgetary Woes

Los Angelenos have reduced water use by 18 percent, according to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which has resulted in a $110.7 million hit to the agency’s budget. LADWP is now proposing a $57.6 million rate hike to recoup a little over half of its losses.

Other districts that have passed or are considering conservation-related rate hikes include the Contra Costa Water District, the East Bay Municipal Utility District and the San Diego Public Utilities Department, according to Reuters.

“It doesn’t seem intuitive that I’m using less water, but I’m paying more,” said Assemblyman Rich Gordon, D- Menlo Park, who chairs the committee. “How do you explain that to the public?”

Mark Cowin, director of the California Department of Water Resources responded, “I would agree that getting this message across that we’re going to expect ratepayers, and taxpayers for that matter, to pay more to hopefully not lose more than they would have otherwise, it’s a tough message,”

He cited the proposed $15 billion Delta pipelines project, known as the California WaterFix, which is expected to be funded largely through rate hikes.

“Why would we expect water users in southern California, the Bay Area and the Central Valley to pay more to get the same amount of supply they are now?” said Cowin. “Well, we have to make the case that sustainability is worth the price we are asking people to pay for.”

Climate change can actually help state officials make that case to the public, he said.

Messaging to the Public

“I think we have as good an opportunity now as we ever have,” Cowin said. “We’re in this unique opportunity right now where we’re messaging to the public: keep conserving water because we might have a fifth year of drought, plus prepare for a potential Godzilla El Nino flood event. That really is what we are looking at as the new normal for California extremes.”

Cowin continued, “So we have got to be able to message better that global climate change leads to these extremes, [which] means that the typical inexpensive sources of water are a thing of the past. And more expensive options are a part of the future.

“We’ve been lucky for decades or generations that we’ve had relatively inexpensive water throughout California, some more expensive than others. But, moving forward, water is going to be more expensive and we’re going to have to pay for it.”

Increasing Water Use Efficiency

One way to keep costs down is to use water more efficiently. Currently, much of California’s treated wastewater ends up dumped in rivers and streams. California should follow Israel’s model and instead spread that treated effluent on farms and orchards, said Eilon Adar, a professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, via Skype.

“Water is still being used in non-responsible ways,” he said. “You waste water. Cities in the Bay Area, they produce a lot of effluence that cannot be used in the Bay Area. However, if diverted about 150 miles to the south there are places in California that can appreciate this water.”

The state definitely can do more with recycled wastewater, said Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute. Only about 13 percent of California’s wastewater – 600,000 acre-feet – is currently recycled. He believes the state will meet its targets of annually producing 1 million acre-feet of recycled wastewater by 2020 and 2 million acre-feet by 2030.

“That’s an enormous amount of water,” Gleick said. “That’s water that we already have, that we already capture and treat and throw away into the ocean. Let’s put that to use.”

Gleick said he’s also concerned about “massive over-pumping of the groundwater. There’s been this long-term inexorable drop in groundwater. Groundwater is a resource, but we’re over-tapping it. And that’s unsustainable, and we know that that’s a problem.”

He continued, “There’s been enormous progress in capturing water use efficiently and developing local supplies. We are, however, still living beyond our means. We are taking too much water from our rivers and streams and especially in our aquifers. Even in wet years we over-pump our aquifers. That is unsustainable.”

On the plus side, nearly doubling the amount of groundwater pumping has helped the state’s $54 billion agricultural industry weather the drought, according to Jay Lund, director of the Center for Watershed Science at UC Davis. About 70 percent of the lost surface water was made up by groundwater.

As a result, despite four years of drought, state agriculture has lost only about 4 percent in net revenue and about 10,000 jobs, he said.

“It’s amazing to have this drought with this relatively small effect,” Lund said. “We will always have drought in California. It’s like the East Coast having hurricanes.”

He agreed with Cowin that weather extremes like drought have the benefit of reminding the public about the state’s ongoing water needs.

“Droughts bring attention to where water management is not keeping pace,” said Lund. A Dutch engineer told him “in the Netherlands they need to have a threatening flood every generation to remind them that they have water problems. California is a dry place susceptible to floods. It’s useful for us … to see droughts and floods from time to time.”

