Last year 19 of California’s 55 members of the U.S. Congress drew pensions from a state-backed public retirement plan, according to a CalWatchdog.com analysis of financial disclosures for the year 2013.

Payments from 2013 – the last reported year available – came from municipal, education and state pension funds and ranged from annual payouts of $3,800 to $70,000. Four members take payments from two or more public pension funds.

The top recipient was Rep. Lois Capps, who collected a total of $70,049 in 2013 – $20,615 from the California State Teachers Retirement System and $49,434 from the University of California Retirement System.

The 77-year-old lawmaker from Santa Barbara is a former instructor at Santa Barbara City College. Capps has been receiving the dual pensions since 1998, when she first was elected.

Members of Congress receive a salary of $174,000. They are not prohibited from taking their taxpayer-subsidized retirement while serving in Washington.

Taking a state pension while serving in Congress is hardly noticed “because it happens in so many different layers that people aren’t tracking it,” said Steve Ellis, vice president for the Washington D.C.-based Taxpayers for Common Sense.

“And besides, the people who are getting this kind of information are the people who would be getting these payments in the future.”

He added that the system has no rules prohibiting what detractors call “double-dipping.”

“All of us are paying two sets of employees, one working and one retired,” Ellis said.

Executive benefits

But pensions are part of the compensation package, like any job in the private sector, insists Steve Maviglio, a California political consultant who represents unions that back public pensions.

“It’s like an executive who hops from one job to another,” Maviglio said. “Should they have to give up the benefits from a previous job?”

Besides, he said, “We’re trying to attract the best and the brightest to be public servants and if they are forced to give up the benefits they’ve earned at a previous job, it would kill that incentive [to serve].”

In addition to the 19 pensioners in the state’s Washington delegation, nine members note on their disclosures that they hold an interest in a public pension but are not yet taking the money.

The pension funds tapped include the County of San Mateo, which paid Rep. Anna Eshoo $12,020 for her time on the board of supervisors from 1982 to 1992; and Marin County, where Sen. Barbara Boxer drew $4,456 for serving on the county board of supervisors from 1976 to 1982. Boxer has announced her retirement beginning in Jan. 2017.

Rep. Scott Peters, 56, who served on the San Diego City Council from 2000 to 2008, noted on his disclosure that he received a $20,703 annual pension from the San Diego City Employees’ Retirement System, but donated it to the San Diego Library Department.

CalPERS and CalSTRS

The majority of the pension draws came from the state’s California Public Employees’ Retirement System, which administers the Legislators’ Retirement System. CalPERS covers members of the statehouse first elected prior to Nov. 1990, when voters passed Proposition 140. The initiative canceled pensions for future legislators and imposed term limits. The California Public Employees’ Pension Reform Act of 2013 took effect in January 2013 and greatly altered the plan, as well as major educator pension arrangements.

The California State Teachers Retirement System also is a major provider of pension income for U.S. lawmakers. And some, such as Rep. Michael Honda, get something from both sources.

Honda, 73, reported income of $38,135 from CalSTRS and $13,393 from CalPERS, plus $12,754 from the teacher system as part of a deceased-spouse family allowance.

Still others have not yet tapped their pension funds and report the accrued benefits as unearned income or an asset. Those funds are allowed to be reported in a broad range as the asset is seen with the potential for growth or reduction.

Rep. Judy Chu reports her pension with CalSTRS has a value of between $100,001 and $250,000 and her CalPERS fund between $1,001 and $15,000.

Chu, 61, served on the Monterey Park City Council and taught in the Los Angeles Community College District.

Rep. Tony Cardenas reported he will receive a pension from the city of Los Angeles when he turns 55, in 2018. His payout, he noted, is an “undetermined amount.”

Some members of the California delegation have seen their payments grow over the years at a rate outpacing standard interest returns for their funds.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s $55,690 pension payout in 2013 from her days as a member of the Board of Supervisors and mayor of San Francisco has grown 36 percent since 2002, when she collected $40,929. Her draw is based on 18 years of work ending in 1988. Her 2002 pension pay was equal to between $53,000 and $62,500 in 2013, according to a relative-worth calculation.

Feinstein, 81, first was elected to San Francisco city office in 1969.

Then there are the benefits that are too good to give up.

