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

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

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

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

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

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

CalWatchdog has more. 

In other news:

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

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

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

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

Legislature:

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

Gov. Brown: 

• No public events announced. 

Tips: matt@calwatchdog.com

Follow us: @calwatchdog @mflemingterp

New follower: @ChrisLevinson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Report: State building modernization plan lacks oversight, behind schedule

Good morning! TGIF. 

The $1.3 billion first phase of a project to build and modernize 11 state office buildings lacks adequate accountability and oversight and is behind schedule, according to a new report. 

The report, released by the non-partisan Legislative Analyst’s Office on Wednesday, identified three areas of concern. First, LAO writes the administration’s strategy “lacks basic information necessary to determine its merits, including its costs, benefits, and potential alternative approaches.” 

Second, the LAO noted the administration’s insistence on using a particular funding process that allows “the administration to establish and fund projects without legislative approval” greatly reduces legislative oversight. 

The LAO also called the construction and renovation plan “ambitious,” adding it was already behind schedule and that it is likely to become increasingly more expensive.

CalWatchdog has more. 

In other news:

• “The U.S. Department of Justice launched a civil rights investigation of the Orange County District Attorney’s Office and the Sheriff’s Department on Thursday over allegations that prosecutors and deputies withhold evidence and use jailhouse informants to illegally obtain confessions,” reports The Orange County Register. 

• “California voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 54 last month, commanding the Legislature to be less sneaky by requiring 72 hours of public exposure for measures before their final votes. … The rules’ potential loophole is that they don’t require a 72-hour wait before a bill’s first floor vote in its first house by defining a bill’s “final form” – the words of Proposition 54 – as the version presented for a floor vote in the second house.” The Sacramento Bee has more. 

• “Poseidon Water hopes to help quench Orange County’s thirst, but first the company’s proposed desalination project must slake a thirst of its own. … But if Poseidon has its way, the $1-billion desalter it wants to build next door will simply take over use of the power station’s old intake pipe, which reaches roughly a quarter-mile into the ocean and is big enough for a tractor-trailer to drive through. Whether regulators allow Poseidon to do that will be the first major test of new state rules,” reports the Los Angeles Times.  

• “A bill that makes it easier for people to leave reviews on websites like Yelp and TripAdvisor without fear of being sued by businesses for sharing their opinion has become law,” writes The San Diego Union-Tribune. 

Legislature:

• Gone till December.

Gov. Brown:

• No public events announced.

Tips: matt@calwatchdog.com

Follow us: @calwatchdog @mflemingterp

New follower: @CelticsJunkies

Since then, it’s come to appear that the Brown administration’s rhetoric is tougher than its actual policies. Late last week, state regulators announced that they were considering significantly relaxing the rules for some water districts.

The proposed changes to California’s emergency drought regulation reward water districts for investing in new local supplies and allow for adjustments to savings goals based on a district’s climate and population growth.

 

Friday’s proposal also allows water providers to reduce their “conservation standards” by as much as 8 percentage points.

That’s from The Los Angeles Times’ coverage. It comes on top of a previous plan announced a month ago that allowed some water districts to get credits of 4 percentage points for their positive actions; it also gave districts credits of up to 7 percent for adding new supplies, a big plus for districts like the San Diego County Water Authority, which finished building the Northern Hemisphere’s biggest desalination plant last year, a $1 billion project on the Carlsbad coast.

“Godzilla El Nino” may be coming to pass

The two rounds of changes easing up reductions might solely be seen as about fairness to better-run districts that diversified supplies and promoted conservation before it became mandatory. But there’s a chance they also reflect increasing confidence that the El Nino storms that began in recent weeks are just a harbinger of what a NASA climatologist suggested in August could be a “Godzilla El Nino.” Previous fears that Northern California wouldn’t benefit from storms nearly as much as Southern California appear to be easing. This is from Friday’s San Jose Mercury-News:

El Niño conditions may have peaked in the Pacific Ocean, federal scientists said Thursday, but powerful weather systems — like a new series of storms on track to soak the greater Bay Area over the next five days — have only just begun and will likely continue at least through May.

 

“This is the time of year when El Niño acts the most reliably,” said Mike Halpert, deputy director of the climate prediction center for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in College Park, Maryland. “So we would certainly expect the impacts to continue well through the rest of the winter and into the early part of the spring.”

