U.S./Mexico water negotiations closely watched

Good morning. Happy Hump Day. A deal between the U.S. and Mexico on how to apportion Colorado River water in drought conditions expires next year and negotiators are in overdrive to renew the pact before President Barack Obama leaves office on Jan. 20.

The talks are being closely watched by California officials. The Golden State relies heavily on Colorado River water, with an entitlement to 4.4 million acre-feet a year. That’s enough to supply nearly 9 million households, though a big chunk of the supply is used to irrigate the hundreds of square miles of agricultural fields in Imperial County (pictured) and the Coachella Valley.

Why the rush? Because U.S. and Mexican officials believe a new deal is crucial to preserving fragile Colorado River supplies. 

CalWatchdog has more. 

In other news:

• “California officials are pushing back on SEIU Local 1000’s plans for a one-day strike next week, warning employees that they could be subject to disciplinary action if they participate in what the state regards as an unlawful walkout,” writes The Sacramento Bee.

• “The state Supreme Court last week agreed to hear an appeal of a groundbreaking ruling that allows cuts in the pensions earned by current state and local government workers, including judges,” reports Capitol Weekly. 

• “A San Francisco supervisor is proposing more money for lawyers to defend immigrants who face possible deportation under a Trump administration. KCBS radio reports that San Francisco Supervisor David Campos will introduce legislation Tuesday setting aside $5 million from the city’s budget to help pay for lawyers to represent people in deportation proceedings.” The Los Angeles Times/Associated Press has more. 

• And in case you missed it: What a Democratic supermajority in the Legislature in the upcoming session may mean for the state. CalWatchdog has more. 

Legislature:

• Gone till December.

Gov. Brown:

• No public events announced. 

Tips: matt@calwatchdog.com

Follow us: @calwatchdog @mflemingterp

New follower: @richardsstarr

On Friday

According to the Stockton Record, Judge Chang “granted a temporary restraining order preventing the State Water Resources Control Board from ‘taking any action’ against the West Side Irrigation District.” She wrote in her ruling that the curtailment letters “including the requirement that recipients sign a compliance certification confirming cessation of diversion, result in a taking of petitioners’ property rights without a pre-deprivation hearing.”

In addition, the 2015 curtailment letters were found to be “coercive in nature and go beyond the ‘informational’ purpose” that the board claimed.

The Associated press previously reported that the SWRCB “issued the curtailment notice on June 12 to 114 water users who hold rights dating back to 1903 and have nearly ironclad rights to take water from rivers and streams.” The last time senior water rights holders were told to stop pumping and irrigating from rivers was during a drought in the 1970s.

Stockton attorney Steve Herum, who represents a number of other water districts that also received water curtailment notices, said of the ruling, “It’s a complete victory.”

But the SWRCB issued a response to the ruling, alleging that the order “is limited to the parties in this case.”

“While the order finds fault with the language of the notice, the order states: ‘To be clear, [the Water Board and its staff] are free to exercise their statutory authority to enforce the Water Code as to any water user, including these Petitioners, if it deems them to be in violation of any provisions of the Water Code, so long as the bases for said action are not the Curtailment Letters.’

 

“Pursuant to section 1052 of the Water Code, unauthorized diversions during the drought emergency are subject to enhanced penalties of up to $1,000 per day and $2,500 per acre-foot of water diverted. Diversion of water when no water is available pursuant to a diverter’s water right constitutes an unauthorized diversion and a trespass under Water Code section 1052.  Any such enforcement action would occur only after notice and an opportunity for hearing pursuant to the Water Code.  This has been the consistent position of the State Water Board staff, and was specifically identified in the curtailment notices sent in May and June.”

Herum, however, told the Stockton Record that all water curtailment notices sent to water users are now “equally unconstitutional” under the ruling.

Draft Trailer Bill 807 would expand the State Water Resources Control Board’s authority by allowing it to impose operating fees paid by public water systems. The state board would be required to adopt, by emergency regulation, “a fee schedule, to be paid annually by each public water system for the purpose of reimbursing the state board for specified activities.” The bill goes on to require the state board to also “set the total amount of revenue collected through the fee schedule to be equal to the amount appropriated by the Legislature.”

