Could cities such as drought-vulnerable Los Angeles come to regret that a “privatization” provision in the old $11.1 billion state water bond was removed?

Back in 2009, there was an outcry against language in the original version of a proposed state water bond that would have allowed private companies to own, operate and profit from water projects partly funded by taxpayers dollars. Critics said it opened a door to dangerous privatization.

But the bill merely contained a provision for joint ventures with nongovernment partners. Nevertheless, it eventually was stricken from the bill, and the new $7.5 billion water bond bill on the November ballot omits it as well.

What’s going on in San Antonio — which has been dealing with a harsh drought for years —  suggests that was a major mistake.

According to a new study by The Environmental Hydrology Laboratory at the University of Florida, both San Antonio and  Los Angeles are extremely drought-vulnerable cities. San Antonio came in dead last among the 225 ranked cities, with L.A. was ranked 220th. High-ranking cities are near very large lakes or rivers while low-ranking cities are in arid areas and have low local storage capacities.

Innovation vs. ineffective status quo

Both cities have adopted successful conservation policies to deal with droughts. San Antonio’s per capita water use is 127 gallons per day as of 2013. Per capita usage in Los Angeles was 123 gallons per day as of 2011.

But San Antonio has recently embraced public-private partnerships as a way to survive prolonged droughts, while L.A. sticks to the standard California playbook.

Los Angeles’ five-year water resource plan — adopted in June 2012 — mainly depends on a set of recycled water projects. In addition, L.A.’s plan will depend on the drought ending and an end to the current curtailments of imported state water. Two new state reservoirs that would be funded by the state water bond wouldn’t be available until about 2023 and would only add about 1 percent to state reservoir supplies.

L.A. is in the process of recharging groundwater supplies with purified recycled water — “toilet-to-tap” water — that would produce up to 15,000 acre-feet of new water by 2022 and 30,000 acre-feet to 2035 to offset the future loss of imported water.

All told, L.A. is planning to produce 59,000 acre-feet of recycled water by 2035. That would equate to about 13.4 gallons of water added per household per day by 2035. But this would be water to backfill projected future losses of water from shortages of state imported water.

L.A. has no water storage or desalination plants on the planning board over the next five years and remains dependent on a long-term solution in Sacramento.

San Antonio officials not waiting for others to act

Unlike Los Angeles, the San Antonio Water System is not depending on the state or Congress to solve problems posed by its prolonged drought.  San Antonio is moving toward importing 50,000 acre-feet of water from Burleson County by partnering with the Abengoa Water Corp. and Blue Water Systems of Austin, Tex., for purchase of water through a new 142-mile pipeline to be completed by 2019. This is called the Vista Ridge Plan.

In the plan, 3,400 water rights holders in Burleson County will be paid an annual fee for their water. Thus, no condemnation of land for water wells would be needed, although pipeline rights of ways would have to be acquired.

Abengoa is a private, international water and energy infrastructure corporation based in Seville, Spain.

San Antonio water officials selected a proposal from Abengoa to buy water from the Vista Ridge Pipeline Project through a competitive proposal process from nine other proposals to provide a solution for San Antonio’s future water demands. While Southern California has been trying to obtain political approvals for its Peripheral Canal or other big projects since 1982, San Antonio is moving ahead for a contract to buy water from Abengoa in five years. The pipeline would be financed, built and operated by Abengoa.

Additionally, San Antonio’s water agency is renting available capacity in an existing pipeline to bring about 25,000 acre-feet of water from the Carrizo Aquifer in Gonzales County by 2015.

By 2016, San Antonio’s water agency also plans to have completed a desalination plant that will produce about 33,000 acre-feet of water per year by desalting local groundwater at a cost of $1,138 per acre-foot of water.

Overall, San Antonio is planning on adding 108,000 acre-feet of new water over the next five years. That equates to adding 35.2 billion gallons of water or 1,212 gallons of new water per year per existing household per day.  San Antonio plans to sell any unused portion of its water supplies from the Vista Ridge Pipeline to other cities to reduce water rates to its customers.

At an Aug. 12 symposium at the University of Texas at San Antonio on the Vista Ridge Pipeline Project, one topic was the difference between California and Texas as to finding solutions to drought (see bottom of page here). San Antonio leaders attributed the difference to a “culture” of “free enterprise and capitalism.” They specifically called out Sacramento as a city, which, in the past, has not even had water meters as part of the problem.

Smaller San Antonio to add far more water than L.A.

Ecowatch.com ran an article titled “Which City Will Run Out of Water First?” on Sept. 3 reporting the new drought vulnerability rankings for 225 large cities in the U.S.

San Antonio may have the worst ranking but has embraced allowing the private sector to propose a drought solution for the city. San Antonio does not have to go to voters to approve a water bond. The new added water will increase water rates 16 percent.

In comparison, Los Angeles’ wholesale imported water rates rose 15 percent in 2009, water deliveries were cut and customers had to cut usage by 20 percent.

The chart below tells the story crisply: San Antonio, one-third the size of Los Angeles, is on track to add vastly more water resources in coming years and decades. L.A.’s government-first approach simply can’t match the results produced by San Antonio’s innovation.

By Chris Reed

San Diegans had an extremely unusual choice for mayor Tuesday, picking between a gay libertarian who’d already turned the city into a hotbed of government experimentation and a 20-year congressman who is a ’60s-ethos liberal with serious anger-management issues. The contrast between City Councilman Carl DeMaio and Rep. Bob Filner was so unusual that it even got prominent play in The New York Times.

Fueled by hundreds of thousands of dollars in union-paid attack ads and a hypocritical strategy that sought to remind voters DeMaio was gay, Filner pulled off a 51.5 percent to 48.5 percent win.

