After a 35-year stalemate stalled new California water storage projects, Gov. Jerry Brown and legislative leaders agreed in 2014 to include $2.7 billion for such needs as part of

The then-raging drought persuaded Democrats to go along with major water storage creation plans after blocking new projects since California completed its last dam in 1979. Many Republicans saw the opposition as a back-door way for environmentalists to squeeze state farmers to limit agricultural pollution and protect native species, and to slow growth in urban areas. 

Groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council scoffed at these claims. They say encouraging water conservation is always a good goal in an arid state, and argue that state and federal laws that protect threatened species need to be fully followed.

This sharp disagreement reflects how water politics have long been fraught in the Golden State. And now that the California Water Commission must choose which of 12 qualified proposed projects to fund with the $2.7 billion kitty, officials’ decisions are sure to be buffeted once again by regional interests (Northern vs. Southern California), economic interests (farmers vs. developers) and environmentalists’ interests. With the 12 projects estimated to cost about $13.1 billion – $10 billion-plus more than what is available – some key water stakeholders are sure to end up unhappy. Some districts will be forced to seek all or nearly all funding from other sources, starting with their customers.

Greens quick to start push for preferred project

The 12 projects were unveiled last week. The water commission must make its final decision by June 2018.

Environmentalists wasted no time identifying their favorite project: The Contra Costa Water District’s proposal to increase the storage capacity at its Los Vaqueros reservoir by more than 70 percent – going from 160,000 acre-feet to 275,000 acre-feet. Contra Costa officials say the additional capacity could meet the yearly needs of 1.4 million people.

But that isn’t why the $914 million project already has the strong support of several environmental groups – including the Planning and Conservation League, the Audubon Society and the Nature Conservancy. It’s because a chunk of the water would go to threatened Central Valley wetland refuges to shore up their fragile ecosystems, long a goal of state greens.

To boost the case for the proposal, Contra Costa water officials have lined up the formal support – and promises of funding help – from 12 other Bay Area water districts, which see the additional storage as “drought insurance.”

The most costly proposed projects are to build a $5 billion dam in Colusa County and a $3 billion dam in Fresno County.

Most of the projects proposed for Southern California are less ambitious. The exception is from the city of San Diego, which is asking for the water commission to help cover the $1.2 billion cost of a plant to recycle wastewater with advanced technology that makes it fully safe to mix with conventional water supplies. Officials believe the plant can supply one-third of city needs by 2035.

The project won final approval at San Diego City Hall in 2014, two weeks after Proposition 1 passed.

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

On Monday, Feinstein announced that she had reached agreement with legislative leaders to place a provision providing $588 million for California water storage, desalination and recycling projects into the massive omnibus infrastructure bill that’s expected to pass Congress by year’s end. The deal also included a change in water allocation rules that would take some supplies away from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and give it to Central Valley farmers temporarily for five years.

The announcement prompted relief among Central Valley politicians, who had been fighting for just such changes for years only to be turned back by Senate Democrats.

Reflecting this history, Boxer — in her final month as a California senator — was the sharpest critic of Feinstein’s compromise. She said the deal threatened the health of the delta and could harm the salmon fishing industry and kill off the endangered Delta smelt.

But hopes that the logjam might have been broken blew up Tuesday when the Obama administration revealed it shared Boxer’s objections to the California provision.

“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,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said, according to McClatchy News. “So, we don’t support that measure that’s being put forward, but we’ll take a look at the bill in its totality.”

Prospects for water changes strong under Trump

This could doom the proposal in the short term. But given how popular the omnibus infrastructure has been in recent weeks among lawmakers eager for a big legislative triumph, it may pass over an Obama veto.

Whatever happens in the next six weeks, on Jan. 20, when Donald Trump takes over as president, the Central Valley is likely to have the most sympathetic president it’s had in the 50 years since the environmental movement began racking up victory after victory in Congress and the courts.