The committee plans to hold a hearing in December in Los Angeles on desalination and one in January in Sacramento on recycling and reclamation issues.

Bishop, CA

Gov. Jerry Brown suffered another setback in his effort to gain the upper hand over California’s persistent drought. New details on alterations to his massive pumping plan, which would change the way the Delta region distributes the water that flows into it, revealed major changes that have aroused major opposition.

In a harsh editorial, the San Francisco Chronicle underscored that the altered scheme “will cost more, provide less water than originally envisioned (but more than pumped south now), restore less than half of the delta habitat than proposed, take longer to build and, most notably, lack the 50-year guarantee of water deliveries that made the old plan attractive.”

For that, Brown had federal regulators to blame. Environmental agencies objected that his half-century assurance “would lock in water deliveries without regard to shifting environmental conditions,” the Chronicle reported. Since that fact was inherent to any such promise, Brown had to drop it in order to proceed.

Measurement problems

The problem has been compounded by a simple dilemma: “nobody can say with certainty how much Delta water is actually being used by Delta farmers,” as the Sacramento Bee observed. “The state allows thousands of water rights holders to divert water directly from rivers and streams, but in most cases has no metering system in place to gauge just how much they take.” What’s more, relying on a meter system could simply produce unclear results, the Bee added, “because of the complexities of the estuary itself: a fragile natural ecosystem that’s been replumbed and reconfigured to deliver water to farms and cities to the south and west.”

The Delta drama played out amid state regulators’ first issuance of a fine for unauthorized water use in a farming district. “The proposed fine, which the district will likely contest in a coming hearing, is the first fine sought by the Board under a new structure in which water rights holders can be penalized for past unauthorized use of water, even if they have stopped diverting since,” Mother Jones noted.

Regulators, farmers, and others have clashed over measurements involving other sources of water, too. “California still doesn’t require that water pumped from underground be measured at all, much less factored into an overall assessment of total water resources,” according to a ProPublica reporter writing for the New York Times; “it’s merely an option under a new law signed last September.”

“California’s new groundwater legislation does require local water authorities to come up with sustainable groundwater plans, but they don’t have to do that until 2020, and they don’t have to balance their water withdrawals until 2040.”

Regulatory wrangling

Meanwhile, in Washington, Congressional Republicans have centered around a fresh push to reform the federal rules around how much California’s pumps can flow. The Western Water and American Food Security Act of 2015 boasted the support of House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. “We designed the bill to move as much water down south to our farms and to our cities as possible without making any fundamental changes to the environmental law,” said McCarthy.

“A bill by Republican Rep. David Valadao set for consideration Thursday would require that federal regulators maintain certain pumping levels unless the secretary of the Interior Department certifies that level would harm the long-term survival of the Delta smelt and no other alternatives to protect the smelt are available,” the Associated Press reported. “The 170-page bill also sets deadlines for the completion of feasibility studies to build or enlarge five dams in the state and ends efforts to build up salmon populations in the San Joaquin River.”

Observers expected the bill to meet the same fate as two previous attempts by the House GOP to pass federal drought relief for California on terms amenable to state and national Republicans, many of whom view strict environmental regulations as a major source of residents’ water woes. But Valadao, in a news conference covered by AP, said the legislation’s Senate outlook was “still up in the air,” with “some support” fueling hopes of a possible win.

The case involved is Capistrano Taxpayers v. City of San Juan Capistrano.

In a split decision, the Fourth District State Court of Appeals ruled that tiered water rates to spur conservation in the city of San Juan Capistrano and statewide “must be based on usage, not budgets.”  But the court also ruled that the added cost of a water recycling plant can be tacked onto residential customers water bills, even though residences are “not plumbed to receive non-potable recycled water.”

Thus, the court evenly ruled both for higher water rates for all customers for recycled water; and against charging higher water rates only on big water users, which are not based on the actual cost of service for that price tier.

Nonetheless, the ruling caused a firestorm of news headlines that contradicted the judges’ ruling as a “blow to water conservation,” as ruling that tiered water rates were “unconstitutional” and as favoring “big users.”