 

There is a 96 percent chance that El Niño conditions will remain through March, scientists at NOAA and Columbia University reported Thursday, and a 62 percent probability they will continue through May.

 

Simply put, that means the likelihood of regular storms across California and heavy snow in the Sierra Nevada will continue to be greater this year than in regular years, offering hope that 2016 may finally be the year that the state’s four-year drought — now starting its fifth year — is broken.

‘Exceptional’ drought conditions over in Northern California

The U.S. Drought Monitor website, run by scientists at the University of Nebraska, said Northern California had received enough rain that it no longer qualified as being in an “exceptional” drought condition. But the website’s Jan. 14 report also had words of caution:

In California, even with the rain and snow received over the last several weeks, many areas are still running below normal for precipitation and snow for the current water year. Wells, reservoirs, ground water, and soil moisture are all recovering slowly, which is to be expected after three-plus years of drought. Precipitation in northern California eased some of the exceptional drought. The consensus from California experts is that recovery will be slow, and many more storm events are needed through the rest of winter to really put a dent in the drought.

Despite limiting water use, residents in lower-income areas have complained that they have faced substantial fines, while some of the Golden State’s most conspicuous consumers have escaped penalty. In Apple Valley, “where the median household income is below $50,000 a year,” some have struggled to keep their consumption below the limit, while one “home under construction in Bel Air has been issued permits for five pools,” the New York Times reported:

“Los Angeles officials hope to start imposing fines so steep that even the wealthy who populate Bel Air will notice. Elsewhere, though, fines have already piled up on middle-class Californians. The Central Valley city of Clovis, faced with an order to cut back 36 percent, has meted out more than 23,000 fines since the mandatory water reductions began in June. In Santa Cruz, where water supplies have run dangerously low, the city has assessed more than $1.6 million in penalties for using too much water.”

Mid-month, Gov. Jerry Brown issued a fresh order expanding and strengthening his strict water policies. “The order gives state water officials greater authority to deal with drought conditions and to cope with potential winter storms from El Nino, a periodic warming of ocean surface temperatures,” as Reuters reported, extending emergency conservation “through October if California still faces a drought in January. The order also extends the suspension of some environmental rules, lets some state residents capture more water and expedites rebuilding permits for power plants damaged by wildfires.”

Localities have braced for the new, unprecedented groundwater regulations as officials have been dispatched to implement and enforce them. “They are under orders to begin actively managing underground aquifers that for generations have been treated as a private resource, with property owners empowered to dig wells and extract as much water as they wanted without particular regard for their neighbors or government agencies,” the Sacramento Bee noted.

“But even amid the sobering accounts of dried-up wells, salt-tainted groundwater and collapsing aquifers in California farm country, no one expects regulation will be easy to set up or sell. Instead, the entire process — starting with just who gets to decide how much water can be ‘sustainably’ pumped in a region — is expected to spark lengthy debate and complicated lawsuits. This is particularly true in farm-rich regions such as Kings County, where the groundwater basins are critically overdrawn.”

Some farmers face the prospect of having to simply cease operations after a relatively brief period of time. “Land retirement is coming to California agriculture. The drought will end someday, maybe even this winter, but farmers will still face long-term shortages of water,” the Bee observed separately. “The relentless groundwater pumping that has kept hundreds of farms going the past four years is coming to an end.”

Meanwhile, other parts of the state have wound up with a large surplus of water, thanks to the uniformity of conservation regulations. “Unlike other parts of California, San Diego has 99 percent of the water needed for normal usage. But statewide conservation mandates have applied equally to areas that have plenty of water and those that don’t, so the result here has been water piling up unused while local water agencies raise rates to make up for lost sales,” according to the Los Angeles Times. “The new supply is just one more reason local water officials are advocating for the state to ease conservation mandates for areas where supplies are ample, which would lessen the oversupply.”

Located in Carlsbad, in the San Diego area, the plant has raised hopes for drought relief — but has brought elevated stakes along with it. “The billion-dollar project is only the nation’s second major seawater plant,” noted the Associated Press. “The first U.S. foray in Tampa Bay is widely considered a flop.” That plant, a decade in the making, lost financing and couldn’t pass performance tests, the AP added. Its capacity was only half that of the Carlsbad plant, expected to churn out 50 million gallons of drinking water every day.