Even though federal lawmakers are privy to some generous health insurance, including dental care, former Rep. Lynn Woolsey, who retired in 2013 after 20 years in Congress, reported she still carried her vision and dental care from her days as a member of the Petaluma City Council from 1984 to 1993.

Steve Miller can be reached at: 517-775-9952 and avalanche50@hotmail.com. His website is: http://avalanche50.com/.

But even if the bill didn’t face certain drowning in the U.S. Senate, President Obama has pledged to veto it. So drought relief floats into 2015, when Republicans will add to their control of the House the control of the Senate.

What happened? Acrimony between Democrats and Republicans in the House poisoned the well in the Senate. Every California Democrat in the House whose district includes parts of the Delta region voted to reject the bill. As the Sacramento Bee reported, “These Democrats say they were cut out from the negotiations. At one point, Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., said House Republicans refused to brief California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer when she insisted on inviting House Democrats.”

Behind closed doors earlier this year, Feinstein secretly had carried out painstaking negotiations with California’s Republican delegation to the House of Representatives. Last month, Democrats and environmental activists pushed Feinstein to abandon her own water bill.

Last-minute labors

Despite the problems in the Senate and over the  objections of environmentalists, California Republicans introduced the California Emergency Drought Relief Act of 2014. It was sponsored by Rep. David Valadao of Hanford, who was joined by Rep. Doug LaMalfa of Redding, Rep. Ken Calvert of Riverside and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield. McCarthy has made the bill a top priority as the 2014 legislative session hastened to a close.

The bill cleared the minimum bar for bipartisanship by including Rep. Jim Costa, D-Fresno, among its co-sponsors.

But Feinstein’s troubles with Democrats drowned out bipartisanship. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., has forcefully condemned the new bill. According to KPCC:

“LaMalfa says the legislation reflects agreements on particular issues they reached with Senator Feinstein.

“‘Some of our other Senators are standing in the way of that,’ says LaMalfa, a reference to Boxer, who heads the Senate environment committee.”

But Feinstein will be expected by Democrats to use her power in the Senate to sink the House bill — even though it includes language from the draft legislation she negotiated with the California Republicans in the first place.

Hoping to navigate the controversy without further embarrassment, Feinstein was restrained in her comments. “It’s my hope that we’ll reach agreement on legislation that can pass both the House and the Senate and enact a bill that moves water to Californians suffering from the drought and helps all of the state while not waiving environmental protections,” she said, according to the Bee.

As the San Francisco Chronicle observed, however, Feinstein made clear she favored acting quickly because of her diminished clout in next year’s Congress, when Democrats switch from majority to minority status.

Remarkably, Sen. Boxer had co-sponsored with Feinstein the Senate bill that became the basis of Feinstein’s negotiations with California’s House Republicans. But environmentalists and other liberal activists will find it harder to criticize Feinstein or Boxer as their legislative influence fades.

Troubled waters

For Republicans, that has put drought relief on the agenda for 2015.

Obama likely will be inclined to veto a bill next year as well. But he will face an emboldened Republican majority and a weakened delegation of California Democrats.

He also will have much on his agenda in other areas over which to battle Republicans: the budget, taxes, immigration, wars and crime.

As President Clinton  showed when Republicans took control of Congress in 1995, sometimes it’s easier for a president to cut deals with the other party when it’s in the majority, than to deal with intramural struggles within his own party.

Meanwhile, 3,000 miles from Washington, despite the recent rains, California still needs drought relief.

After working all year with Republicans for a compromise, this week Feinstein encountered surprise opposition from her own political base. In fact, her very willingness to work with Senate Republicans prompted cries from liberals and environmentalists that her bill would benefit corporations more than drought-stricken Californians.

As the left-leaning Mother Jones magazine reported, Feinstein’s bill concerned “management of the Central Valley Project, a federally owned irrigation system that moves water from California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range to farmland in the state’s main growing region, the Central Valley.” There, water flows controlled by the federal government — not Sacramento — have become essential interests to California’s large almond and pistachio growers.

As California’s drought has persisted, the size of their crop has attracted the attention of observers around the country and the world: 82 percent of earth’s almonds are grown in the Golden State, along with 98 percent of America’s pistachios. With foreign demand for California nuts rising, any substantial reduction in output would not only cause economic problems in the U.S.; it would reverberate overseas as well.