Gov. Brown called the ruling a “straightjacket” on conservation efforts. Kelly Salt, an attorney with the water law firm of Best Best and Krieger, representing the State Association of Counties, League of California Cities and Association of California Water Agencies, said, “It is unfortunate that this decision came down during the worst drought in California history.” Even Tim Quinn, head of the California Association of Water Agencies, called the decision a potentially major blow to water conservation efforts. But it was unclear if their reactions were pointed at the court ruling or Proposition 218.

Judge: Tiered pricing allowed, but based on actual costs

Acting Judge P.J. Bedsworth made it very clear that the court’s decision did not rule out tiered water rates to bring about conservation:

“…one of the benefits of tiered rates is that it is reasonable to assume people will not waste water as its price goes up.  Our courts have made it clear they interpret the Constitution to allow tiered pricing; but the voters have made it clear they want it done in a particular way” (p. 21-22).

In accordance with Prop. 218, the particular way the voters wanted it was to base each rate tier on the cost of service for the tier. The court ruled:

“…we do hold that above-cost-of-service pricing for tiers of water service is not allowed by Proposition 218 and in this case, City Water did not carry its burden of proving its higher tiers reflected the cost of service. In fact, it has practically admitted those tiers don’t reflect cost of service” (p. 28).

The city did not try to calculate the extra cost of providing water for each tier and used revenues from the top tiers to subsidize below cost rates for the bottom tier.

Benjamin Benumof, who filed the lawsuit for the taxpayers, said there is no conflict between the court’s ruling and water conservation. “The court simply invalidated ‘arbitrary tiered rates,’” said Benumof.

Brown looking for water rates to finance water tunnels

Jon Coupal of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayer’s Association stated in an email:

“Methinks Governor Brown doth protesteth too loud, to paraphrase Bill Shakespeare. First, the court did not reject out of hand tier water rates. However, the court did make it clear that water rates must be based on the cost of service. That is as it should be. The reality is that water districts and cities have many tools (fines, penalties, termination of service, voter approved special tax) to enforce conservation.”

Gov. Brown and the California Association of Water Agencies are still looking for a financing mechanism for its controversial Delta water tunnel project. State water contractors will pay the largest share – 68 percent – of the bill for the tunnels, which would be passed on to water rate payers. The Association of California Water Agencies filed a “Friend of the Court” brief on behalf of the city in the case. The cost of the water tunnels, without wetlands restoration, which has been dropped, would be $42 billion.

Brown’s Delta Water Tunnels Project has not been making much progress because of apparent difficulties in its financing. In December 2014, Brown dropped the huge pumps from the Delta water tunnel plan in favor of a gravity flow system, which is how the Sacramento Delta operates today. And a week ago, Brown dropped the Delta Restoration guarantees from the project as well.

An appellate court decision that would have invalidated the cost of local water service test for water rates from Prop. 218 would have made financing large state water infrastructure projects through local water rates a viable option.

One  shocking thing about Northern California is how horrible the roads are. Not just the back roads, but the main freeways and state arteries: I-80, I-680, I-580, I-880, I-280, I-5, 101, 82, 84, 1 and numerous others. All are crumbling.

That’s the same as in Southern California. I often drive on the roads in Los Angeles and Orange counties, and all are uniformly bad.

This is a scandal for a state as wealthy as California. And it’s a contrast to when I was in the U.S. Army and was posted to California in 1978 to learn Russian at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey. I was amazed at how great the roads were, uniformly smooth with reflector lights across the white and yellow stripes in the middle. It contrasted with the roads in my native Michigan, which have to be rebuilt every spring after the assault of the harsh winters. For several years after the 1974 Depression that damaged the state, and sent the auto industry into its long decline, the repairs had not been adequate.

The California roads of 1987, when I came here to write for the Orange County Register, were not as sparkling as those of 1978. Yet they still were in fairly good condition. But today the state’s roads are those of the Third World.

The culprit was Gov. Jerry Brown during his first stint as governor, 1975-1983. He declared an “era of limits” and sharply cut back on road construction. He was wrong. The state’s population has risen from 20 million in 1970 to 38 million today — nearly doubling. So we have a state infrastructure built for 20 million people but which carries 38 million.