According to analysis from the Association of California Water Agencies, these changes “would repeal most of the existing fee program, including safeguards in existing law, and authorize adoption of a new fee schedule by emergency regulation.” Under existing law, fees for large water systems are determined by actual costs incurred in administering the program, such as a fee-for-service model.

ACWA notes the proposed trailer bill “would not require fees to be based on actual costs.” In fact, the new language “would remove the existing statutory cap on the base total for the fees and the existing cap on annual increases.” These additional fees charged to water agencies will likely be passed on as costs to ratepayers.

In a letter addressed to the members of the California state Senate and Assembly, ACWA and a number of other local water-regulating entities expressed their reservations about the language in TB807:

“The proposed trailer bill language, which would repeal most of the existing fee program, including safeguards in existing law, without sufficient financial context and authorize the adoption of a new fee schedule by emergency regulation is in stark contrast to the commitment of increased transparency and public participation as pledged to the water community when the Program was transferred last year to the SWRCB. …

 

“We have significant concerns related to the current language. Not only does the proposed emergency regulatory authority circumvent public process in raising fees on drinking water systems throughout the state, but many questions remain unanswered related to the Program’s financial structure that is being used as context for the proposal.”

A second proposal, draft Trailer Bill 825, would also broaden SWRCB’s authority, allowing the state board to mandate consolidation of public water systems, in the event that “a public water system fails to reliably provide an adequate supply of safe potable water.”

ACWA says this proposal “would authorize the State Water Board to require a public water system that fails to provide an adequate supply of safe drinking water to consolidate with another public water system.” Concern was expressed in a May 29 letter to the Joint Budget Conference Committee that the trailer bill skips the regular policy and fiscal committee process and “does not provide adequate time for stakeholder comment or public input.”

Aside from the lack of transparency, the proposal to give the state board authority to force consolidations is not an immediate fix to the current drought emergency, says ACWA. SWRCB would have the authority to consolidate “under a broad scope of circumstances,” despite the fact that “consolidations of water purveyors are complex and take time.”

California Special Districts Association also wrote a letter of opposition, stating TB825 would “grant the [state board] unprecedented unilateral power to take ownership and operation of a water system from one entity and force it upon another.” Water rights would be placed in jeopardy, the CSDA alleges, and the proposal “could upend these rights and create legal gridlock.” Ratepayers would also be exposed to unlimited liabilities by “taking on failing systems” in the costs of “environmental cleanup, regulatory penalties, vendor and employee claims and other legal and financial risks.”

Neither of these bills have been formally introduced in the Legislature but are listed on the Department of Finance website as part of budget trailer bill language.

“The action by the State Water Resources Control Board, after weeks of warnings, affects 114 different water-rights holders in the Sacramento and San Joaquin river watersheds, as well as the Delta region,” the Sacramento Bee reported. Not since 1977 have restrictions dug so deep into the state’s so-called riparian rights system.

Only the beginning

State officials told the New York Times that further restrictions are all but a foregone conclusion, with reassessments to be conducted on a weekly basis.

“The reductions announced Friday apply to more than 100 water right holders in the San Joaquin and Sacramento watersheds and delta whose claims to water came after 1903,” reported the Times. “While the cuts will fall primarily on farmers, some will affect small city and municipal agencies, as well as state agencies that supply water for agricultural and environmental use. Water can still be used for hydropower production, as long as the water is returned to rivers.”

Despite the blanket expansion of cuts, some rights holders fared better than others. San Francisco, where rights date to 1901, avoided the strictures for now. Meanwhile, in the state’s agricultural heartland, the pain was sharply felt. According to the Bee, residents drawing water from the federal Central Valley Project and the State Water Project “have lost about one-third of their water this year. The University of California, Davis, estimates that more than 560,000 acres of farmland will sit idle.”

A different future

Deep into the most serious and protracted challenge of his time in office, Gov. Jerry Brown has tightened the taps with a methodical urgency and a quintessentially Californian sort of spirituality. In recent remarks for the Los Angeles Times, Brown took a cosmic view of California’s future, weaving conservationism and futurism together in an extended metaphor of “spaceship Earth.”

“We are altering this planet with this incredible power of science, technology and economic advance. If California is going to have 50 million people, they’re not going to live the same way the native people lived, much less the way people do today,” said Brown. “You have to find a more elegant way of relating to material things. You have to use them with greater sensitivity and sophistication.”