Trump made appearances in the Central Valley in May and August, the first time for a rally in Fresno and the second for a fundraiser in Tulare. At the rally, he expressed contempt for policies that he said favored fish over human needs. He also appears to have a good relationship with Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Tulare, who has been among the loudest critics of state and federal water policies’ effects on the Central Valley.

Nunes was reportedly under consideration for secretary of agriculture in the days after Trump’s surprise Nov. 8 election, but his name hasn’t been heard as much in recent days.

The favorite for the job may now be former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, who recently met with Trump about the position. Perdue, like Nunes, is often skeptical of heavy environmental regulation and comes from a state that has often balked at global warming activism.

It took some time, but a 2011 report by the Federal Energy Information Administration that estimated that California’s Monterey shale underground land mass formation had 15.4 billion barrels of accessible oil and a follow-up study that put the figure at 13.7 billion barrels of oil — about twice as much as the rest of the nation combined — got plenty of folks’ attention. Advances in hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking, made extracting the oil cost-effective.

Excitement about a possible oil bonanza was stoked by a 2012 City Journal analysis. That continued to build in early 2013 after word spread that oil companies were already buying land above the 1,750-square-mile shale formation, which extends across much of central California to the Santa Barbara-San Luis Obispo coast. Then came a 2013 USC study that estimated development of the Monterey shale could boost the state’s economic activity by 14.3 percent and had the potential to generate nearly $25 billion in new state tax revenue by 2020.

In January 2014, Gov. Jerry Brown made headlines when he said he was open to allowing fracking in California, getting blasted by environmentalists as a result. Fracking, which involves the use of underground water cannons to eradicate rock formations and allow access to previously unreachable oil and natural gas reserves, has been targeted by green groups on safety and health grounds for a decade.

But it’s been all downhill ever since for those enthusiastic about oil exploration in the Golden State. It’s not just that low oil prices have left energy companies facing a “world of hurt,” in the words of the Houston Chronicle, and without the resources to pursue large new drilling programs in California or elsewhere. It’s specific, daunting developments.

Last week, Los Angeles-based U.S. District Judge Michael Fitzgerald halted plans to allow fracking of the Monterey shale on public lands in central California and rebuked the U.S. Bureau of Land Management for failing to do a full review of the environmental effects of the extraction technique.

In July 2015, state officials released final rules on fracking that were billed as the toughest in the nation. They were seen as much more onerous than the tough-but-manageable draft rules released in fall 2013 to the applause of energy companies.

And in May 2014, the federal Energy Information Administration — the same agency that triggered the interest in the Monterey shale in the first place — cut its estimate of how much oil could be recovered from the underground rock formation by 96 percent, to 600 million barrels.

Obama administration still backs fracking in state

Who remains enthusiastic about oil exploration in California? U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, who last year criticized local governments in the Golden State for adopting fracking bans.

“There is a lot of misinformation about fracking,” Jewell told KQED in an interview. “I think that localized efforts or statewide efforts in many cases don’t understand the science behind it and I think there needs to be more science.”

That may surprise some, given the Obama administration’s aggressive pursuit of a global climate-change strategy that is based on much less use of fossil fuels. But President Obama campaigned for re-election in 2012 on an “all of the above” strategy for energy production and has continued with the approach in his second term.

Jewell endorsed the fracking plan for California public land that was blocked last week by the Los Angeles federal judge. The Bureau of Land Management, the agency the judge criticized, is part of the Interior Department.

California’s massive computing industry faced the prospect of sweeping changes at the hands of Golden State regulators worried that idle devices are drawing too much power at too great a cost.

“All computers sold in California could be required to adopt stricter state energy standards by 2018, cutting computer energy consumption by as much as half, according to new regulations being proposed by the California Energy Commission,” the Sacramento Bee reported. “The standards would apply to power use settings on both desktops and laptops, monitors and signage displays sold in California,” requiring “software and hardware settings controlling the amount of power used by the machines, especially when not in use, in a power period called ‘idle load.'”

