Category: Current Affairs

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Water Project: California Reservoir Watch

The background: The state Department of Water Resources announced yesterday that its “initial allocation” of supplies for the next year is 5 percent. What that means: It’s only promising to deliver 5 percent of the water that customers have asked for. The reason: Three low-rainfall years–nothing Mother Nature can’t handle, but a disaster for us humans–and some limits placed on water shipments to protect endangered fish. The reaction: Agriculture and other water contractors say it sure looks like the sky is falling. So does the governor, whose biggest agenda item for his last year in office is getting the voters to pass an $11 billion bond for water projects. The rhetoric from the water interests has led some environmentalists and other water-policy skeptics to say the 5 percent allocation is little more than a scare tactic to sell the bond.

Whatever the case may be, I noticed an interesting thing in the documents the Department of Water Resources released with its allocation announcement: The water managers are cutting the promised deliveries to 5 percent even though a chart (PDF) they put out shows they have 20 percent more water in the bank than they did last year–when the initial allocation was 15 percent. One of my colleagues at KQED asked the department’s deputy director about this, and the initial answer was along the lines of, “That’s weird–I don’t know.” Later, she suggested the chart was wrong because it didn’t take into account the fact some of the water in storage is already committed to other customers and can’t be allocated. (As a matter of fact, current combined storage at major reservoirs in the Sacramento-San Joaquin system is running 17 percent ahead of last year at this time; of course, last year was really, really bad, and that same group of reservoirs is only storing 72 percent of average for this date.)

The chart still hasn’t been fixed, though, and it lends credence to the arguments that the allocation–which is only a beginning number and is likely to be adjusted far upward as the season progresses–is being used to aid the bond campaign.

Anyway; Since I got into all this stuff yesterday, and since reservoir levels are such a big part of this debate and the state’s well-being, I put together a map showing where the biggest reservoirs are and the current storage levels. Here it is:


View KQED: California Reservoir Watch in a larger map

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My Afghanistan Reader: ‘Taliban in Total Rout’

President G.W. Bush in Aurora, Missouri, January 14, 2002:

“…I’m proud of the efforts of many all around our country who are working endless hours to make America safe. But the best way to make America safe is to hunt the enemy down where he tries to hide and bring them to justice, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.

“I gave our military a mighty task, and they have responded. I want to thank those of you who have got relatives in the military, a brother or a sister, or a son or a daughter, or a mom or a dad. They have made me proud, and I hope they made you proud, as well.

“We sent the military on a clear mission, and that is to bring the evil ones to justice. It’s a mission, however, that I expanded to include this: that if you hide a terrorist, if you feed a terrorist, if you provide aid and comfort for a terrorist, you’re just as guilty as the terrorist. That’s why the Taliban is no longer ruling Afghanistan.

“I think that one of the most joyous things for me is to see the faces of the Afghan women as they have been liberated from the oppression of the Taliban rule. Not only is our military destroying those who would harbor evil, destroying whatever military they had, destroying their defenses, but we’re liberators. We’re freeing women and children from incredible oppression.

“… The Taliban is in total rout. But we haven’t completed our mission yet. And we’re now at a very dangerous phase of the war in the first theater, and that is sending our boys and troops into the caves. You see, we’re fighting an enemy that’s willing to send others to death, suicide missions in the name of religion, and they, themselves, want to hide in caves.

“But you know something? We’re not going to tire. We’re not going to be impatient. We’re going to do whatever it takes to find them and bring them to justice. They think they can hide, but they’re not going to hide from the mighty reach of the United States and the coalition we have put together. …”

Speech delivered in the warehouse of the MFA Food Mill. Full text here.

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Fly-By

We’ve been having a string of clear evenings in the Bay Area, perfect for watching the nightly fly-by of the International Space Station and the shuttle Atlantis. When the shuttle and the station are docked, they appear as a single, bright star moving from (roughly) west to east. The Atlantis undocked early this morning and rapidly moved away from the station. This evening one of the ships appeared in the northwest, then the other–the space station trailed by the shuttle, I think. From San Francisco, they seemed to move nearly straight overhead, then rapidly vanished into the Earth’s shadow when they were still high above the horizon.

It always surprises me a little not to see others out staring at these objects as they pass over, or that passers-by don’t ask what I’m looking at. A big-city rule, I guess: avoid the harmless-looking guy staring into the sky just in case he’s a lunatic. One time, a co-worker happened upon me watching the space station go over a nearby park. “What happened?” she asked. “Did a bird shit on you?” I told her about the space station and pointed at it. She glanced toward the sky, gave me a look that said she didn’t quite believe anything like that was up there at the moment, and moved on.

Tonight in Berkeley, meantime: Kate knew the twin apparitions of space station and shuttle would become visible at 6:22. She called several neighbors to alert them. While I watched from the lower western edge of Potrero Hill, she had nearly a dozen people out in the street here in our neighborhood for the three-minute show. That’s just one of the things I love about this block: that people will come out to see a night-time sky display–lunar eclipses, comets, meteor showers, whatever’s on tap–and just hang out for a few minutes.

There’s another double-viewing Thanksgiving night. Check your local listings on NASA’s Satellite Sightings Information page.