Now he wants to “solve” the problem by building the $68 billion (probably much more) California High-Speed Rail. How many of these rickety roads could be fixed for that money?

The Delta

My friend Steven Greenhut, now the UT-San Diego’s new California columnist, lives near Sacramento and drove me around the Delta. The Delta is made up of thousands of levees built in the late 19th Century largely by immigrant Chinese laborers. Some of their descendants still live in the area. But as with most Americans, most Chinese have moved on to larger cities.

The area now largely is know for its farming, irrigated by the levees. I saw vast farms of corn and pears.

The old buildings in the towns there now are being transformed into quaint boutiques. We had lunch at Al’s Place in the city of Locke. It looks like a “hole in the wall place” but now is fairly famous, and serves great steak.

The area’s roads, typically crumbling, are dotted with “Stop the Tunnels” signs. They reference Brown’s plan to build tunnels under the Delta at a cost of $23 billion. Supposedly this would solve the “problem” of the Delta now producing the wrong mix of inland water from the mountains and saltwater from the Pacific Ocean.

As my colleague Wayne Lusvardi has written on CalWatchdog.com, the tunnels would be another expensive, wasteful, unneeded Brown boondoggle. They would destroy the current Delta ecosystem and uproot the lives of the farmers and others whom I saw in the Delta.

Caltrans reportedly has been ripping up the anti-tunnels signs people are posting on their front lawns next to state roads. Do you think they will rip down Brown’s campaign signs during his expected 2014 re-election bid? His picture now appears in the top left corner of their Web site. He’s their boss.

By Steven Greenhut

In Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov,” a priest recalls the words of a man who confessed: “The more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular.” We can all think of people like that — folks of varied political persuasions who rally to “save” humanity, but become so consumed by their cause that they lose patience for the individuals they ostensibly are trying to help.

Judging by Gov. Jerry Brown’s latest plan to “save” the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, he appears to suffer from a variant of the same condition. California’s Green Governor loves the Earth in general but he doesn’t seem to care about particular earthly environments.

Throughout his political career, Brown has championed grand Earth-saving projects such as AB 32, the state’s first-in-the nation cap-and-trade system designed to prod the world into cutting the carbon dioxide emissions that supposedly lead to global warming. He is pushing a high-speed-rail system that is designed to lure people out of their automobiles. He speaks often about his commitment to the environment.

A lack of appreciation for the Delta

Yet I wonder whether the governor has ever taken the short trip from the Capitol to one of California’s ecological treasures. As it comes down from the mountains and heads toward the San Francisco Bay, the bulk of the state’s water passes through the Delta. It is a land of marshes, islands, charming small towns, Victorian mansions, and orchards interspersed between 1,000 miles of waterways.

The Delta also is Ground Zero for ongoing fights over the state’s water supplies. Judges have routinely stopped the water flows out of the Delta, toward the dry but agriculturally rich San Joaquin Valley and toward Southern California’s massive metropolises, to help a tiny endangered baitfish known as the Delta Smelt. The smelt is viewed as the canary in a coal mine — a bellwether for the ecological health of the waterways.

Millions of fish are killed each year as they get caught in the giant pumps near Tracy, near the south end of the Delta. Environmentalists also express concerns about the level of saltwater that moves inland from the Pacific Ocean.

This tiny, tranquil region is about to undergo dramatic, government-imposed changes that threaten its beauty and way of life. The governor’s plan is touted by Southern California water agencies and farmers alike who view it as a means to assure more consistent water supplies.

Gigantic project — but not necessarily more water flow

I’m a believer in providing water to thirsty farmers and thirsty cities. But the Bay Delta Conservation Plan won’t necessarily increase the flow of water, according to the first parts of the plan, which recently has been released to the public.

The plan would start a decade-long construction project to build two massive tunnels to bypass the current river system. At a cost estimated as high as $39 billion before the usual government-project overruns, the tunnels would move water supplies under the Delta and thereby decrease the current reliance on the aging, earthquake-prone levees.