The regulations have already been pegged to make a decisive impact on the manufacture and production of electronic devices in the U.S. “Given California’s size, market share and influence, the rules adopted by the CEC expect to trigger changes across the industry by mandating changes even the federal government has thus far avoided tackling,” U-T San Diego noted. But the federal Department of Energy has been tipped as next in line to consider applying such rules, according to the Bee:

“The regulations would save 1,913 gigawatt-hours of power used by computers and 588 gigawatt-hours from monitors and displays yearly, said Andrew McAllister, commissioner for the California Energy Commission. That’s estimated to reduce utility bills by more than $400 million annually by 2024.”

Costs and savings

With little if any organized opposition to the rules, outside of industry negotiations, the California Energy Commission would become the first state body to codify an energy-reduction agenda — at an initial cost to consumers. “The agency estimates it will add about $18 to the price of a computer but promises it will save customers and businesses much more in energy savings,” reported U-T San Diego. “But the commission estimates consumers will save $75.53 over the computer’s 5-year lifespan, due to energy savings.”

“California businesses will pay up to $62 million more per year in incremental costs for installing more efficient computers, monitors and electronic signs, but the CEC said businesses will reduce their electricity costs by up to $290 million per year once their equipment has turned over.”

Hitting the wall

Environmentalist groups have spearheaded the push for the new regulations, insisting that the energy savings translate into air cleaner enough to justify big changes. “Roughly 300 million computers in the U.S. spend from 50 to 77 percent of their time ‘on but inactive’ and devour $10 billion a year worth of electricity, the equivalent of 30-large power plants spewing 65 million metric tons of carbon dioxide pollution that contributes to climate change,” the Natural Resources Defense Council claimed. 

But some industry analysts have cautioned that, regardless of environmental objectives, the need for energy efficiency standards could be driven by an even simpler problem: current limits on the global capacity to produce energy. “The anticipated and growing energy requirements for future computing needs will hit a wall in the next 24 years if the current trajectory is correct,” according to Semiconductor Engineering. “At that point, the world will not produce enough energy for all of the devices that are expected to be drawing power.”

“A report issued by the Semiconductor Industry Association and Semiconductor Research Corp., bases its conclusions on system-level energy per bit operation, which are a combination of many components such as logic circuits, memory arrays, interfaces and I/Os. Each of those contributes to the total energy budget. For the benchmark energy per bit, as shown in the chart below, computing will not be sustainable by 2040. This is when the energy required for computing is estimated to exceed the estimated world’s energy production.”

Now there’s a fresh sign that environmentalists’ clout may be on the wane. De Leon has stunned green groups by endorsing a moderate incumbent — Assemblywoman Cheryl Brown, D-San Bernardino — who opposed the push for a sharp cut in gasoline use over another prominent Inland Empire Democrat, attorney Eloise Gomez Reyes. As Calwatchdog reported earlier this year, Brown was indirectly blasted by one of de Leon’s leadership team, Sen. Connie Leyva, D-Chino, who said she was backing Brown’s opponent because “she was a principled human being.”

In a strange twist, the document making the rounds in media circles showing de Leon’s endorsement of Brown contends that Leyva and all his fellow Senate Democratic leaders agree with him.

“I support Eloise Reyes. Period. Somehow the pro tem must have misunderstood my position, although I thought I was quite clear,” Leyva told The Los Angeles Times.

Whatever the logistical problems with de Leon’s endorsement, it amounts to a striking rejection of environmentalists’ argument that they know Brown’s district better than she does. This view was voiced again this week by one of Reyes’ consultants, Leo Briones, who told the Times, “Cheryl Brown can have every special interest and every Sacramento politician … but she still is a legislator that does not represent progressive values or her district when it comes to issues of working families, of consumers, of guns and public safety and the environment.”