But Brown affirmed that residents will have to pay for their enlightened approach to growth. “A lot of heavy lifting will be done by local water districts, and that will show up in your water bill,” he told the Times.

To the courts

Not all Californians, of course, share Brown’s vision, or that of the Water Resources Control Board. The result, analysts predicted, would be a flood of litigation. “Within hours of the board’s announcement,” the Los Angeles Times recounted, “officials of the Oakdale Irrigation District in the San Joaquin Valley issued a statement saying that they were ready to seek a court injunction to put a hold on the curtailment.”

Their case appeared to hinge on claims that the WRCB used inadequate information on water use to overstep its regulatory authority. Oakdale Irrigation District chief Steve Knell suggested to the Times that California “doesn’t have the authority to manage pre-1914 rights, nor does the board have accurate data on diversions by junior rights holders.”

But the board blamed the cuts’ rough consequences on the state’s inflexible rights regime. “Those ordered to stop diverting from rivers and streams have other options, including tapping groundwater, buying water at rising costs, using previously stored water or leaving fields unplanted,” officials said, according to the Associated Press. WRCB executive director Thomas Howard was blunt: “It’s going to be different story for each one of them, and a struggle for all of them.”

At Bloomberg View, for instance, the editors made a splash with a recommendation drawn from Australia’s approach to limited water. “The system sets an annual cap on the amount of water that can be used without threatening future supply, then breaks that amount into entitlements for different users, which they can trade, temporarily or permanently,” they wrote.

“California, like most other U.S. states, also lets farmers buy and sell their water rights, to each other or to cities. But the transactions are not supported by a transparent online marketplace (though laws passed last year will help track water use). And they’re bogged down by red tape and other costs. The volume of trading shows it. From 2006 to 2010, agricultural districts or urban water utilities bought only about 3 percent of the water used in California’s San Joaquin Valley, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.”

Tilting the policy balance

In some ways, the creation of formal water market in California would be reminiscent of the cap-and-trade regime already well underway in pricing carbon emissions. That has raised questions about the level of complexity involved in taking on the project.

As one carbon trading expert has indicated, Californians can and do already trade water, but not within the sort of Australian-style system sophisticated enough to address water allocations at the statewide level. “It’s the equivalent of someone driving around and talking to ranchers and asking them if they want to sell their water,” McKenzie Funk told NPR. “To have this sort of hyper-efficient, computer-driven water market I think could help if it sends a price signal. But to set it up would be a mess.”

On the other hand, some observers noted, more efficient water markets could be opened up simply by stripping away the favoritism embedded in current regulations, rather than adding layers of new policy.

Water pricing in California has long been shaped by regulatory distortions. As Shikha Dalmia noted at The Week, “Although residential users pay more for water than farmers, they still pay below-market prices. Sacramento homes pay a flat rate for their water, no matter how much they consume. They don’t even have meters. In Fresno, which gets less than 11 inches of rain a year, monthly water bills for families are sometimes only a third of those in Boston, which gets four times more rain.”

Meanwhile, agricultural users have enjoyed cut-rate water for decades. Writing in favor of water markets at the Sacramento Bee, Lawrence McQuillan and Aaron White cast blame at “California’s 1930s federal Central Valley Project and 1960s State Water Project,” which “provide water to contractors at heavily subsidized prices. Farmers in parts of California are consuming subsidized water at $20 per acre-foot that is worth more than $2,000 per acre-foot in urban areas.”

Although Dalmia agreed that shifting “overnight” to full market pricing was “probably not doable,” she argued that California’s biggest water users, who benefit the most from market distortions, should bear the biggest cuts in the interim.

Tweaking taxes

As policymakers puzzle over California’s pricing regime, some proposed solutions have muddied once-reliable partisan lines on issues as fundamental as tax policy. At National Review, for instance, two co-authors recently made the case for slapping a special water inefficiency tax on organic farmers. The logic, wrote Terry Anderson and Henry Miller, is that “organic agriculture uses more of critical inputs — labor, land and water — than conventional agriculture. Taxation would reduce the demand for water-wasting organic products relative to non-organic alternatives, and thereby reduce some of the pressure on California’s dwindling water supplies.”

