State, feds on collision course over “sanctuary” policies

Good morning. TGIT. If today is anything like yesterday, buckle up. 

President Donald Trump on Wednesday said his administration would block federal funding for cities that don’t cooperate with federal immigration laws, with Democratic leaders in the state vowing to fight back.

A handful of California cities, like Los Angeles and San Francisco, have so-called “sanctuary” policies, which prompted the federal action. And in a statement of defiance, Senate President Pro Tempore Kevin de Leon said he would fast track his bill to make California a sanctuary state. 

“(T)he Senate will expedite the process to pass my bill, SB54, to prevent state and local tax dollars and law enforcement resources from being used to help ICE destroy families and damage our economy,” the Los Angeles Democrat said. 

But even as Democratic leaders strongly push to protect the sanctuary policies, the public is split. A Hoover Institution poll from earlier this month showed that 40 percent of voters support sanctuary policies, while 41 oppose (19 percent didn’t seem to care either way). 

CalWatchdog has more. 

In other news:

• Pensions: “The mayor of El Monte, a cash-strapped San Gabriel Valley city with many retired employees drawing two pensions, says there’s ‘no rational justification’ for the extraordinary, taxpayer-funded generosity. But at the same time, Mayor Andre Quintero says there’s nothing city officials can do about the situation in the near term.” The Los Angeles Times has more. 

• Sanctuary backlash: “Assistance promised to victims and law enforcement in response to the Dec. 2 terrorist attack is among the funding potentially jeopardized by President Donald Trump’s executive order blocking assistance to so-called sanctuary jurisdictions.” The San Bernardino County Sun has more. 

• Unfunded liability: “California faces a $76.67 billion cost to provide health care and dental benefits to retired state employees, state Controller Betty Yee reported Wednesday, an increase of $2.49 billion over the previous year’s estimate,” reports The Sacramento Bee. 

• Drought: “Hammered with record rainstorms and blizzards, nearly half of California is no longer in a drought, and the rest saw dramatic improvement over the past week, federal scientists reported Thursday. Overall, 49 percent of the state is now drought free, the highest level since April 2013, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor,” reports The San Jose Mercury News.

Legislature:

• In at 9 a.m. 

Gov. Brown:

• No public events announced. 

Tips: matt@calwatchdog.com

Follow us: @calwatchdog @mflemingterp

New follower: @Tony_Larson

Legislators in Sacramento try to include citizens in lawmaking

Good morning. TGIT. Although legislators won’t really be back until next year, new bills are coming. In fact, two state lawmakers are looking to include constituents in the policy-making process in similar, and yet very different, ways.

While Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia, D-Bell Gardens, is holding a contest for constituents to pitch their best ideas for a “There Ought to be a Law” contest, Sen. John Moorlach, R-Costa Mesa, aims to do the exact opposite. 

Moorlach, partnering with four other Republican senators, is pushing a “There Ought NOT Be A Law” program. Unlike Garcia’s program, the Republican contest is not to write a new law, but to instead simplify and streamline existing state law. 

CalWatchdog has more. 

In other news:

• “Tempting fate — and mobilized outrage from consumers and their Silicon Valley allies — municipalities around California have zeroed in on a new source of revenue: Online film and television streaming services, and the people who use them,” writes CalWatchdog. 

• “Led by members of the California delegation, dozens of House Democrats are again pleading with President Obama to pardon hundreds of thousands of immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children to whom he granted temporary deportation deferrals.” The Los Angeles Times has more. 

• “A day after the city emerged from its 53-month bankruptcy, city officials marked the ‘watershed moment’ with a detailed statement on what they’ve done since filing for bankruptcy and their plans for the future.” The San Bernardino County Sun has more. 

• “With recreational cannabis legal in California, state leaders are taking another stab at letting law enforcement test the saliva of people suspected of driving under the influence of marijuana,” reports The San Jose Mercury News/The Orange County Register. 

Legislature:

• Gone till January. 

Gov. Brown:

• No public events scheduled.

