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

By Chris Reed

Jerry Brown’s nonstop self-accolades for his alleged genius in bringing California back to solid ground are rather dubious. But it is with pensions that Brown’s self-congratulation is most incoherent. While he congratulates himself for achieving moderate pension reform via the Legislature last summer, his appointees continue their anti-reform rampage on the state Public Employment Relations Board.

On Tuesday night, the latest PERB outrage arrived with the release of a ruling from a PERB administrative law judge which gives labor unions a leg up in their push to invalidate Proposition B, the unprecedentedly ambitious pension reform measure approved by San Diego voters in a landslide last June. The judge held that state courts should find the measure illegal because city officials should have engaged in collective bargaining with city labor unions before pursuing a ballot initiative, a ruling in keeping with PERB’s emerging view that collective bargaining trumps state law.

Brown appointees go where no bureaucrats have gone before

As I detailed for CalWatchDog.com in September, the radicalization of PERB came as an unexpected consequence of the California Nurses Association’s war with Brown’s predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. The CNA was furious with PERB for preventing illegal strikes at UC hospitals as a tactic to win raises, and the union got Brown to install former CNA counsel M. Suzanne Murphy as PERB’s general counsel, and to appoint union-beholden members to the agency’s governing board.

The result of this turnover has been much more than the CNA getting its way on a new contract. Instead, it’s resulted in a widening of the war on direct democracy from the California Attorney General’s Office, whose Democratic occupants always write dishonest ballot language to undercut initiatives that unions don’t like; and from a previously obscure government bureaucracy:

“In February 2012, PERB’s radical change in course first became apparent when the agency for the first time in California history sought to keep a pending San Diego pension reform ballot measure from going before voters in June. Murphy’s argument held that, because elected officials in San Diego were involved in drafting the measure, it amounted to an attempt to circumvent and thus violate union collective bargaining rights — even though the San Diego City Council had taken a stand against the measure and it had been organized by private groups.

“This argument, if upheld, arguably would set a precedent under which elected officials could never join in ballot petition campaigns to try to force changes in government policies, because such changes would have affected employees, and thus needed to be collectively bargained.”

Dan Borenstein’s recent column underscores another example of Brown’s incoherence on pensions. In his bizarre effort to declare California’s structural deficit as having vanished, the governor simply ignores the vast underfunding of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System. By doing so, he makes the problem more intractable, as Borenstein detailed in his Bay Area News Group op-ed:

“Gov. Jerry Brown’s claim that he balanced his proposed 2013-14 budget ignores that he’s driving the state teacher pension system deeper into debt by shortchanging it at least $4.5 billion.

“Teachers will almost certainly receive retirement payments they have earned. It’s our children, the next generation of taxpayers, who will suffer. They will be stuck with an astronomical bill we should be paying now.”

But at least Brown doesn’t have to stop patting himself on the back if he ignores CalSTRS’ woes.

San Diego city attorney: Real judges will do right thing

As for PERB, San Diego City Attorney Jan Goldsmith predicted in an email Tuesday night that the administrative law judge’s ruling would be seen as a rogue act and wouldn’t hold up in court — a real court, not the PERB kangaroo court.

“We expected it. Barely mentioned are the 120,000 voters who signed petitions to get Prop B on the ballot and had a constitutional right to have it placed on the ballot or the voters who approved it last June,” Goldsmith wrote. “We look forward to returning to the courts where the constitution and the rule of law applies. Recall that PERB filed a lawsuit to stop the city from placing Prop B on the ballot and proceeded to lose three attempts to get an injunction in court; then, PERB dismissed its lawsuit.”

Goldsmith did a good job in an op-ed last summer of exposing the absurdity of the PERB stance:

“Citizen initiatives have been around for over 100 years. Yet never before has any initiative that qualified for the ballot through petition signatures been deemed a ‘sham’ citizen initiative. Governors (including Jerry Brown on his current tax initiative), mayors and other political leaders have regularly supported citizen initiatives and never has that support rendered those citizen initiatives ‘shams.’