A secret saga

As Mother Jones further reported, political jockeying over federally controlled California water has been playing out all year in Washington, D.C. California Republicans in Congress sought to roll back relatively tight federal requirements on usage, drawing fire from Gov. Jerry Brown and a vow from president Barack Obama of a veto.

Feinstein shook up the predictable partisan battle lines, however, when she entered into careful and quiet negotiations with Central Valley Republicans in the House of Representatives. She recognized their constituents — the growers single-handedly propping up large sectors of the global nut market — were key to any federal reorganization of California water use. She then sidestepped largely Democratic representatives in San Joaquin Delta districts.

The outcry from those House members was summed up by Rep. John Garamendi, D-Walnut Grove, who said Feinstein’s approach was “wrong” and “not the way to do this.”

Quickly, Feinstein’s controlled negotiations became a political problem. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported, “confidential drafts” of her legislation “leaked out last week,” prompting alarm among her Senate colleagues, according to unnamed Democratic lawmakers. Making matters worse, “Bay Area members, along with fishing and environmental groups, began putting pressure on” her Democratic colleague from California, Sen. Barbara Boxer, to intervene. “They feared that Feinstein was trying to rush through legislation they had not seen and which had not been subjected to committee scrutiny.”

An anonymous Republican source told the Chronicle that Feinstein’s response — yanking the bill — spread shock through GOP negotiators. “We were 99 percent there,” the source said. “Out of the blue, members started receiving calls” from Feinstein explaining the deal was dead and negotiations were over.

According to the Chronicle, Feinstein will present a new bill in January — “under ‘regular order,’ which involves an open committee process and public debate.” By then, Feinstein will be in the minority party as Republicans take over control of the Senate after their Nov. 4 electoral victories.

Richard Bloom

As if the water wars weren’t enough, Feinstein was confronted with indirect criticism from some fellow Democrats over her husband, Richard Bloom, a businessman and regent for the University of California.

In the fracas over a tuition hike supported by UC President Janet Napolitano, Newsweek reported, Bloom took the side of fellow regents who believed that “paying faculty and executives higher salaries is essential to competing with elite private universities for talent.”

That provoked the fury of Brown, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. “I want to point out that you run an investment banking industry and this is a public university,” Brown told Bloom. “This is not Wall Street. This is the University of California. The public university has as its mission public service.”

Nonetheless, the tuition hikes went through on a 14-7 vote of the regents. But as CalWatchdog.com reported, Brown is resourceful and the intramural Democratic tuition battle is far from over.

Losing Democratic majority status in the Senate; having her water bill fall through; a Brown-Bloom rift over tuition. The next year looks to be nothing but headaches for California’s long-serving senior senator.

Although California’s congressional Democrats have made a substantial mark on politics, their vigor has run up against one obstacle that even popularity can’t remove: Age. Sen. Barbara Boxer and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi both turned 74 years old; Sen. Dianne Feinstein turned 81.

Traditionally, younger legislative leaders have not had to worry much about unfavorable election cycles that leave them in office. For Boxer, Feinstein and Pelosi, however, their decades in office have left little time to wait for Democrats to recover Congress.

As the San Francisco Chronicle reported, while Pelosi has determined to press on as House Democratic leader, Boxer and Feinstein must both surrender influential positions they have likely lost the opportunity to recover. Boxer has lost her control of the Environment and Public Works Committee.

Even more important, Feinstein has had to surrender her control of the Intelligence Committee. Although some Republicans, such as Sen. Rand Paul, have led observers to think Feinstein’s interest in oversight of the CIA and other agencies will be maintained or even expanded, the loss of her prominence has reminded Democrats that the generational turnover created by this month’s GOP wave could well be permanent.

Eyeing the door

California’s two senators have also encountered an unaccustomed shift in public opinion. Boxer has intensified suspicion that she will retire instead of seek re-election in 2016. Recently, according to the Chronicle, “she told reporters that she has served half her Senate career in the minority and half in the majority, and learned that ‘I really like the majority much better. Much, much better.'”

Boxer did not cite any polls, but her remarks underscore that most Californians have begun to consider it’s time for fresh representation. In new polling conducted by USC Dornsife and the Los Angeles Times, in-state voters have indicated that Feinstein’s future is also at stake.