Tips: matt@calwatchdog.com

Follow us: @calwatchdog @mflemingterp

New follower: @CALmatters

Darrell Issa sues opponent

Good morning. TGIT. Welcome to December. The election is over, but some of the animosity remains.

Just days ago, Congressman Darrell Issa was determined the winner in a very close re-election race — by far the toughest race of his career. We wrote about the race here.

But instead of going quietly into the sunrise, Issa is suing his Democratic opponent, Doug Applegate, for what he claims were libelous campaign ads.

Issa, the richest member of Congress, is seeking $10 million in damages, and said he’ll donate to charity whatever he’s awarded by the court. The Los Angeles Times/San Diego Union-Tribune has more.

In other news:

• Teacher Shortage: “California school districts have grappled with a teacher shortage for years but the problem has worsened since 2014, with 75 percent reporting a lack of qualified instructors, according to a survey released Wednesday,” reports The Bakersfield Californian.

• San Bernardino Shooting: “But despite piecing together a detailed picture of the couple’s actions up to and including the massacre, federal officials acknowledge they still don’t have answers to some of the critical questions posed in the days after the Dec. 2, 2015, attack at the Inland Regional Center,” writes the Los Angeles Times. 

• Water: “Under a new draft plan, urban water suppliers would have to meet new conservation targets by 2025 based on a variety of factors, including indoor and outdoor water use, commercial and industrial water use, and water lost to leaks.” Capital Public Radio has more. 

• Supermajority: “Democrats who take the oath of office next week in the California Legislature will find their ranks have swelled, with the party now holding a supermajority of seats in both houses. But there are likely to be notable intraparty disagreements on economic issues, none more important than taxes.” The Los Angeles Times has more. 

Legislature:

• Gone till next week. 

Gov. Brown:

• No public events announced. 

Tips: matt@calwatchdog.com

Follow us: @calwatchdog @mflemingterp

New follower: @CapitolGab

After years of operating under the radar, the cover has been pulled back on an FBI program, centered around Southern California, to amass iris scan information in a federal database.

“To create that pool of scans, the FBI has struck information-sharing agreements with other agencies, including U.S. Border Patrol, the Pentagon, and local law enforcement departments. California has been most aggressive about collecting scans, but agencies in Texas and Missouri can also add to and search the system,” the Verge reported. “The result amounts to a new national biometric database that stretches the traditional boundaries of a pilot program, while staying just outside the reach of privacy mandates often required for such data-gathering projects.”

“In California, the counties of Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino have contributed scans, with the latter’s sheriff’s department harvesting more than 200,000 scans alone,” as Mashable noted. “An average of 189 iris scans were collected every day at the start of 2016.” 

According to the Verge, those scans were collated and sent to the FBI by the California Department of Justice, which signed a memorandum with the Bureau in 2013 that set down the responsibilities of each. “The document says only that the FBI will handle information from the project ‘lawfully,’ while California must ‘comply with its state privacy laws,'” the site noted. “The FBI has said the program is bound by internal information security standards.”

Ready and willing

Southern California law enforcement agencies appeared eager to help spearhead the program, signing up again and again to participate. While California’s effort “was scheduled to run for one year and then be reassessed,” the site added, “it’s been renewed each year since 2013,” with Steve Fischer, Chief of Multimedia Productions at the FBI’s CJIS Division, estimating the so-called pilot program would “continue for 2 to 3 additional years.” 

Treatment of the undertaking as a pilot has made relative sense given its current scope and future aims. “The iris scan program, like the facial scans, is part of the FBI’s Next Generation Identification (NGI) database,” a system with “a broad purview including employment background checks and identifying unknown corpses as wall as use in criminal, terrorist, and intelligence investigations,” according to Yahoo Tech. Pushing to develop the technology out of “fears of another 9/11-style attack,” IB Times reported, “the FBI signed a $1 billion contract with military behemoth Lockheed Martin to develop and launch the unit.” Details haven’t emerged on how large of a database, or how many years of activity, might have been considered before expanding iris scans nationwide.