Green official: Brown a ‘nice person,’ bad lawmaker

This argument was offered by a high-profile environmentalist in a January Sacramento Bee story that rubbed some minority lawmakers the wrong way:

“There’s no doubt Ms. Brown, who’s a very nice person, has not been representing her constituents when it comes to environmental issues, particularly clean-air issues,” Sierra Club California director Kathryn Phillips told the Bee. “She’s collected too much money from the oil industry and let that guide too many of her votes.”

As Calwatchdog reported then …

Phillips, who works out of Sacramento, is a white UC Berkeley graduate who used to work for the Environmental Defense Fund. Brown, who turns 72 next week, has been a fixture in the Inland Empire African-American political establishment for more than three decades. She co-founded a weekly publication that focuses on black issues in 1980 and has worked on a wide variety of African-American causes in western San Bernardino County.

Assemblyman Sebastian Ridley-Thomas, D-Los Angeles, told the Bee he didn’t care for how environmentalists were treating his fellow African-American lawmaker. “I think it’s a tone-deaf approach. … The environmental community, and the broader environmental coalition, needs to figure out whether or not it’s going to be a collaborator and … work with black California on policy, and shared political goals, or if it will be an adversary.”

Ridley-Thomas is a vocal supporter of de Leon’s efforts to have a Superfund-type cleanup of the Exide battery plant in Vernon.

In calculating the risk of loans that would likely exceed $35 billion, bankers want to see a greater willingness on the part of the public to bet on the train. “Even as builders clear land and begin work on viaducts near Fresno for the bullet train’s initial segment, financiers solicited by the state rail agency are calling on California to pitch in more than the $10 billion in bond funds already committed in order to give potential investors confidence that the project will become reality,” Bloomberg Business reported:

“Their responses point out a dilemma for Democratic Governor Jerry Brown and other supporters of the line: persuading reticent taxpayers to ante up more than already approved under a 2008 bond measure as support for the project declines, though private investors may stay away unless they see a bigger public buy-in.”

Banks’ reticence has been matched by the construction and engineering firms solicited to join in a partnership with the High Speed Rail Authority. Although many of the 36 firms to respond “expressed a willingness to participate in the project,” the international group gave the Authority more than it bargained for when it asked for “suggestions on how to complete the $68-billion project,” according to the Los Angeles Times. None offered to bring forward private funding, as the Sacramento Bee noted.

State investment so far has been significant, but is nowhere near the amount needed to bankroll the entire project. Along with $3.5 billion in federal matching funds, the 2008 measure greenlit some $10 billion more. “The state Legislature agreed last year to provide the first ongoing source of financial support to the project by tapping revenues from the state’s greenhouse gas emissions program in which companies buy and sell pollution credits,” the Associated Press confirmed — a divisive process that saw Gov. Jerry Brown claw away from environmentalists to his left about $750 million and 25 percent of future “cap-and-trade” revenue.

Pressing on a particularly sore spot for train backers — especially Gov. Jerry Brown, who has labored to fund construction while keeping a relatively tight hand on budgeting — Spanish and German companies warned that California’s rail program would require substantial and ongoing subsidies. “As part of the taxpayer protections written in to a voter-approved plan to provide funding to build the line, public subsidies for operation of passenger service were banned,” the Times noted. “State officials have consistently projected the train will turn a profit as soon as it begins carrying riders.”

One proposal advanced by some companies involved segmenting the train project into several much smaller and more affordable chunks, giving firms a greater willingness to bear risk and spread outlays of capital. “In the documents, many firms suggested breaking the project up into smaller contracts, typically in the $3 billion to $5 billion range. Anything much larger could scare off even the world’s largest construction and financing firms, the respondents said,” according to AP.

Meanwhile, construction plans have not slowed down. But evident shifts in the Authority’s strategy and priorities became clear as planners startled Silicon Valley with a sudden emphasis on the region. “Some Bay Area city officials were surprised by the California High Speed Rail Authority’s renewed focus on the San Francisco to San Jose segment because they believed the agency was going to start building the line in Southern California after finishing the first section in the Central Valley,” reported the San Jose Mercury News.