According to the Times, nearly 60 percent of registered voters preferred that both senators be replaced next time around, saying California “would be better off with new candidates for the two seats.” Perhaps predictably, a preponderance of respondents who identified themselves as Republicans agreed — almost 80 percent.

“But even many Democrats said it was time for new representation,” reported the Times, with 44 percent preferring new candidates — more than the 43 percent that favored Boxer and Feinstein again.

A new playing field

Few political analysts suggested that Boxer, Feinstein or Pelosi have become politically weak. Pelosi’s fundraising prowess and the established electoral advantage of California’s senators would be too daunting to overcome even for a Democratic primary challenger. Nevertheless, more plausible candidates from both parties could emerge over the next year if and when it becomes clear they would run for open seats.

Meanwhile, congressional Democrats have gone out of their way to indicate a willingness to work constructively in the new GOP-led political landscape. Feinstein recently pronounced her respect for incoming Intelligence Committee chair Richard Burr, R-N.C.

And Boxer was able to work with her replacement, James Inhofe, R-Okla., on a previous transportation bill, according to Southern California Public Radio.

With GOP Rep. Kevin McCarthy set to return as House majority leader, California Democrats have set their hopes on playing a role in legislation by keeping attention focused on statewide issues that matter to Washington.

Fast-forward to 2013 and “Progressive” has a new meaning in California. “Progressives” are desperately trying to re-monopolize energy, workplace, consumer, healthcare and poultry farming industries to advance the state’s environmental laws.

The U.S. states and Congress are beginning to push back against California’s new “landmark” laws that mainly use environmentalism to trump the Interstate Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution and anti-trust and consumer protection laws. The Interstate Commerce Clause gives Congress the complete power to regulate trade among the states, giving America a vast free-trade zone that has been essential to our prosperity.

Congress is trying to counter California’s use of environmentalism as way to re-legitimate monopolization.

Green Chemistry Law as covert CA bailout bill

The Green Chemistry initiative is winding its way through the California Legislature in Senate Bill 498, sponsored by state Sen. Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens, which would further regulate toxic chemicals; and in Assembly Bill 597, by Assemblyman Brian Dahle, R-Shasta, which would redefine all chemicals as hazardous until approved by the state.  Once enacted, the Green Chemistry Law would create a trade barrier for out-of-state products that did not conform to California’s chemical standards.

The Green Chemistry Initiative is a bureaucratic process requiring every maker of chemical products to submit data on chemicals in their products to the California Department of Toxic Substances Control. Green chemistry is the “design of chemical products and processes that reduce or eliminate the use and generation of hazardous substances.”  California’s Green Chemistry Law would usurp the federal regulation of chemical substances by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration, and effectively would replace California’s existing Proposition 65.

To counter California’s new Green Chemistry Law, the Chemical Safety Improvement Act,  S. 1009, has been introduced by U.S. Senators David Vitter, R-La., and Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J. It’s a bipartisan bill by a coalition of states to prevent California from erecting trade barriers to their products in the name of protecting health.

Both Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and California Attorney General Kamela Harris, are opposed to S. 1009.

Proposition 2 let the fox in the henhouse

The law that spearheaded California’s re-monopolization of its industries was Proposition 2, the Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act of 2008, which created a virtual monopoly for in-state poultry operators.

This has been followed by a host of other re-monopolization efforts. The most notable has been the 33 percent mandate for green power created under AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006; and by a requirement signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown in 2011. AB 32 produced the quarterly “cap-and-trade” auctions of greenhouse gases that the state has been running since last November.

AB 32 erected new Smoot-Hawley Act-like trade barriers against imported power from other states. That’s because one aim of AB 32, promoting the growth of green industries in California, is thwarted if those industries grow in other states with fewer regulations and taxes than California.

Recently, a federal judge decided that states cannot erect trade barriers to out-of-state green power without violating the Interstate Commerce Clause. The ruling severely limits AB 32’s impact.

But California already has ingeniously erected covert trade barriers against out-of-state green power by:

1. Indirectly routing new power line routes to carry power only from wind and solar farms situated in California’s desert;
2. Imposing a “smart grid” that eliminates energy providers having to buy imported power on the spot market;
3. Deregulating environmental laws so that green power from surrounding states that do not have environmental laws do not have an advantage over California; and
4. Using only direct current (DC) power lines such as used by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to keep alternating current electricity from entering its power lines.