Drawing criticism

Predictably, California civil liberties advocates and activists have swiftly lined up against the scheme. “What we’re seeing is how counterterrorism and counterinsurgency tactics are being codified into everyday policing,”  Stop LAPD Spying founder Hamid Khan told the Times. “In essence, we’re all suspects.” Nicole Ozer, ACLU California’s policy director for technology and civil liberties, told the Verge it was “very troubling” that “these systems have gone forward without any public debate or oversight that we’ve been able to find[.]”

But in Southern California, where San Bernardino was left reeling in the face of one of the nation’s most shocking terror attacks, officials’ relationship with the FBI has grown close. Northern California heavyweight Apple fought the Bureau’s demand to unlock the cellphone belonging to the shooter, raising questions “over whether technology companies’ encryption technologies protect privacy or endanger the public by blocking law enforcement access to information,” the Washington Post recalled. By collecting iris scans on its own, federal law enforcement could help ensure that the information might later be construed as personal data protected by private companies.

A wave of violence, legislation and litigation fueled the latest acrimonious phase of the debate about guns in California. While the issue had risen near the top of the political agenda following shootings that intensified the immigration debate, an apparently close call with mass bloodshed at the Los Angeles gay pride parade has sharpened the dispute around firearms even further. 

“The early morning arrest in Santa Monica of James Wesley Howell, 20, of Jeffersonville, came just a few hours after at least 50 people were shot and killed in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, though police said they had found no evidence of a connection between the events,” the Associated Press reported. “The L.A. Pride event continued as usual, albeit with increased security. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced the arrest at the start of the parade and struck a defiant tone.”

Rules and rulings

In Sacramento, that tone collided with heated opposition to a new slate of measures designed to pick away at Californians’ market access to guns and ammunition. In a harsh session, “divided California state lawmakers advanced a dozen gun-control bills, including proposals to outlaw the sale of semiautomatic rifles with easily detachable magazines,” the Los Angeles Times noted. First introduced in the wake of the December terror attack in San Bernardino, the mass shooting of scores of people in Orlando “was invoked over and over Tuesday by Democrats as state legislative committees heard testimony before voting to send bills to the floor for votes,” the paper added. 

The atmosphere surrounding that legislation was charged even more highly by a Federal Appeals Court ruling this month keeping sharp restrictions in place around so-called concealed carry in California. “The 7-4 decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit reverses a 2014 ruling from its three-judge panel, which had struck down restrictions imposed by two California counties based on state law,” USA Today reported.

“California’s law, like those in eight other states and the District of Columbia, generally requires citizens to show ‘good cause’ before being granted a concealed-carry license. In other states, licenses are issued to most citizens without felony convictions who are not considered dangerous or mentally unstable.”

Congressional Democrats have faced a much higher hurdle to passing gun regulations than their fellow party members in Sacramento. “House Democrats with limited ability to influence the congressional agenda tried for the dozenth time Tuesday to force a gun-control vote,” as the Times reported separately. “Lawmakers used a procedural move in an attempt to get their colleagues to vote to prevent people on the FBI’s terrorist watch list from being able to purchase a gun. Given Republican control of Congress and a years-long logjam on anything related to guns, the push was symbolic.”

“But it was the second emotional and tense moment for Democrats who have repeatedly pushed for the provision and other changes to gun laws in the months since Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, and other California members first stalled House floor action in the days after the San Bernardino shooting in an effort to raise the same issue.”

From morality to money

The root of the controversy over gun control has increasingly shifted onto not just moral but more deeply philosophical grounds, with proponents of tighter strictures thinking of firearms more abstractly, akin to contagious diseases, hazardous building conditions, and other generalized risks. “Gun violence is one of the top public health problems in the nation,” Boston University epidemiologist Michael Siegel argued to Wired. “If you’re in an urban area and African American, it’s probably the number one public health problem you’re going to face.”