Initially, the sequence of events was expected to begin with the state’s midsection, move up toward the Bay, and then extend branches to Sacramento and San Diego — a span of “520 miles, shuttling travelers between San Francisco and Los Angeles in less than three hours,” according to the Bee.

Doubts overcome

After sailing through the Assembly in May, AB888, introduced by Richard Bloom, D-Santa Monica, languished in Sacramento’s upper chamber. As the Sacramento Bee reported, “it was blocked by a vote of 19-16 in the Senate, where a similar bill died last year.”

Although granted reconsideration, the bill was dogged by the abstention of some Democrats leery of going too far and too fast toward the elimination of the popular cosmetic and hygienic additives. Suggesting the scope of the uncertainty, state Sen. Richard Pan, D-Sacramento — co-author of the state’s recent closure of vaccination exemptions — withheld his vote, arguing that technology should be given a chance to lower the risk posed by the beads to the environment, according to the Bee.

Sure enough, tweaking the bill’s allowance for microbes alternatives won enough support to put it over the top. Originally, Bloom’s language required “that only natural products, such as ground walnut shells, could be used as alternatives to microbeads,” as the Huffington Post noted. “When proponents of the bill agreed to remove those provisions, the legislation was granted reconsideration and passed in the Senate the following day.”

Pushing for a trend

Bloom swiftly hailed the bill’s passage by a 24-14 vote. In terms now becoming typical of legislation passed in Sacramento, he framed the regulations as a model the rest of the country was ready to embrace. “California is a national leader on environmental issues. It is my hope that this legislation, which will create the strongest protections in the country, will be used as a nationwide standard for eliminating harmful micro-plastics from personal care products,” he said, according to the Santa Monica Mirror. “We cannot afford to wait any longer to stop this pervasive source of plastic pollution.”

Key environmental groups echoed Bloom’s predictions. In a blog post, the 5 Gyres Institute, a co-sponsor of the bill, pointedly referenced a pending bill in Congress. “Since CA is by far the largest market for consumer care products in the country, it is likely that Federal Legislation currently under consideration (H.R. 1312) will follow the CA model,” 5 Gyres said.

“Unlike bans in states like Colorado, Maine, New Jersey, Illinois and Indiana, AB888 bans all types of plastic microbeads, including so called “biodegradable plastics,” many of which do not biodegrade in the marine environment. The bill will encourage companies to shift towards more sustainable, naturally derived alternatives like sea salt, apricot pits and walnut husks. AB888 would ban the sale of products containing plastic microbead by 2020.”

Compound fears

Activists have long complained of microbeads’ quiet, cumulative impact, which falls disproportionately on the coastal ecosystem especially beloved of Santa Monica’s environmentalist constituents. As Mother Jones observed, “the particles are so small that they aren’t caught in wastewater treatment plants and end up in waterways and oceans, where they don’t biodegrade and are frequently mistaken for food by fish and other marine animals. There are an estimated 300,000 microbeads in a single tube of face wash.”

At the same time, opposition to microbeads arose from Californians with more of a culinary interest in marine life. “Fish species that humans harvest have been known to eat micro-plastic particles and the toxins absorbed in those plastics transfer to the fish tissue,” the Mirror noted. “Humans eat fish and bivalves that have eaten microplastics which carry known dangerous toxins.” Bloom and others have also expressed concerns that microbeads can “pose a threat to humans when used in toiletries such as toothpaste, potentially sticking in gums and causing disease.”

In a remarkable reversal, California Democrats have dropped a main provision in landmark legislation ratcheting up emissions regulations. As Republicans cheered, liberals nationwide decried the turnabout, with Golden State environmentalists blaming a sizable campaign against the bills launched by a nervous oil industry.