The plan has two equal goals: restore the Delta ecosystem and improve water reliability. It won’t increase water flows, but by resolving the Delta Smelt issue it will end the court-ordered water stoppages — at least in theory. Here, the administration proposes the use of tax dollars and massive engineering feats to solve a legal and regulatory problem. This is a poor use of resources, especially in a state that still is largely broke and that already faces some of the biggest debt and tax burdens in the nation.

What are the chances that once the smelt issue is fixed that environmentalists won’t find another reason to sue to stop the water flows given that the water flows are the source of the real dispute?

The administration’s plan will tear up the Delta for at least 10 years. We know how government infrastructure projects are always delayed, so it’s anyone’s guess how long it actually will take. Even its advocates admit that they aren’t sure about the unintended consequences of the project.

Destroying the Delta in order to save it?

As part of its ecosystem restoration program, this boondoggle will flood a large portion of the Delta’s land, destroying vineyards, farmland, orchards, and marshes. It will submerge islands. There will be land confiscations.

Environmental groups believe the re-engineering of the ecosystem will destroy salmon and other fish habitats. No one in their right mind would hand over a precious region such as this to bureaucrats, but in Sacramento these days the Brown administration is trying to relive the glory days of the New Deal where central planning and big spending are the in thing.

Here’s a case where free-market advocates such as myself and true environmentalists should make common cause — to stop a misguided project that will raise water rates and increase the state’s debt load to provide limited and questionable gains. There are better, cheaper, more reasonable ways to increase water supplies, tend to a damaged ecosystem and shore up the levees.

I don’t expect this governor to worry much about debt spending, tax burdens and that sort of thing. But perhaps his might take a trip through the meandering waterways and charming small towns of the Delta where he can learn that one shouldn’t save the environment in general by sacrificing an environment in the process.

[Editor’s Note: This was corrected. It originally read, “Millions of smelt,” then was corrected to “Millions of fish.”]

By WAYNE LUSVARDI

California’s water wars are back. U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., sent a letter to the Association of California Water Agencies late Tuesday March 27 again pitting North against South.

The letter stated Feinstein was no longer entertaining compromise legislation on House Resolution H.R. 1837, the San Joaquin Valley Water Reliability Act, sponsored by Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Clovis.  HR 1837 would have repealed Feinstein’s three-year-old H.R. 146, the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009 (formerly called the San Joaquin River Restoration Settlement Act of 2009).

Politicians have a way of using titles to their legislation that covers up what it is really all about.

Feinstein’s H.R. 146:

* Took water in 2009 from Central Valley farmers to redistribute to tourist commercial, fishing, recreational and real estate interests in the San Joaquin River under the guise of environmental restoration and mitigation;
* Raised water rates for Central Valley farmers to subsidize fishing and recreational “restoration”; and
* Required that renewal of agricultural water contracts had to go through an environmental review for distribution of “mitigations” to special interests.

Simply stated, the Republican-backed H.R. 1837 would have undone all this.

For a brief period, Feinstein was apparently willing to listen to a Republican proposal for a compromise bill brokered by Rep. Jeff Denham, R-Turlock. In a water war, as in all wars over water, it is difficult for opponents to meet face to face to make peace. HR 1837 was authored by Nunes and spearheaded by Rep. Tom McClintock R-Elk Grove, head of the U.S. House’s Subcommittee on Water and Power. Apparently, Feinstein has ended listening to any compromise proposals by Republicans.

DiFi’s Reelection Bid

Feinstein is also running for reelection in November and doesn’t want any appearance of capitulation to HR 1837 in the eyes of her environmentalist political base.

The Legislative Affairs Committee of the Association of California Water Agencies is holding a meeting on Thursday March 29 to issue a position statement on H.R. 1837.  Feinstein’s letter was to make her position clear that she will work to defeat H.R. 1837 if  it’s brought before the U.S. Senate.

Instead of pursuing compromise, Feinstein’s letter states she wants to pursue the Bay Delta Conservation Plan, the proposed state water bond, and water transfers, banking and recycling.  All of these are wholly Democratic Party-backed measures that stick agriculture, wholesale water agencies and cities with the tab for all of the above projects and policies.