Siegel and other such analysts cheered Sacramento’s recent passage of a $5 million allocation toward a new California Firearm Violence Research Center. The funding, according to Wired, will “train a new crop of researchers, and get one of the best gun violence data sets out there.” UC Davis violence-prevention researcher Garen Wintemute linked up with sate Sen. Lois Wolk, D-Davis, to parse California’s copious amount of data around violence and guns, examining “the ways it has changed over time as policies shifted.”

The ongoing legal struggle between Apple and the Department of Justice shifted dramatically as federal officials dropped their effort to force the Cupertino tech giant to grant access to the iPhone used by Syed Farook, the terrorist who perpetrated the San Bernardino attacks.

Through means which have yet to be disclosed, DOJ gained access to the phone’s contents on its own, raising questions about its methods which may be revealed to Apple as the focus of litigation shifts away from Riverside, California, to New York.

Cracking the code

“F.B.I. investigators have begun examining the contents of the phone but would not say what, if anything, they have identified so far,” the New York Times reported. “The Justice Department also remained tight-lipped about how it was able to finally get into the smartphone after weeks of furious public debate.

“A second law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reporters in a conference call said that a company outside the government provided the F.B.I. with the means to get into the phone used by Mr. Farook, which is an iPhone 5C running Apple’s iOS 9 mobile operating system. The official would not name the company or discuss how it was accomplished, nor would officials say whether the process would ultimately be shared with Apple.”

But according to industry sources cited by NBC News, the Israeli firm Cellebrite was contracted to do the job. “The firm has been rumored to be behind the FBI’s newfound ability to access the device, thanks to a previous and unconfirmed report from an Israeli newspaper,” The Hill noted. Though Cellebrite and the Department of Justice have not confirmed the rumors or the reports linking the two, Bureau officials have “routinely contracted Cellebrite over the last five years,” The Hill added. “The company, which publicly boasts of its ability to hack into Apple devices, has received over $2 million in purchase orders from the agency since 2012.”

Another shoe to drop

Nevertheless, the details of the government’s behind-the-scenes efforts could soon come to light. “Apple is in the middle of a separate case in Brooklyn, New York, in which the Justice Department wants the company to unlock an iPhone used by an alleged drug dealer. So far, Apple has resisted,” as CNET observed. But if federal officials press forward with litigation, “both sides would have to exchange information and evidence. That’s when Apple could demand that the DOJ explain how it hacked Farook’s iPhone[.]”

According to Reuters, a federal magistrate ruled last month in the Brooklyn case “that he did not have authority to order Apple to disable the security of an iPhone seized during a drug investigation. The Justice Department then appealed to a district court judge.”

“After filing that appeal, U.S. prosecutors notified the magistrate in the San Bernardino case that a third party had demonstrated a new technique which could access the iPhone in question. The Justice Department disclosed the new technique to the judge one day after the demonstration, and then confirmed its success on Monday, according to court filings, though it did not reveal how its solution works.”

Notably, the means whereby the Department of Justice might access the contents of the alleged drug dealer’s cellphone could well differ from those used on Farook’s phone. That’s because “the Brooklyn phone runs an older version of Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS 7, than the phone in San Bernardino, which ran iOS 9,” as Quartz pointed out. “As such, it’s likely that the Brooklyn phone is easier to access. For example, hacking tools can be bought on eBay to unlock some phones running iOS 8 or earlier.”

Edward Snowden recently made headlines by claiming that the FBI lied about needing Apple’s help at the beginning of the controversy because of a relatively easy-to-implement passcode workaround.

Scores of companies threw their weight behind Apple’s effort in court to block the FBI’s bid to unlock the phone. “Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and a parade of other technology companies filed a barrage of court briefs […] aiming to puncture the United States government’s legal arguments against Apple in a case that will test the limits of the authorities’ access to personal data,” CNBC reported. “The extraordinary show of support for Apple from the tech companies, including many rivals, underscores how high the stakes are for the industry with the case, in which the authorities are demanding Apple’s help” to break into the phone.

Federal fury

The Justice Department fought back with a searing brief, saying “Apple should be compelled to help the F.B.I. break into the iPhone and that the company should not be allowed to hide behind what prosecutors said were diversionary tactics in the court of public opinion,” according to the New York Times.