Fueling fears

Petroleum interests were able to use Democrats’ dramatic objectives to raise an effective alarm in one of the most reliably anti-carbon states in the union. “The oil industry has poured money into a campaign against SB350, calling the legislation the ‘California Gas Restriction Act of 2015’ and warning that it could lead to bans on SUVs,” as ThinkProgress noted; according to the original terms of the bill, passed by the state Senate, California would be committed to a 50 percent reduction in gasoline use in both cars and trucks. In the new bill, expected to clear the Assembly, that provision has been removed.

Substantial curbs on emissions remained, however. “The amended bill still aims to curb carbon emissions from two other sectors of the energy industry,” the Wall Street Journal observed. “Using 2016 levels as the starting point, the legislation would require the state’s utilities to get half their power from renewable sources and all buildings in the state to increase their energy efficiency by 50 percent.”

Nevertheless, the more modest version of SB350 marked the second of two big disappointments for environmentalist policy advocates in California and around the country. As the Journal added, SB32, which would slash state emissions by 80 percent from 1990 levels before 2050, also passed a vote in the Senate only to run aground in the Assembly.

Sharp rhetoric

Supporters of SB350, including Senate Leader Kevin de Leon, were adamant that industry scaremongering scuttled the 50 percent petroleum cut. Remarking on the bill’s modification, the New York Times reported, he said, “Big Oil might be on the right side of their shareholder reports, but we’re on the right side of history.”

Activists sharpened the message on their own terms. “Kathryn Phillips, who runs the Sierra Club’s California chapter, went even further, saying that the oil industry was waging ‘war on humanity’ by blocking efforts to reduce heat-emissions as much as scientists say is necessary to avert catastrophe,” MSNBC noted. Phillips, the network added, described the industry as “ruthless” and “determined to tell every lie they can and to scare people to death just so they can keep as much market share as possible.”

But a different, more practical factor weighed heavily on the minds of skittish Democrats. “The decision on how to carry out the proposed cuts would have been left to the state’s Air Resources Board, a matter of strong concern to many lawmakers,” according to the Times. If the board made decisions adversely impacting constituents, many of whom have already been struggling economically, the consequences could be dire. What’s more, angry voters would have little way to respond but at the ballot box.

An uncertain future

For now, however, anger was concentrated among climate activists convinced that the world’s fortunes depend in outsized measure on California’s ability to demonstrate a path forward on strict emissions reductions. “If they can’t succeed in their ambitions,” MSNBC suggested of Sacramento’s liberals, “it raises serious questions about the fate of a hoped for global climate agreement this December in Paris.”

Their dismay was compounded by the outright defeat of this year’s other embattled emissions bill, SB32, introduced by state Sen. Fran Pavley, D-Agoura Hills. “Pavley tried to overcome opposition to her measure by changing it to provide more legislative oversight of the state’s powerful Air Resources Board,” the Los Angeles Times noted. But skeptics were unmoved, the Times reported. Meanwhile, Gov. Jerry Brown’s office pulled its support out of concerns that it had become toothless, leaving Pavley to promise she would reintroduce the bill next year.

Fire politics

By making the crisis official, Brown boosted the state’s ability to fight the fires in two ways. First, as the Sacramento Bee noted, he triggered the mobilization of the National Guard. Second, in a move likely to deepen the frustration of climate change activists, he “relaxed some regulations like environmental rules” and prohibitions on trespassing.

In a statement, Brown praised the state’s responders, but warned that the situation was critical. “California’s severe drought and extreme weather have turned much of the state into a tinderbox,” he said, according to the Sacramento Bee. “Our courageous firefighters are on the front lines, and we’ll do everything we can to help them.”

Fighting meddlers

California’s fire trouble has been compounded by residents interfering with operations — or, at times, necessitating new ones. A Redding resident, for instance, was recently arrested on suspicion of starting 14 small fires in the area.

But to date, the most sensational problem caused by meddlesome individuals has been drone related. In three separate instances, private drones floating overhead posed enough of a threat to firefighting airplanes that their missions were delayed. “After the unmanned devices were spotted flying above flames and smoke from the blazes this year — which altogether burned about 36,000 acres — fire crews were forced to ground water-dropping aircraft,” the Los Angeles Times noted. “Officials said the delays allowed the fires to spread, resulting in devastating property losses.”