In the case of the Bay Delta Conservation Plan, the hidden agenda is for Northern California to stick farmers, cities and water agencies with the bill for creating a huge regional “sewer district” that would clean up Delta pollution mainly caused by Northern California waste water discharges and urban runoff. The Bay Delta Conservation Plan is a cost-shifting scheme. But to pull this off, Northern California interests must disguise their actions as “environmentalism.”  And to do so they must demonize water agencies, cities, and farmers.

‘Consent of the Governed’

Thus, Feinstein’s letter represents an abandonment of an attempt to reach the “consent of the governed” and continued pursuit of her goals by force and fraud.  “Consent of the governed” is not the same as “compromise” or “consensus.” It implies that voluntary assent should be attained of those who must pay taxes, give up water, pay higher water rates or pay out mitigations.

What is at stake with attaining “consent of the governed” over Central California water is no less than democracy itself.  Otherwise any “consensus” would be a sham water grab by a kleptocratic state.

In California water war history, Feinstein’s water policies would be a sophisticated return to the water grabs of the Mulholland era of the Los Angeles Department of Water and power in Mono Lake in the early 20th century.  But even DWP paid market prices for land and water rights involving voluntary transactions.

Such “consent of the governed” was reached in 1994 with the Bay-Delta Accord.  Both Democrats such as President Bill Clinton and California Republican Gov. Pete Wilson agreed to the accord.

One-Sided Policy

H.R. 1837 would have “restored” the Bay-Delta Accord as the compromise policy document for the Delta, the San Joaquin River and the Central Valley.  But Feinstein and her Party of Government do not want to return to that former treaty in the North-South water war.

Instead, Feinstein has signaled she wants to pursue the one-sided water redistribution policies of her political party. And the only way to do that without “consent of the governed” is by force and fraud.

Hence, it is back to the water wars using the force of laws and the fraud of environmentalism as a cover for redistributionist policies. But public opinion polls are indicating a thin 51 percent approval for the proposed $11 billion state water bond on the November ballot. California Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, R-Sacramento, indicated March 27 that the state water bond may be pulled from the ballot due to weak public support.

Radio and television commentator John Gibson was once quoted: “We’d love to be able to work out compromises to these problems, as long as they don’t compromise access to our land and water.”  This pretty much sums up the tug of war with the North-South water war in California over Central Valley water.

Water wars are obviously about water. But they are also often about real estate and wealth transfers.  This is why Mark Twain famously wrote: “Whiskey is for drinking. Water is for fighting.”

By WAYNE LUSVARDI

The waters are being roiled again in the Delta.

The roiling concerns H.R. 1837, the Republican-backed San Joaquin River Reliability Act currently pending before the U.S. House of Representatives.

Northern California Rep. John Garamendi, D-Walnut Grove, says the bill “destroys a state consensus” on the San Joaquin River and the Sacramento Delta.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

California’s Democratic U.S. senators, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, have joined Garamendi’s chorus and called “for consensus-based solutions that respect the interests of all stakeholders.”

There never was a consensus except perhaps between the plunderers of the spoils from California’s perpetual water wars.

The Shame of the River Consensus Sham

Garamendi says H.R. 1837 would undo 150 years of water law, remove all environmental protections for the Delta and Central Valley farmers and allow destructive water exports from the Delta.

He says H.R. 1837 should be called the “State Water Rights Repeal Act.” He’s right — but for the wrong reasons. What H.R. 1837 does is undo what Feinstein did with the San Joaquin River Restoration Act of 2009 – H.R. 146.  That bill was enacted three years ago, not 150 years ago.

Contra Garamendi, H.R. 146 was a prior water grab from farmers.  It limited how much water farmers can take for crop irrigation and imposed tiered water rates and environmental impact reports for renewal of all existing water contracts. In short, Feinstein’s H.R. 146 redistributed the water taken from farmers to fishing, recreational and real estate interests.