“The fight has been brewing since mid-February, when Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym of the Federal District Court for the Central District of California ordered Apple to create and deploy an alternative operating system that would help law enforcement agents break into the iPhone in the San Bernardino case. Apple publicly opposed the order, igniting a standoff with the F.B.I. and the Justice Department.”

Underscoring the government’s view of the importance of the case, President Obama himself made a point to remark publicly on the controversy, insisting — if obliquely — that national security was imperiled by the precedent Apple would set. “Speaking at the South by Southwest festival in Texas, the president said he could not comment on the legal case in which the Federal Bureau of Investigation is trying to force Apple to allow access to an iPhone linked to San Bernardino shooter Rizwan Farook. But he made clear that despite his commitment to Americans’ privacy and civil liberties, a balance was needed to allow some government intrusion if necessary,” IT News noted.

A tipping point

But not all in government have agreed. Also in Austin, countering the president’s position, was Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Ca., a former tech titan in his own right who chaired the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee until last year. Issa told USA Today the FBI’s decision to push the limits on privacy protections was “a bad decision,” although he credited FBI Director James Comey with making an “honest and forthright” effort to convince Congress of the merits of the Bureau’s case. “The repercussions of creating a digital ‘backdoor’ to the iPhone not only weakens technology, but endangers the civil liberties of individuals, emboldens prosecutors to pursue thousands of similar cases and compromises corporations like Apple overseas, where privacy laws are stricter,” Issa and his allies have cautioned, the paper added.

On the other hand, foreign countries sizing up the U.S. debate have already seen the introduction of proposed measures that would grant their governments sweeping, invasive new authority. “Intelligence agencies and the police could get powers which would allow them to hack into phones under proposed new laws which would force firms to install deliberate security flaws,” the Daily Mail wrote of a new British scheme. “Under the plans, which are currently being considered by Parliament, internet service providers and technology giants like Apple would have to build secret security flaws into mobile phones, tablets and computers which would allow officials to access the devices. The so-called ‘backdoor technology’ would allow police and security agencies to hack into the devices whenever they wished.”

Critics have charged that Apple is more interested in a marketing coup than in customers’ privacy rights. But recent polling revealed that about half of Americans surveyed “support Apple’s decision to resist the government’s demand to unlock the iPhone,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported. “Meanwhile, public trust in government has remained at some of its lowest points in recent history.”

“Obama designated more than 1.8 million acres of California desert for protection with the creation of three national monuments: Castle Mountains, Mojave Trails and Sand to Snow,” the Washington Post reported. “The new monuments will connect three existing sites — Death Valley and Joshua Tree national parks and the Mojave National Preserve — to create the second-largest desert preserve in the world.”

“President Obama has set aside more of America’s lands and waters for conservation protection than any of his predecessors, and he is preparing to do even more before he leaves office next year. The result may be one of the most expansive environmental and historic-preservation legacies in presidential history.”

Obama’s desert monuments marked a victory of sorts for California’s senior senator, who had to turn to the president to accomplish what she could not in Congress. “The designation was requested by U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who for a decade has sought to protect land that wasn’t included in the 1994 California Desert Protection Act. That measure covered nearly 7.6 million acres, elevated Death Valley and Joshua Tree to national park status and created the Mojave National Preserve,” recalled the Los Angeles Times. “Unable to gain momentum on her California Desert Conservation and Recreation Act last year, Feinstein and conservation groups asked Obama to act unilaterally to create the three monuments overlapping biological zones between roughly Palm Springs and the Nevada border.”

Fears of more

Yet the executive action rankled critics — not only among out-of-state Republicans, who have chastised the president’s unilateral measures in the past, but among local California officials. “Utah’s congressional delegation is urging President Barack Obama not to use his powers under the Antiquities Act to designate a national monument on federal lands in San Juan County,” the Moab Sun News reported. “The calls from the state’s four Republican congressmen and two U.S. senators come on the heels of the president’s designation last week of three new national monuments in southern California’s Mojave Desert.”