As a result, San Bernardino County officials have now ponied up $25,000 apiece, one reward per incident, for details about who’s responsible. “We want to know who was flying drones, and we want them punished,” said Board of Supervisors chairman Jorge Ramos, according to the Verge. “Someone knows who they are, and there is $75,000 waiting for them.”

California lawmakers, Slate reported, “proposed a pair of bills that would make flying drones over fires a misdemeanor carrying up to $2,000 in fines and shield emergency personnel from liability for swatting them out of the way.” And in Congress, Rep. Paul Cook, R.-Ca., introduced legislation that would make similar interference a federal crime worth up to five years behind bars.

As the state’s drought-imposed cutbacks in water consumption have tightened, medical marijuana farmers have largely flouted the rules — until now.

A new era

The Cannabis Pilot Project, staffed by personnel from California water boards the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, recently set an example with its first strike against environmentally harmful marijuana farming. “The Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board has fined property owner Christopher Cordes and contractor Eddie Axner Construction Inc., a total of $297,400 for large-scale grading activities that resulted in actual and potential harm to surface waters in the Ono area of Shasta County,” according to the Central Valley Business Times. In addition to grading the land without a permit, the offending parties violated water quality laws in an “egregious” manner, the board ruled.

In an illustration of the enforcement challenges faced by the board, officials did not become aware of the violations until Shasta County sheriff’s deputies “raided the site in October and destroyed about 100 plants growing there,” as the Associated Press observed.

Pot farmers have been scrambling to adapt to the state’s new crackdowns on excessive and unauthorized water use. In the north San Francisco Bay, cultivators formed a new organization, the Sonoma County Growers Alliance, to organize around the challenge. Former Sebastopol mayor Craig Litwin “said the flip side to getting recognized as legitimate businesses is that growers won’t be able to flaut environmental regulations by planting pot directly along creeks or diverting stream water need for endangered fish,” reported The Press Democrat.

The group’s inaugural meeting drew Assemblyman Jim Wood, D-Healdsburg, who “expressed surprise to find so many of the region’s growers backing his efforts to place themselves under government oversight.” As the Press Democrat noted, Wood cautioned that the race to curry favor with lawmakers and regulators could leave growers dissatisfied even if they succeed, speculating that “in a few years they would be asking him, ‘Dammit, what is with all these regulations?'”

Regulating medical pot

Growers have already gotten an early taste of the Legislature’s attitude toward their product. Several bills regulating medical pot have been condensed into a new bill making its way through Sacramento. “The new version of AB266 would create the Bureau of Medical Marijuana Regulation under the Department of Consumer Affairs,” California Healthline reported. “That agency would be tasked with licensing and regulating dispensaries, as well as any cultivation or distribution of medicinal marijuana. The bill would allow counties to impose a tax on the cultivation and distribution of medicinal pot.”

In addition to curbing harmful and illegal water usage, lawmakers took aim at the quality of the drug itself. “For those who need and use it, it’s important that it be high quality,” said Assemblyman Rob Bonta, D-Oakland, according to California Healthline. “Because of a lack of regulation, mold or pesticides and other harmful ingredients could be in it and that could threaten the health of patients.”

Splitting the difference

Fearing a messy clash involving growers, environmentalists and law enforcement, some policymakers have set out to ensure that lawbreaking growers of legal medical pot can make an orderly transition into a regulated marketplace.

In the so-called Emerald Triangle, the hotbed of marijuana cultivation centered in Humboldt County, water regulators have crafted a new approach. “The North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board is poised to adopt a program that would require all marijuana cultivators to register, pay a fee, follow strict environmental guidelines and seek appropriate permits from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife,” the Los Angeles Times noted.

According to the Times, the impetus for the proposal’s development can be traced to Gov. Jerry Brown himself.