All of the above would not have been possible without the California Legislature using its environmental laws to trump federal interstate commerce and antitrust laws. But that soon could end if S. 1009 passes in the U.S. Congress.

By Wayne Lusvardi

For some time environmentalists and have been telling fish stories that Central Valley farmers are dodging timely repayment of the costs to build the massive Central Valley Project.  But it is the fish, not the farmers, that are not paying their fair share of the costs of the massive Central Valley Water Project.

The CVP was built in the 1930’s at a cost of $1.3 billion. The CVP is not the same as the California State Water Project, which was built five decades ago through state bonds.

To give an idea of the magnitude of the CVP, it delivers about 6 million acre-feet of irrigation water to about 3 million acres of farmland in the central San Joaquin Valley.  By comparison, the State Water Project supplies only about 1 million acre-feet of water to farmers.

The CVP also delivers water to cities and for wildlife refuges.

CVP was Depression Era Project

In the 1930s Great Depression Era, the federal government built the Central Valley Project when California was broke.  The federal government had to take over the state water plan to stimulate the agricultural economy and bail out California.  The federal government built the separate CVP water system mostly to supply water to farmers, and to reduce disputes between farms and cities.

But with the rise of environmentalism in the 1990s, farm water began to be diverted to “wildlife refuges.” The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation reports that there were no deficiencies in water deliveries for farms until the 1990s.  The CVP carries water to the Sacramento Delta, which is pending a massive re-engineering called the Bay Delta Conservation Plan. 

The enacting Reclamation Law for the CVP required farmers to repay only the principal amount of the bonds, not interest, as long as they met the 960-acre limitation (1.2 square miles). Large corporations don’t get most of the water subsidies from the CVP. Individuals or families own 80 percent of California’s 64,000 farms.

The only water subsidy small farmers receive is the foregone interest on the bonds. Large corporate farms must pay their share of the full cost of the CVP, including interest, to receive their CVP water allocations.

CVP repayment audit

Congress ordered an audit of repayment for the costs of the CVP by farmers, which was completed in March 2013.  The audit, titled Central Valley Project California: Repayment Status and Payoff, indicated the bonds have 18 years remaining until repayment in 2030. But repayments are not keeping up with the repayment schedule due to the variability of water deliveries needed to generate agricultural product sales to meet contractual payments.

In 2011, CVP water diverted for wildlife refuges only amounted to 6.5 percent of total CVP water deliveries (388,488 out of 5,886,610 acre-feet of water). But it is apparently large water users that are being disproportionately hit with reductions in water deliveries, resulting in repayments lagging behind schedule.  As the audit report of the Office of the U.S. Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Interior states:

“To identify why repayment progress was not satisfactory, we reviewed water rate calculations and payment information for four irrigation contractors. We determined that for the 3-year period from 2008 to 2010, actual water delivered to these contractors was only 41 percent of estimated water deliveries used to calculate their contract water rate. The variance in water deliveries resulted in a $45 million shortfall in the contractors’ repayment of capital costs that USBR must recover in future years through rate increases. In the case of one contractor, we estimated that by 2030, their CVP water rate could more than double if current trends continue” (last paragraph on page 6). 

Contrary to the notion that large corporate farms are receiving larger farm water subsidies, their CVP payments face the prospect of doubling.

Farmers can fish, but fish can’t farm

In 2009, U.S. Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, both California Democrats, snuck their $1 billion San Joaquin River Restoration Project bill through Congress as a rider to the larger Omnibus Public Lands Bill (H.R. 146).  However, this rider bill only funded initial research costs and not implementation.  To fund implementation, the Feinstein-Boxer bill proposed to partly fund the costs of the river restoration project by accelerating the repayment of CVP project costs on the backs of Friant water users.

The Friant Water Authority depends on CVP water from the Friant Dam near Fresno and Madera Counties.

However, since coming back into the majority in 2011, Republicans in the House of Representatives have blocked Congressional funding of the San Joaquin River Restoration Project.