With less than four weeks until he takes office, the question for Filner is whether he will try to fight implementation of aggressive reforms approved by San Diego’s voters or whether he will betray voters by working with unions and the union-controlled state Public Employment Relations Board in trying to sandbag those reforms.

The first of those reforms is Proposition C, approved in a landslide by San Diego voters in 2006. It was intended to cut the cost of providing city services through a “managed competition” process in which private companies bid against groups of city employees for city contracts.

After four years of stalling by public employee unions in negotiations with the city as well as stall tactics by a City Council whose Democratic majority had strong union ties, “managed competition” was finally implemented.  The four “competitions” to date have all been won by city employees, to the surprise of some. But the savings have been substantial, and are expected to reach tens of millions of dollars annually in coming years.

Under Mayor Jerry Sanders, the city has been moving steadily toward the biggest “managed comp” implementation of all, in trash collection.

Defined-benefit pensions no more?

The second reform is Proposition B, approved this June by San Diego voters in another landslide.

It seeks to impose a six-year freeze on “pensionable pay” — the types of compensation that are added up to calculate pensions. It will end defined-benefit pensions for new city employees, except for police, and give them a 401(k)-style defined-investment retirement benefit.

This is the measure that PERB, in an extraordinary move, tried to kill before it even reached the ballot. The agency makes the bizarre argument that, because DeMaio, Sanders and other city leaders led the push for the ballot petitions for Measure B, it amounted to an illegal attempt to circumvent mandatory collective bargaining on job conditions. (San Diego City Attorney Jan Goldsmith, who is fighting PERB, so far successfully, captures the absurdity of the PERB stand well here.)

Filner has said he will honor voters’ wishes on these measures. But he has long criticized both, and it would be easy to see him saying he had changed his mind.

So is the DeMaio-driven libertarian dream of increasingly privatized city services and private sector-level government compensation still alive in San Diego?

To a considerable degree, it appears to be up to Filner. If he follows through with managed competition on trash — which has potential savings of hundreds of millions of dollars in coming years — Filner may learn to appreciate the process. The extra money could pave a lot of roads in a city where even busy boulevards in rich areas like Camino del Norte in Rancho Bernardo are pothole-strewn.

The stark choice for a true-left pol

But to the extent that the left sees privatization as a bogeyman akin to outsourcing, it’s hard to imagine Filner accepting a trash-service bidding process that led to hundreds of city workers getting axed. Sooner or later, an outside bidder is going to win, and trash is likely to draw several serious bids. That would leave Filner with a stark choice.

There is a transactional quality to the enthusiasm that many of California’s elected Democrats show for public employee unions. They know where their bread is buttered. But Filner’s passions, for better and worse, seem real. He sees the world in binary fashion, with little gray. For him to decide to accept, rather than fight, a mass firing of public employees is difficult to imagine. The same may hold for accepting a profound change in public-employee retirement benefits as well.

So much for heeding the voters in America’s eighth-largest city. Libertarians may be left to wonder what might have been. DeMaio would be the next mayor if only one in 66 San Diego voters preferred him to Filner.

One in 66.

By Brian Calle

Hermosa Beach meter maids make nearly $10,000 a year.

By Joseph Perkins

Voters in San Jose and San Diego sent a loud, clear message to public employees unions this week that they can no longer expect gold-plated benefit packages and immunity from private competition.

Santa Cruz County Sheriff Phil Wowak hopes the message resonates with his county’s public-employee unions, which oppose his proposal to contract out medical services for jail inmates overseen by his department.

Wowak has no animus, he says, toward the unionized public employees who currently provide medical treatment to the county’s inmate population. It’s just that his Sheriff’s Department is operating under budget constraints that require him to find savings.

By turning over inmate treatment to a private sector provider, Monterey-based California Forensic Medical Group,  the Sheriff’s Department can save an estimated $600,000, according to the annual budget Wowak has proposed.

The increasing duration of inmate stays at the four correctional facilities has a lot to do with the sheriff’s decision to turn to the private sector, said Lt. Shea Johnson, medical division commander for the county jail system.

“With more long-term housing comes some more acute problems,” she told the Santa Cruz Sentinel. “The longer they stay, the more services they need.”

Jodi Capitola-Duran, chapter president of Service Employee International Union Local 521, argues that Wowak is to blame for the problems with the county-run medical services because it was insufficiently staffed with unionized public employees.

“We have been advocating for keeping medical services in house,” she said, in a statement.

“It’s a shame that the sheriff allowed this service to fail by not filling vital positions when needed to provide care. This is disappointing not only for families losing jobs in this community, but for our community that is losing vital public health services.”

That’s the kind of rhetoric that was heard from the public-employee unions in San Jose, opposing cost-saving pension reform, and San Diego, opposing pension reform and a ban on union-only project labor agreements (which drive up the cost of public works construction).

Unions too costly

But, like the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Department, budget-strapped county and city agencies throughout the state are increasingly willing to part ways with the public-employee unions.

The city of Santa Clara, for instance, turned over operations of its library system this past July to Library System and Services Inc., a private library management company.

City residents couldn’t be more pleased with non-unionized LSSI, which has lengthened hours, including opening on Sundays. It also has added more than 75 new computers, a new home-schooling book collection and more children’s programs.

San Joaquin County also is looking to the private sector to help its Micke Grove Zoo restore the national accreditation it lost six years ago. It has contracted with a private non-profit, the Micke Grove Zoological Society, whose non-unionized workers will take over day-to-day operations for the long-neglected zoo.

The future is now for privatization not only in Santa Cruz County, the city of Santa Clara andSan Joaquin County, but throughout California. And Tuesday’s election results in San Jose and San Diego will only add to the momentum.