There was no bipartisan consensus when Feinstein’s bill was passed.  In fact, it had to be bundled with a bunch of bills under the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009 for it to pass even through a Democratic-controlled Congress and get signed by Democratic President Barack Obama.  There was no “consensus” except of Democrats.  Consensus implies that those having to give up water rights and have to pay higher water rates somehow concurred with Feinstein’s bill.  This was not the case.

H.R. 1837 Would Restore Genuine Consensus

What Republican Rep. Devin Nunes’ HR 1837 bill would do is repeal Feinstein’s HR 146 and replace it with the Bay-Delta Accord drafted in 1994.  The Bay-Delta Accord was “consented” to by both then-President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, and then-California Governor Pete Wilson, a Republican.  This is what genuine “consent of the governed” entails.

Rep. Nunes’s HR 1837 would depoliticize water contracts.  H.R. 1837 provides for water contracts to be renewed automatically, instead of being thrown to political piranhas for the picking under a contrived retroactive environmental impact report.

Sure, by undoing H.R. 146 and replacing it with H.R. 1837 commercial salmon fishermen, sport fishing and recreational-real estate interests would be denied new water rights.  But they never had any water rights in the first place. Nor were there any environmental impacts on them because they had no rights or ecosystem to impact.  All that an environmental impact report would conclude under California’s sham California Environmental Quality Act is that salmon fishing rights were not granted 150 years ago and should be now.

But farmers had to buy their land to get their riparian (river) water rights 150 years ago.  A riparian right is a right to use the natural flow of water on land that touches a river, lake, stream or creek.

Appropriative water rights are those obtained by permit, court actions or legislative action.  Such rights are always subject to who is in political power and whom they may want to redistribute the rights to.

Garamendi also claims that H.R. 1837 is “imbalanced” and does not “satisfy the needs of everyone in California.”   HR 1837 is no more imbalanced than is Feinstein’s H.R. 146, which harms Central Valley farmers.

Neither would H.R. 1837 “take away California’s ability to control our own water destiny,” as Garamendi claims, any more than Feinstein’s H.R. 146 did.  Both H.R. 146 and H.R. 1837 are federal legislation.

As for the charge that “water storage and water recycling are important components of water policy, and they’re lacking in HR 1837” — the same could be said of H.R. 146.

H.R. 1837 also does not, as the Democrats claim, “threaten thousands of jobs for salmon fishermen and Delta farmers.”  Those thousands of jobs for San Joaquin River salmon fishermen and farmers would just be taken away from Central Valley farmers and from city water ratepayers and consumers of agricultural produce.

Politics is Dis-sensus

Any determination of an environmental impact under H.R. 146 isn’t environmental, but cultural and political.  Why, under Feinstein’s HR 146, in a drought should commercial salmon fisheries, sport fishermen and recreational/real estate interests have first dibs on water over?  Why should fishing and recreational interests be granted water rights without buying them?

And what about the “stranded assets” of farmland that no longer will have irrigation water?   Shouldn’t government re-pay farmers for those “sunk costs,” instead of hiding behind the sham that a “regulatory taking” is non-compensable?  Where is the “public purpose” behind the sham wealth redistribution of H.R. 146?  How is H.R. 146 any different than taking private property rights and giving them to developers under California’s defunct Redevelopment Law?

Water Rights by Force and Fraud — or Consent of the Governed?

A mix of force, fraud and consent of the governed have held California’s historic water contract together.  The elements of that contract have been Northern California giving up water to Central Valley farmers and Southern California cities in exchange for Delta flood protection, cheap hydropower and some water for themselves.

Feinstein’s H.R. 146 and the state-level Delta Reform Act together change the existing water social contract in California so that Central Valley farmers and Southern California cities get less water and in return Northern California gets Delta flood protection, cheap hydropower, a greater share of the water to redistribute to special interests and a new Delta regional sewage system to be paid for mainly by farmers and cities in the Southern half of the state.

Feinstein’s H.R. 146 confiscated water rights by the force of law and the fraudulent ideology of environmentalism and redistributed it to non-farming constituents under a wealth distribution scheme. Nunes’ H.R. 1837 merely returns those water rights to the pre-2009 genuine political “consensus.”

A sham consensus is no substitute for consent of the governed in California’s political water wars.