With few, if any, policy analysts pushing for a hands-off approach to California’s water woes, prospects for fresh legislation amid the state’s ongoing drought seemed set to brighten.

H.R. 3964 by California Congressmen David G. Valadao, CA-21, Devin Nunes, CA-22, and Kevin McCarthy, CA-23, is a comprehensive bill to resolve the water crisis in California, according to the congressmen.

“H.R. 3964 is an unwelcome and divisive intrusion into California’s efforts to manage this severe crisis,” Brown wrote in a letter to the Congressmen. “It would override state laws and protections, and mandate that certain water interests come out ahead of others. It falsely suggests the promise of water relief when that is simply not possible given the scarcity of water supplies.”

H.R. 3964 would undo years of environmental dominance in California’s water priorities.

Brown said the bill would “re-open old water wounds undermining years of progress toward reaching a collaborative long-term solution to our water needs.”

Valadeo, Nunes and McCarthy say the bill would undo a San Joaquin River restoration program, would improve water access for Valley farms. The San Joaquin restoration program to restore flows to the San Joaquin River from Friant Dam to the confluence of Merced River and restore a self-sustaining Chinook salmon fishery.

What Brown could be angry about is the California Department of Water Resources announced in November that the Central Valley would only get five percent of the water it needs in 2014. Valadeo’s office reported Thursday, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Michael Connor upheld Valadao’s position, along with other Central Valley lawmakers, regarding rescheduled water deliveries for Central Valley Project water contractors. The letter to the Bureau urged the Administration to reconsider halting rescheduled water deliveries to San Joaquin Valley farmers. The letter stated strong opposition to the use of rescheduled water to meet other Central Valley Project water delivery needs at the expense of farmers and contractors in the Valley.

In an interview I did in November with Sen. Andy Vidak, R-Hanford, he explained:

“California has had two dry years, the Central Valley is suffering under the San Joaquin River Restoration Program, a federal program to restore flows to the San Joaquin River from Friant Dam to the confluence of Merced River, in order to restore Chinook salmon in the river. “Billions are being spent on dry salmon runs,” Vidak said. “We’re spending $2 million to $3 million per fish!”

“H.R. 3964, the Sacramento–San Joaquin Valley Emergency Water Delivery Act restores water reliability to California communities by codifying the bipartisan Bay-Delta Accord,” Valadeo’s website says. “It also reforms onerous federal laws – such as the Central Valley Project Improvement Act and the San Joaquin River Restoration Settlement Act – that have severely curtailed water deliveries and resulted in hundreds of billions of gallons of badly needed water being flushed into the ocean.” Valadeo represents Kings County and portions of Fresno, Tulare, and Kern Counties, three of the hardest-hit counties in the recession and drought.

“The current California drought is a crisis exacerbated by the failure of government to ensure water flows to our communities and farms,” said Rep. McCarthy. “Today, led by my good friend Rep. David Valadao, the entire California Republican delegation in the House introduced legislation to put families before fish. One more day cannot go by without addressing the shortage of a resource so precious to our economy and wellbeing. It is time, as representatives for the entire state, that Senator Boxer and Senator Feinstein support drought stricken Californians and get behind this legislation.”

Valadeo’s website recently reported House Republicans passed comprehensive water policy reform legislation for California (H.R. 1837) in February 2012. The bill would have mitigated the water crisis now going on in the Central Valley. However, the bill died in the Senate “due to the opposition of California’s Democratic Senators,” Valadeo’s website reported. “No Senate hearings were held, nor were any amendments offered or alternatives proposed. Furthermore, the Senate recently prevented the addition of emergency drought relief provisions for California in the Farm Bill,” the website said.

The Central Valley, the heart of California, is the state’s top agricultural producing region, often called “the nation’s salad bowl” for the great array of fruits and vegetables grown in its rich soil.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, author of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, wasn’t thinking about California’s Central Valley when he wrote:

However, if the water resources department gets its way, the Central Valley may as well get used to this poem.

I talked with Sen. Andy Vidak, R-Hanford, a fourth-generation farmer from the Central Valley, about this threat. Vidak represents all of Kings County and portions of Fresno, Kern and Tulare counties.