“Since 1911, the right to place citizen initiatives on the ballot through voter petitions has been a constitutional right in California reserved by the people to bypass politicians and special interests. This right is not conditioned upon the approval of those special interests and is not something to be bargained over.”

The issue the San Diego city attorney identifies is even bigger than pension reform. It’s likely that the Yale Law School graduate who governs this state understands this.

But Jerry Brown would rather pretend he’s figured out how to make California thrive than acknowledge the undemocratic ways his appointees are behaving at the state Public Employment Relations Board.

By Chris Reed

Arnold Schwarzenegger was such a disappointment as governor that it’s somewhat of a disappointment that the reason the media have turned on him has to do with his personal misconduct, not the bait-and-switch he pulled on California voters. His decision to switch from a libertarian-lite, pro-business governor to the champion of AB 32 and his version of Obamacare was an utter betrayal. But if you want 21st-century Benedict Arnold to take some deserved abuse, even if it is for other sins, then you’ll enjoy the cattiness and bile of this Newsweek article by Lawrence Leamer, who wrote a highly favorable biography of Arnold after his election as governor:

I hadn’t seen Schwarzenegger since 2004, when I was researching a biography about him, Fantastic. As I greeted him at Caffé Roma in Beverly Hills, I saw a man who appears a diminutive, action-toy version of the movie and bodybuilding Arnold. He is devoid of his once-bulging muscles, and his face looks as if a master taxidermist has been at work. In the ’80s, you would often find Schwarzenegger at his special table in the back of the restaurant, schmoozing with his bodybuilding buddies, smoking a stogie and commenting authoritatively on the breasts and buttocks of women who walked by. Schwarzenegger is still a fixture at Caffé Roma, dropping in after having his hair tinted at a salon behind it. But times have changed. When the scandal broke, a woman shouted “pig” as he walked to his favorite table, says a longtime friend of his. Schwarzenegger has said that he did not hear the remark. But he has heard of the widespread public disgust, especially among women, at the betrayal of his wife in such a spectacularly sordid fashion.

More here.

In the government’s obsessive project to treat us all like prison inmates, it has destroyed the great cars America once produced. Except for pollution controls — which were done stupidly anyway — all government controls on cars amount to tyranny.

If I want to drive in a dangerous car, what business is it of theirs?

It’s especially idiotic because the government lets people ride on motorcycles. Even with a helmet, bike riders are completely unprotected in an accident. By contrast, even someone in an old 1960s rust-bucket, before many modern safety devices were imposed, is far better protected.

Then there’s the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards that the oppressor Obama raised to 35 mpg. Hey, if I want to buy a huge gas-guzzling dinosaur V-8 and pour gas into it at 8 mpg, that’s my business.

The whole “oil shortage” is a lot of slick government hucksterism. There never was an “energy crisis” in the 1970s. What happened was that the crook Nixon took us off the gold standard in 1971. The unconstitutional inflationists at the Federal Reserve Board then debased the dollar, driving up the price of everything, including gas.

Gas Price DROPPED

I remember when I first got my license in 1971 when I was 16 the price of a gallon of gas in Detroit was 31 cents. The price of gold, before Tricky Dick’s thievery, was $35 an ounce.

Today, the gold price is $1,658 an ounce. So, that’s 47 times as much as in 1971.

However, gas today now is $3.53 a gallon. That’s only 11 times as much as the 31 cents of 1971.

If gas had risen along with the price of gold, it would cost $17 a gallon. But capitalism has actually improved production and refining methods, so the real price has dropped to a fraction of what it was.

There is no gas crisis. There is no oil crisis. There is only a government crisis.

Enviro-extremists like Obama, Al Gore, Schwarzenegger and Jerry Brown are intent on controlling, and ruining, our lives. They want to shove us out of our cars and into mass transit and high-rises.

We need to resist. Except for exhaust regulations — which affect the air everybody breathes — all auto regulations should be abolished.

Then we’ll get great cars again like this 1967 Shelby GT500E Super Snake Eleanor. Listen to that engine roar when she peels out!

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Jan. 21, 2012