The bottom line to the fish story about farmers reneging on timely repayment of CVP costs is that fish don’t have any money to make payments, but farmers do.  If Congress wants farmers to pay more to repay CVP costs on schedule, all it has to do is to quit reducing water deliveries to Central Valley farmers. Then farmers will pay for river restoration projects jobs programs.

Congress created this problem and also has the solutions in its own hands. To solve the problem of slow CVP payments, politicians and environmentalists first need to stop making up fish stories about how farmers are reneging on their CVP payments.

Editor’s note: For clarity, this article has been modified to include an excerpt from the letter by Robert Pyke. 

June 11, 2012

By Wayne Lusvardi

Should we save the endangered red herring fish in California’s San Joaquin River?

The question is meant to fool you.  Herring is a saltwater fish not found off the coast of California or in the fresh waters of the San Joaquin River.

A red herring is a fish that has a reddish color after being been dried and smoked.  It has such a foul smell that in Hollywood movies red herrings were used by escaped jailbirds to mislead hound dogs that were tracking them. The term “red herring” today is used to describe anything that is misleading or distracting from the central issue.

And that is what the issue about restoring Chinook salmon in California’s San Joaquin River is all about: a red herring meant to draw attention away from the central issue about the sham restoration of the San Joaquin River.

The San Joaquin is Central California’s largest river. It starts in the Sierra Nevada mountain range, flows through the San Joaquin Valley, then ultimately into the San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean. It flows through or near Clovis, Fresno, Madera, Turlock, Modesto, Stockton and the Sacramento Delta on its way to the Bay. It is heavily dammed to prevent flooding in the Central Valley. The river has not flowed naturally since the Friant Dam was built in the 1940s.  Its flows have been so drastically reduced to prevent the Delta from becoming a periodic “inland sea” that salmon no longer exist in the river.

Rep. Denham Delays Restoring Salmon in San Joaquin River

On June 5, the U.S. House of Representatives approved an amendment by U.S. Congressman Jeff Denham, R-Turlock, to H.R. 5325, the Energy and Water Related Agencies Appropriation Act of 2013. It would prohibit the premature introduction of salmon into an inadequate San Joaquin River system.

Without full restoration of the flows of the river, the salmon could not migrate from the ocean to upstream spawning pools.

Blogger Doug Obegi at the National Resources Defense Council’s Switchboard website seized on the House’s action to accuse Denham of trying to undo the court approved settlement to restore the San Joaquin River for salmon runs.

As Mike Wade of the Farm Water Coalition responded:

“[Obegi’s] criticism of Rep. Denham’s amendment and claiming the SJR Exchange Contractors are reneging on the river restoration settlement are efforts to mislead public opinion without providing all of the facts. The restoration agreement provided protection for third parties along the river, including farmers within the Exchange Contractors’ region. Past efforts have already seen these farmers suffer from undue seepage problems caused by high water releases into the river. The agreement also called for multiple construction projects and it was acknowledged that early introduction of salmon a year or two before the completion of the projects might take place; but none of the necessary construction projects needed for a successful fish passage have begun. It could be 5-10 years or more to reach completion of the Phase 1 projects once construction begins, depending on funding. Why introduce salmon that are listed as endangered that stand no chance of reaching the ocean? 

There is not much to be shown for the $100 million already expended for the restoration. Those groups pushing for the salmon introduction insisted that the restoration effort could be accomplished for $250 million. It is readily recognized that this number will fall far short of the amount required. Now is not the time to compound this oversight with efforts such as early introduction of salmon that serve no purpose.” 

Thus far, $70 million has been spent on San Joaquin River restoration mainly on environmental studies with nothing to show for it. No physical improvements have been made to bring about restored salmon runs in the San Joaquin River.  That’s $70 million that might as well have been flushed down the proverbial toilet to run to the sea.

This is one reason why California has spent $18.7 billion on five water bonds (Propositions 12, 13, 40, 50 and 84) since 2000 and has no added water to show for it.  Instead, the bond monies have gone for open space acquisitions, greenscaping and environmental studies around upscale residential enclaves.

Using the “red herring” distraction of alleged obstructionism by Denham, Obegi is trying to shift the public’s attention away from the squandering of public funds on environmental studies with nothing to show for it.

Where is Water for River Restoration Coming From?