“A five percent water allocation for our Valley is unconscionable; it will wipe out any hope of a thriving agriculture community and the jobs it brings,” Vidak said.

While Vidak said California has had two dry years, the Central Valley is suffering under the San Joaquin River Restoration Program, a federal program to restore flows to the San Joaquin River from Friant Dam to the confluence of Merced River, in order to restore Chinook salmon in the river. “Billions are being spent on dry salmon runs,” Vidak said. “We’re spending $2 million to $3 million per fish!”

Vidak said the Central Valley is home to the poorest district in the state, and in the entire United States.  “Yet we’re doing this with salmon?” he asked incredulously. “Communities and cities in the Valley continue to be deprived of their fundamental right to water because of extreme environmentalists that promote policies that place the needs of animals and fish above those of families, farmers and agricultural workers.”

Vidak said the San Joaquin River Restoration Program officials are even trucking salmon around dry river areas to spawn.

“We’re now running this water out to the ocean,” Vidak said. “We don’t even had clean drinking water. “It’s politicians who have done this, and environmentalists have gone too far.”

Vidak said Gov. Jerry Brown could declare a state of emergency to help “ratchet down the federal salmon project.”

 State Water Bond

“This hammers home the point that any water bond that does not fully fund surface water storage and conveyance for the Valley is a non-starter.” Vidak said the state water bond was pushed aside to make way for the bullet train.

The Water Bond Measure was originally expected to be on the 2010 ballot. Despite being certified for the ballot, it was removed and placed on the 2012 ballot. But the Legislature instead passed a bill July 2012, to take the water bond measure off the 2012 ballot and put it on the 2014 ballot.

Even if it passes, Vidak said the state still wouldn’t have any new water storage for five to ten years.

“What we’ve got is a political legacy of pumping the valley dry,” Vidak added. He said the ground is sinking where the High-Speed Rail train is supposed to run because officials are pumping out ground water.

The affected areas in Vidak’s Senate District 16 are:

• Tulare Lake Water Storage District
• Kern County Water Agency
• Empire Westside Irrigation District
• Kings County
• Dudley Ridge Water District

These five areas requested 1.1 million acre-feet of water, but with the 5 percent allocation, they will only receive 56,544 acre-feet.

By WAYNE LUSVARDI

California’s historic water social contract been held together by force, fraud and sometimes the consent of the governed.  The result has been Northern California giving up water to Central Valley farmers and Southern California cities in exchange for Delta flood protection, cheap hydropower and some water for themselves.

But due to the combination of the San Joaquin River Restoration Settlement Act of 2009, by Democratic U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and the California Legislature’s new Delta Reform Act, SB X7-1 from 2009, California’s historical water social contract is on the verge of cracking up.  There is too much force and fraud and too little consent of the governed.

Central Valley farmers want out of the coercive new state Delta and river restoration plans.  And for good reason: unlike a private contract where there are reciprocal benefits, there is little to nothing in the Delta Plan for farmers besides less water and more taxation that may make them uncompetitive with interstate and foreign competition.

The attitude is, “You can have your nitrate-free lettuce for $10 a head and with only symbolic resulting health or environmental benefits. And you will have to pay for Delta and San Joaquin River ‘restoration.’” “Restoration” is a sugar-coated term meaning “redevelopment” to benefit California fishing, recreational, tourist and real estate interests.

The old kind of “redevelopment” — using eminent domain to grab private property to benefit private developers — may be dead in California, but masquerading environmental “restoration” is alive and well in its place.

Rep. Nunes’ End Run Around Force and Fraud: H.R. 1837 

In response, Rep. Devin Nunes, R–Tulare, has drafted a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives called the “San Joaquin Water Reliability Act,” H.R. 1837, that would repeal the provisions of the San Joaquin River Restoration Act of 2009 on Central Valley water usage and replace it with the Bay-Delta Accord drafted in 1994.  Democrats such as then President Bill Clinton and Republicans such as then-Gov. Pete Wilson) approved the Bay-Delta Accord. So there was implied “consent of the governed.”

By contrast, Delta Reform Act of 2009 was entirely concocted by the Democratic Party. The San Joaquin River Restoration Settlement Act, H.R. 146, was passed as part of the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009.   The terms “omnibus bill” means a package of bills whereby any one bill might have been rejected otherwise.