“The move amplified the Utah delegation’s fears that a 1.9-million-acre Bears Ears National Monument may be next on the president’s agenda. ‘Use of the Antiquities Act … will be met with fierce local opposition and will further polarize federal land-use discussions for years, if not decades,’ the delegation says in a letter to Obama.”

Local divides

Meanwhile, in California, the president’s action triggered the kind of local dismay warned of by the Utah delegation. “San Bernardino County politicians said it could jeopardize a lucrative mining operation in the Castle Mountains and off-highway vehicle recreation areas,” according to the Desert Sun. “In separate written statements, San Bernardino County Supervisors Curt Hagman and Robert Lovingood and Rep. Paul Cook, R-Apple Valley, accused the president of bypassing the legislative process via the Antiquities Act.”

Lovingood, noted the Sun, “said the Castle Mountains gold mine, which sits in the center of the newly designated national monument abutting the California/Nevada border, has the potential to generate more than $225 million in tax revenue and create roughly 300 jobs if scaled up to full production. But under the president’s executive action, it appears there is no mechanism for the National Park Service to issue the necessary permits[.]”

But at least some area locals had thrown their weight behind the new monuments. “Several Latino coalitions participated in the effort to protect the desert areas, including the Council of Mexican Federations, the Latino Conservation Alliance and the faith-based organization Por La Creación,” according to KPCC. Maite Arce, president and CEO of Hispanic Access Foundation, told the station “wide local participation was made possible by the large Latino population in the region.”

“It’s California’s debt and liabilities that are concerning financial analysts, particularly the state’s rapidly growing unfunded retiree health care costs, which grew more than 80 percent over the past decade. California has promised $74 billion more in health and dental benefits to current and retired state workers than the state has put aside,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

Adding to the concern, new reporting rules have cast new light on local debt burdens. Changes issued by the Governmental Accounting Standards Board caused California governments to begin reporting “pension debts differently in their 2015 financial statements, which is becoming a wake-up call,” Reason noted. “Medical costs and other non-pension benefits will be accounted for differently in the 2017-2018 fiscal year. As a result, localities are facing much larger pension debts than previously reported.”

Observers have also had their eye on final developments in the case of one of California’s municipal canaries in the pension coal mine. “The bankrupt city of San Bernardino, California, said in a court filing […] it had reached a tentative agreement with the creditor holding its pension obligation bonds on how the debt would be treated in the city’s plan to exit bankruptcy but did not provide details,” according to Reuters.

Burdening Brown

CalPERS, the fund at the center of the ongoing pensions controversy, remained a sticking point. Its refusal to secure higher servicing payments created “a heavy political lift from Brown,” as the Contra Costa Times wrote in an editorial. “If CalPERS had required higher payments, he could have simply planned for it in his state budget. Without the requirement, he must persuade the Legislature to free the money.” Amid the recession, its funded ratio, the board wrote, “plummeted to 61 percent” in two years. “If that happened today, it would be devastating.”

“CalPERS is especially vulnerable because it assumes it can earn returns of 7.5 percent annually. To try to hit that target, it must make aggressive investments. In other words, it must take risk, which comes with upside potential and downside dangers. The higher the investment target, the greater the exposure in a down market.”

Bond struggles

One of Brown’s would-be replacements in the governor’s mansion, state treasurer John Chiang, has sought to shift expectations around California’s budgetary reliance on bond measures. Bond use has “risen substantially in California, with the state’s reliance on borrowing for infrastructure resulting in 1 of every 2 dollars spent on those projects going to pay interest,” the Chronicle noted, citing figures from the Department of Finance. But although Chiang suggested earlier this month that the state should “rethink” its use of bonds, Chiang has embarked “on a national tour this month aimed at seducing investors with an environmentally friendly investment alternative,” according to the San Jose Mercury News. “Chiang wants to plant a full-fledged green bond market. Individuals and institutions, such as mutual funds and hedge funds, will have the opportunity to invest. The bonds promise to appeal to environmentally minded investors, as well as those looking to diversify portfolios overly dependent on fossil fuels — in case future climate change regulations sprout up.”