This begs the question: where is the water for restoring salmon runs in the San Joaquin River coming from?  It is coming from U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein’s H.R. 146, the San Joaquin River Restoration Act, sponsored by Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J. It was passed as part of the Omnibus Lands Act of 2009 when Democrats had a supermajority in Congress and the presidency.

Feinstein’s bill took contracted water from Central Valley farmers to restore salmon runs along the San Joaquin River.  It also hiked federal water contract rates for farmers to pay for the restoration. And it subjected farmers to paying environmental mitigations to commercial fishing, recreational and real estate development interests in Northern California when their water contracts are due.  The farmers not only had water taken from them, but would have to pay for a gigantic $1 billion redevelopment scheme for the San Joaquin River cloaked as a salmon restoration project.

After Republicans took back control of the House in 2010, Republican Rep. Devin Nunes of Tulare authored H.R. 1837, the San Joaquin Valley Water Reliability Act, to repeal Feinstein’s water grab.  H.R. 1837 was folded into Utah Senator Orrin Hatch’s “The West Act,” which has been blocked in the U.S. Senate by Feinstein and Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.

This is the problem of not obtaining true “consent of the governed” — in this case, those who have to pay for such schemes; or of not relying on voluntary market transactions.  Without voluntary consent of those taxed or a market transaction, what happens is an endless “water war.”  This is tragic, as an engineer has recently revealed that the Sacramento Delta has too much water in wet years.

Northern Cal Water in Wet Years

Robert Pyke, a geological engineer, recently wrote an interesting letter to Ken Salazar, the secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior, and John Laird, the secretary of the California Natural Resources Agency. Pyke wrote:

“the inherent variability in precipitation in Northern California has not been addressed in the [Bay Delta Conservation Plan] to date. I know that they now talk about taking more water in wet winters and less water in dry winters but that is just talk without there being any mechanism to actually accomplish this. When I met recently with Secretary Laird and suggested that what was needed was a plumbing system that allowed the extraction of up to 8-10 million acre feet in wet winters to make up for the fact that you can’t take more than 2-4 million acre feet in dry winters, he said that he had never heard anyone suggest that previously. Maybe so, but that is indicative of a problem.”

Now, 8 to 10 million acre-feet excess water in wet winters is enough water to serve 8 million urban people per year over a five-year drought; or irrigate 533,000 acres of farmland per year over a five-year dry spell.

But the present conveyance system, the California Aqueduct, cannot take more than 2 to 4 million acre-feet per year.  Thus, there is need of a new, larger conveyance system — a so-called Peripheral Canal or Delta Tunnels — to convey the excess water out of the Delta during wet years, to farmers and cities which then can store it dry-year usage.

By taking the excess water during wet years from the Delta, the threat of flooding and of an earthquake breaching heavily flooded levees would be reduced.

So environmentalists continue to shake down farmers in the Central Valley for contracted water and higher water rates to pay for a $1 billion water-related redevelopment scheme along the San Joaquin River.  But they are also opposed to the completion of a Peripheral Canal or Tunnel system that would provide farmers with more water for banking in local groundwater basins during wet years for use in dry years.  Northern Californians and environmentalists want to eat their water cake and have it too!  And they are opposed to any water for farmers and cities in return.

Then they have the nerve to call elected representatives of farming districts “obstructionists” to a one-sided so-called court “settlement” mandating the restoration of the San Joaquin River.

Bad Water Law

As Judge M. Smith wrote in the dissenting opinion in a June 1, 2012 9th Circuit Court of Appeals case, Karuk Indian Tribe vs. U.S. Forest Service, Central Valley farmers will suffer from the impact of “extremist” environmental decisions.  Smith pointed out that, because judges are unelected, they should be limited to interpreting environmental law, not creating de facto new legislation for which they are unaccountable to anybody (see pages 6126-6127 of the case).

Welcome to the wonderful world of California’s water wars, where water flows to the San Joaquin River are to be restored for a fictional endangered Red Herring fish that is a ruse for a $1 billion river-related redevelopment scheme and jobs program for environmentalists.  Environmental disputes are almost never really about preserving some fish or ecological habitat.  They are about wealth effects created from water-related redevelopment for commercial fishing, recreation and tourist lodging and real estate development to be handed out to the politically connected.