Part of the San Joaquin River Restoration Act limits how much water certain farmers can take for irrigation; and it imposed a tiered water rate system.  It also required that renewals of water contracts had to undergo an environmental impact report.

In essence, H.R. 1837 is a potential federal end run on behalf of Central Valley farmers around the San Joaquin River Restoration Act and Delta Reform Act.   H.R. 1837 is currently still in the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Water and Power chaired by Rep. Tom McClintock R-Elk Grove.  H.R. 1837 would allow water contracts to be automatically renewed and would eliminate tiered water rates and environmental impact studies.  Also, in a dry year environmental and recreational interests would not have first dibs on water over farming, as is now the law.

Siamese Twin Water Systems Joined at the Delta & San Luis Canal

To comprehend this federal vs. state water war you first have to understand that there are three government water storage and conveyance systems in California.

One is the State Water Project, or SWP, that was built beginning in Gov. Pat Brown’s era in the 1950s and 1960s.  It includes Lake Oroville on the north, the Sacramento Delta, the West Branch of the California Aqueduct ending in Lake Castaic and the East Branch ending in Lake Perris both in Southern California.

The second system was built and is run by the U.S. Bureau and Reclamation and is called the Central Valley Project, or CVP.  The Central Valley Project is bigger than the State Water Project but is less well known.  The CVP includes Shasta Lake and Folsom Lake on the north.

The Central Valley Project was begun in California by the Federal government during the 1930’s Depression Era.  At that time California was broke.  The federal government took over the state’s water plan and built it out to stimulate the agricultural economy and bail out California.  Sound familiar?  California is once again broke, but wants to put an $11 billion water bond on the November state ballot to go further into a hole.

The third system is the Colorado River Aqueduct.

Federal-State Cooperation

Both the CVP and SWP systems use the San Luis Reservoir, O`Neill Forebay and the more than 100 miles of the California Aqueduct and its related pumping and generating facilities. A portion of the mid-section of the California Aqueduct — called the San Luis Canal — is a joint federal-state facility.   The Delta-Mendota Canal forks from the California Aqueduct and serves Merced, Madera and Fresno Counties (see map). These operations are coordinated at a Joint Operations Center in Sacramento.

The Federal Central Valley Project has long-term contracts with more than 250 contractors in 29 out of 58 counties; while 29 agencies have 50-year contracts with the State Water Project.

California’s Central Valley farmers want out of the coercive San Joaquin River Restoration Act and Delta Reform Act.  As in the 1930’s, it might be better to allow farmers to rely more on the federal Central Valley Project.  Unlike the 1930’s, agribusiness is now partly globalized.

Democratic legislators are portraying the Republicans’ proposed H.R. 1837 Bill as the “Evil Twin” of the two Democratic plans.

But which is the Good Twin and the Evil Twin? 

There is so much propaganda about H.R. 1837 that it is difficult to sort out what is force, fraud or the consent of the governed.  To listen to the mainstream image makers, you would believe that, of the two competing sets of laws, Nunes’ bill is the “evil twin” and Feinstein’s San Joaquin River Restoration Act and the Delta Reform Act of 2009 is the “good twin.” But this is an oversimplified fraud perpetrated on the public.

The National Resources Defense Council blog wants you to believe that H.R. 1837 would “preempt state water law and prioritize junior water rights.” If that were the case, then Feinstein’s San Joaquin River Restoration Act of 2009 also preempted state water law and prioritized junior water rights of fishermen and recreational, tourism and real estate interests over the historical water rights of farmers.

In case you need reminding, the National Resources Defense Council is the same environmental organization that brought the lawsuit causing the phony California “drought” from 2007 to 2010 and a bogus lawsuit to protect the Delta smelt fish; the lawsuit that was thrown out of court. The federal judge ruled the scientific basis of the Delta Smelt case was fraudulent.

According to the Western States Water Council — an organization of Western state governors dealing with water issues — Nunes’ bill is “the water uncertainty act.”  But “uncertain” for whom?

Yubanet.com, — which provides online news to the California Sierras — claims the Western States Water Council is “nonpartisan.”  The WSWC representatives for California are Gov. Jerry Brown and a bunch of bureaucratic apparatchiks who serve at the pleasure of the governor.