But in a sign of the inertia and perverse incentives that critics often associate with entrenched bureaucracies, the bonds have been built to stretch beyond their narrowly tailored confines if given the right kind of tug. “Instead of rules, green bond issuers rely on a set of nonbinding guidelines called the Green Bond Principles, drafted by an international group of issuers and investors,” the Mercury News noted. “The lack of third-party monitoring means issuers can label almost anything a green bond. If the bonds’ popularity outstrips the number of green projects, issuers could have an incentive to label bonds as green, even when they’re not.”

“Under pressure from environmental groups’ lawsuits, the U.S. Forest Service has begun a comprehensive environmental review of Switzerland-based bottled water giant Nestle’s Corp. continuing operations in a San Bernardino Mountain canyon,” the San Bernardino Sun reported. “Since its permit expired, in 1988, Nestle has been drawing what now amounts to millions of gallons of water from the rugged Strawberry Canyon in the San Bernardino Mountains, north of San Bernardino. Under Forest Service regulations, expired special use permits, like what Nestle has, remain in effect until they are either renewed or denied.”

According to the lawsuit filed against Nestle, that policy led to an explicit green light for its unique consumption arrangement. “The Forest Service has allowed pipeline operators to continue transporting water about four miles, from a series of bore holes and tunnels to a storage tank near California 18, without more stringent review required after the original permit was issued in 1976,” the Los Angeles Times observed at the time of the suit’s filing.

Sharp demands

That arrangement incurred the wrath of environmentalists. Even though Nestle’s renewal application is pending — meaning it’s legal for the company to continue its operations — its impact on the state’s ecology amid the current drought became the focus of a sweeping lawsuit, pressing the federal government to take action. “The Forest Service was sued in October by environmental and public interest groups who allege the Swiss-based company is operating its Strawberry Canyon pipeline on a permit that expired in 1988,” the Associated Press noted. “The groups, led by the Center for Biological Diversity, said the prolonged drought in California combined with the water operation is affecting wildlife.” According to the wire, the CBD and other groups “believe species, including Least Bell’s Vireo and California spotted owls, could see their numbers increased with improved water supply, the lawsuit said.”

The CBD counts The Story of Stuff Project and the Courage Campaign Institute among its fellow plaintiffs. Warning that Nestle has siphoned off “between 50m-150m gallons of water each year from a creek in the southern Californian forest to use in its Arrowhead bottled water brand,” the Guardian reported, those groups asked the Forest Service “to immediately turn off the water spigot and conduct a permit review, assessing the environmental impact of Nestlé’s operations.” Courage Campaign environmental director Eddie Kurtz called Nestle’s consumption of “public water” both illegal and immoral, according to the Guardian.

Managing protests

For its part, the Forest Service has sought to placate activist groups while initiating the review process. When pressed by CREDO, a self-styled progressive activist organization, the Forest Service responded that it had cautioned Nestle about the prospect of future restrictions on its water consumption. According to CREDO, the Forest Service indicated that, “should the drought continue, as we all expect it will, the state or local authorities may make further demands for conservation measures from all water users.”

Nestle had the local California media to blame for the initial scrutiny surrounding its arrangement with the Forest Service. “The legal action comes on the heels of an investigation this year by the Desert Sun,” as the Los Angeles Times noted. “Jody Noiron, supervisor for the San Bernardino National Forest, told the paper afterward that re-issuance of the permit would become a priority for the agency.”

After the Sun’s coverage, the story quickly gained steam across the state and the country. Protesters gathered to challenge Nestle face to face, while a nationwide movement to push bottling operations out of California succeeded in causing Starbucks to relocate its sourcing. “But others have continued to bottle water despite the drought. Wal-Mart, for example, still bottles water in California, as do companies at more than 100 other plants that are still licensed to bottle water in the state,” Business Insider noted at the time.