To avoid a Tampa-style debacle, the San Diego County Water Authority brought in Poseidon Resources, a premier developer that agreed to shoulder some financial risk in exchange for a sizable investment return, including performance-based incentives. But Poseidon’s labors have so far come at a substantial cost. The plant “will cost $1 billion to construct over the course of the next few years and operational costs will remain high due to its energy consumption,” wrote Morgan Stanley advisor Larry Palmer in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune.

“Indeed, despite fears that Wall Street is making money off the drought, so far it has mainly been Poseidon’s investors who have been on the losing end,” the New York Times recently said of Poseidon. “The company’s first return on its investment is not expected until next year, after years on the drawing board.”

Beach backlash

And Poseidon has already faced major obstacles to building on its success in Carlsbad. For over a decade, the company has labored to secure permission to construct a plant in Huntington Beach, where surfers, beachgoers and environmentalists have pushed hard to fend off desalination. “After nine hours’ worth of public comments, many of which came from supporters of environmental groups Surfrider Foundation and Orange County Coastkeeper, and facing an obviously un-winnable vote, Poseidon withdrew its coastal development permit application” in November 2013, as the OC Weekly noted.

Clashes have repeatedly broken out around the significant alterations to marine life that the Huntington Beach plant would impose. But the debate over the right approach has been mired in uncertainty. It’s “unclear which method of bringing in seawater — open-ocean through an existing pipe or subsurface intake — is actually more environmentally friendly,” the Orange County Register recently observed.

While a “subsurface intake would assuredly kill fewer fish and fish larvae that otherwise would get sucked into an open ocean pipe, even if the pipe had screens,” building the intake “would last five to seven years, depending on the construction method, and disturb 25 acres of ocean floor habitat. Plus, the subsurface intake would have to be cleaned — sand and sediment scraped off — every few years, re-disturbing the habitat for decades after construction was done,” the paper added.

Innovating desalination

Although the biggest industry players have made the biggest headlines in desalination, several startups have also sought to make headway. Manoj Bhargava, famous for his 5-Hour Energy drink, has hatched plans to sell California cities “a desalination unit roughly the size of a flatbed truck that relies on a conventional power source to distill seawater into freshwater well beyond Environmental Protection Agency guidelines,” as Fortune reported.

“A single Rain Maker can be placed in a town with a wastewater plant. In a crisis, hundreds could be stacked on an ocean barge to process seawater. Coastal desalination facilities typically cost billions to construct and require massive amounts of energy. […] Regulators at the Brackish Groundwater National Desalination Research Facility, a testing facility administered in New Mexico by the Department of the Interior, have given it a stamp of approval.”

California startup WaterFX, meanwhile, has begun crowdfunding $10 million of the cost of its new solar-powered desalination plant, which “will likely reach the construction phase early next year in Fresno County and will make enough water to be used across 2,000 acres of cropland a year, or to run through 10,000 homes,” according to Edie.net. “WaterFX’s design will run fully on solar power, helping minimise the plant’s carbon footprint. The plant removes the salt from the water and turns it into usable products, unlike traditional desalination, which dumps salt and brine back into the sea, which can hurt ecosystems.”

Many solutions were suggested but one that seemed to dominate during the long afternoon program was the expectation that market forces would compel the moves necessary to deal with the drought.

Tim Quinn, Executive Director of the Association of California Water Agencies, responding to the headlines that said farmers use 80 percent of the water and almonds are somehow the villains because it takes a gallon of water to grow one almond, said, “Let’s not have this silly numbers debate.”

Quinn said if water was priced at its market level farmers and consumers would make prudent decisions. He pointed out that when he worked for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California he never paid more for water than $125 an acre foot. Now the MWD wanted to buy water for $700 an acre foot but farmers won’t sell because their water supplies dried up.

What is water’s true value?

Danny Curtin, a member of the California Water Commission and Director of the California Conference of Carpenters, suggested the $700 price was low. After all, he said, taking up a pint of bottled water to illustrate his argument, if the bottled water sold for a dollar a piece, given the number of pints in an acre foot then the value of an acre foot of water would be $2.6 million dollars.

Talk about your conservation incentive!