The Western States Water Council has, unsurprisingly, sent a letter opposing H.R. 1837, along with opposition statements by Democratic California Reps. Grace Napolitano, George Miller and Mike Thompson, as well as Rep. Ed Markey D-Mass.  No Republican opposition or support was reported because there are no Republicans as California representatives to the WSWC.   So much for the “nonpartisanship” of the Western State Water Council and so-called unbiased reporting from Yubanet.com.

Sustainability as Wealth Redistribution

What the San Joaquin River Restoration Act and Delta Reform Act do is re-distribute water and wealth from farmers to fishing, recreational, tourist and real estate interests in the name of river restoration and Delta sustainability.  No new water resources are created by either act.  Since farmers are typically not affiliated with the Democratic Party, some of their water is being legally confiscated by the force of law and the fraudulent ideology of environmentalism and given to non-farming constituents.  “RestoreTheDelta.Org” even admits that its goal is the “economic sustainability” of the Delta.

As for the Delta, the major source of pollution is not agriculture but municipal sewer treatment plants in Northern California.  What the Delta Plan will do is create a huge regional sewer district to reduce urban runoff into the Delta to be paid for mainly by farmers and cities in the Southern half of the state.  The Delta Plan is a fraudulent cost-shifting plan from Northern California urban polluters to water users statewide.

The combined river and Delta restoration plans will change the existing water social contract in California so that Central Valley farmers and Southern California cities get less water and in return Northern California gets Delta flood protection, cheap hydropower and a greater share of the water. Additionally, Northern California cities around the Delta will get a giant new Delta sewage management system to be paid for mainly by farmers and cities in the Southern half of the state.

The current Blue vs. Red water war over the Delta and the San Joaquin River restorations has implications for the pending state water bond on the November ballot.  If the Federal government passes H.R. 1837 and Pres. Obama’s signs it, this may replace the need for the State Water Bond.

According to Nunes’ statement in the Central Valley Business Times, “We have crafted a good bill that not only restores the flow of water but will ultimately make unnecessary the construction of a $12 billion canal to bypass the Bay Delta.”  The bypass Nunes is referring to is the Mendota Pool Bypass authorized under the San Joaquin River Restoration Act.

U.S. Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer have recorded their opposition to H.R. 1837, signaling that that the U.S. Senate, which is controlled by Democrats, will not pass the bill. But what tradeoffs the Republicans may be willing to offer is unknown.  Feinstein’s San Joaquin River Restoration Act of 2009 could only be passed as part of a package in an omnibus bill.  So maybe H.R. 1837 could also be passed as part of a package deal.

But should the federal government yet again bail out California with another water bill and bond as it did in the 1930’s?   If California voters reject the proposed California Water Bond on the November ballot, they will at least be voting to deny any funding for the fraudulent San Joaquin River Restoration Act and Delta Reform Act.  The public needs to be reminded that both Acts are actions of force and fraud and are not the reciprocal benefit contract of a market.

In fact, the San Joaquin River Restoration Act changes current State water contracts into mechanisms for water and wealth sharing by coercion. Democrats will buy new voter constituencies with these bills to be paid for by farmers and cities. But it will be called river and Delta restoration and sustainability.

This is also why California has had five water bonds totaling $18 billion since 2000 that have produced a mud puddle of water but a reservoir of fraud.

Force, Fraud or Consent of the Governed?

When Los Angeles water planner William Mulholland started buying land and water rights around Mono Lake in Northern California in the early 1900’s using shill buyers, there was obviously some fraud involved. There was “consent” of the parties to those transactions until Mono Lake farmers realized their water rights were being bought up and transferred elsewhere, and higher holdout prices for land could be obtained. But at least Los Angeles was paying for the farmland and water rights in voluntary transactions and at going market prices.

That is more than we can say for Feinstein’s fraudulent and coercive San Joaquin River Restoration Act and the California Legislature’s Delta Reform Act, where there is very little “consent of the governed” or just compensation as required by the U.S Constitution.

San Fernando Valley land speculation in Los Angeles has been replaced by so-called river and Delta “restoration,” but with the same wealth-transferring effect.