When one considers water pricing that way Curtin said desalination, at $3,000 an acre foot, is not so unreasonable.

There are many solutions to the water crisis that numerous panelists brought up in what was called an “All the Above Strategy”: Conservation, storage, improved infrastructure, fines, better data to understand the problem and reducing the nearly 4,000 entities around the state that deal with water issues in parochial ways.

The issue of multiple water agencies recalled for me my service on the California Performance Review Commission – Gov. Schwarzenegger’s “Blow Up the Boxes” effort — that ultimately went nowhere. The most contentious debate before the commission was among local water agencies and state units that oversee water. Can you call fights over water “turf wars?” That’s what the commission experienced at a high volume – turf wars over who controls the water.

At the Schwarzenegger Institute/PPIC conference it was the idea of market forces that came up time and time again as driving behavioral change and efficient use of water.

Dan Sumner, UC Davis professor of agricultural issues, said that as the price of water goes up innovation would come. Innovation will be driven by business interests coming in to solve the problem. He warned that any government attempt to take profit out of business involvement in looking for solutions could kill innovation.

Schwarzenegger called for a large 2016 bond on the ballot to build water infrastructure, especially for water storage. Schwarzenegger said the recently passed $7 billion Proposition 1 water bond does not provide nearly enough money to do the job. Given current governor Jerry Brown’s war against more debt, the proposal from the former governor would likely be dammed up.

A webcast of the entire conference can be found here. http://www.schwarzeneggerinstitute.com/waterforum42715webcast

Follow Joel Fox on Twitter @1JoelFox1

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.

But a California-based journalist who specializes in science reporting based on hard evidence — Hank Campbell, author of “Science Left Behind” and founder of the popular Science 2.0 website — takes a broader view based on the last 50 years of state governance.

In an essay titled “California Government Is The Big Water Management Problem,” featured on the Real Clear Science site, Campbell notes that ….

… much of the fresh water that California has runs into the Pacific Ocean. You might wonder why the Pacific Ocean needs so much, since 96 percent of Earth’s water is already in oceans, but the oceans are not asking for it. Instead, it is due to anti-science policies lobbied for by well-heeled California environmentalists.

Environmental regulations mandate that water that would sustain 4.4 million families gets flushed this way, regardless of drought conditions (however, farmers do get penalized during a drought, the environment must come before food). Meanwhile, Governor Jerry Brown just now got around to mandating water conservation among his wealthiest and most loyal voters. It had to be mandated because the wealthy are not conserving anything the way the more agricultural sections of California have been doing for two years. …

[If] we cared about the actual problem — having enough water in good times and bad — the situation would be easy to resolve. For example, enough water to sustain 2.6 million California families was dumped into the ocean because there isn’t enough storage capacity in the north of the state and environmental rules limit the amount of water that can be pumped to reservoirs in the south.

An intentional effort to not prepare for drought

Campbell notes that this isn’t just a failure of government foresight. He says this inaction was the goal of powerful interests.

Why not allow more water to be stored in the south or build more reservoirs in the north instead of dumping fresh water into the ocean? Californians know water is important, we have agreed to water bonds totaling $22 billion in recent years, but the money has ended up going to environmental projects rather than things that help the people paying interest on those bonds.

Most of California is actually desert, the green parts are all watered to be that way, and we know droughts will happen — this is the fourth one in 50 years — so it would make sense to store more water, a literal anti-rainy day plan. But environmentalists block all efforts to create more reservoirs even though we know this sort of thing has always happened and will continue to happen. ….

Because of environmental impact lawsuits and lobbying by environmental groups, there hasn’t been a real investment in water infrastructure since the 1960s, when there were only 16 million people in California. Now there are 40 million people all using the same major infrastructure. …

The common denominators in our water problem are a lack of snow and lawsuit-driven, rather than science-driven, environmentalism. We can only fix one of those.

Greens bitterly fight desalination plants

California environmentalists have also been the biggest opponents of a soon-to-open desalination plant in Carlsbad and one proposed for Huntington Beach. They say it is because of legitimate concerns about effects on fish, ocean water quality and the coastline.

Defenders of desalination efforts, such as former state Sen. Mark Wyland, R-Carlsbad, say that many greens’ real long-term goal is blocking growth or making it more difficult. Constricting water supplies could be seen as a tactic toward that end.