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Journal of Self-Promotion

wheelerprotest112009.jpg

Friday morning, I heard on KCBS, the local all-news AM station, that some students had “taken over” Wheeler Hall, a building on the UC-Berkeley campus. As I wrote our morning news team a note about that, the phone rang. It was one of the morning news team asking whether I could go out and cover the Wheeler Hall story. I said I would.  

When I went out to get in the car, I realized I had a flat tire. I thought of riding my bike, but knew it would be hard to find a secure place to lock it up. As I walked back inside the house to ponder my next move — if I walked or took the bus or BART, I’d miss the air time for the upcoming newscast — I heard the neighbors’ dog barking outside. One of the neighbors in question works for the university–in the news office, actually. I ran outside hoping I could catch a ride to campus with him. I did.

I showed up outside Wheeler to find yellow police tape around the building — it might have taken a quarter mile of tape to do put up that line — and several dozen students with banners who had parked themselves across the main north-south path through campus. In a few minutes, I’d sized up what was happening and had lined up a young woman who said she was one of the protest organizers. She wouldn’t give her name, but said it was OK to call her Jane Doe or Emma Goldman. Yeah, she really said that. We put her on the air. I was on, too–both for one of the newscasts and our longer “Forum” discussion show. One observation: I say “um” and “ahhhhh” a lot.

Here are the links to the audio of these immortal radio (and associated) appearances:

The California Report: UC Students Protest Fee Hike

Forum: Students Occupy UC Berkeley Building

Photo slide show: Wheeler Hall protest

And in other self-promotion news: November 22 marks this blog’s sixth anniversary.

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Health Care: Good Deficits, Bad Deficits

“There are no solutions, Bernstein–only the rearrangement of problems.”
—David Mamet, ‘November’

Is the health-care debate a mess? It is. By which I mean it’s sure hard to keep up with the competing claims about what the pending legislation will do or won’t do. Yes, our leaders try to make things easy for us by declaring one set of ideas (theirs) good and another set (someone else’s) bad; the “someone else” in this equation returns fire in the same terms. It’s only certain at this point that nothing about the health-care system or the bills that may effect some changes in it is simply “good” or “bad.”

For me, “good” consists of two things: First, make health coverage universal. In a nation as wealthy as ours, no one should be without medical care. Second, ensure that health coverage is affordable for all. The devil, as they say, is in the details. The bill headed to the Senate floor is about 2,000 pages long. What all do you think is in there?

Rank speculation aside, one concern that lies outside my list of “good” or “bad” attributes of health-care legislation is the deficits they’d cause. This may be uncaring of me. I don’t want my kids and their kids to be paying for my colonoscopies, or for yours either. But I have to say that when I hear the opponents of the health-care bills screaming about deficits, it’s hard to take them seriously. Right down the line, these are the very same folks who thought nothing of committing the nation’s wealth to the Iraq war, deficits be damned. Some economists say that that little project will wind up costing us $1 trillion–the low estimate–before it’s all over. And although I think we can rest assured that the investment has been worthwhile for most Iraqis who survived our good intentions, I don’t think all that money has done a thing to make life better for the tens of millions of people here — a group double the population of Iraq, by the way — who make do without medical care.

So let’s see where the health-care legislation takes us. It may be far from perfect. but improvement, not perfection, is our goal. And if we mess it up on the first round, gee, it won’t be the first time. We’ll just have to go back and try to to better. That seems to be the only way this system of ours work.

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California Water: ‘Crumbling Infrastructure’?

Sparse posts of late. The reasons are many. Let me toll off some of them: Facebook. Twitter. Another absorbing online project having to do with the future of California water. Work. Non-Internet recreations. Sleep. Dog-walking.

But about the water stuff: the current distraction was triggered by the Legislature’s recent passage of five bills, including an $11.14 billion bond measure, intended to refocus water policy and “rebuild California’s crumbling water infrastructure”–our governor’s preferred formulation and one widely parroted by politicos, pundits, and journalists alike.

Yes, I question the “crumbling infrastructure” line. Why? The system of levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta–an area drained and diked more than a century ago–is known to be in need of constant attention. Some of the levees may even be said to crumble. But the description doesn’t apply elsewhere. The state, federal government, and water districts have invested billions over the past couple of decades to keep their facilities from deteriorating.

“Crumbling water infrastructure” has become the early campaign slogan for the bond campaign. The phrase is standing in for a more complex reality, and one that has nothing to do with the condition of physical facilities. It’s true California’s water system seems broken. But the stress is the result of growing population, an ancient and unresolved battle for water between urban and agricultural interests, and the arrival over the past few decades of a new interest that demands water: environmentalists and fishery groups arguing on behalf of salmon and other species that have been extirpated or brought to the brink of extinction. And add one more factor: Schemes to divert Canadian rivers or the Great Lakes aside, there’s only so much water to go around in California.

One thing that’s struck me as I’ve pored paragraph by paragraph through the bond measure is that we’ve been here before. Just one for-instance. Back in the 1990s, there was a grand negotiation involving the state and federal government and all the interests, including environmentalists. Eventually, the process became known as CALFED–that’s pronounced “cal-fed” and has nothing to do with newborn beeves. In August 2000 CALFED produced a behemoth set of agreements, principles, legislation and environmental studies, all designed to do the same thing the governor and Legislature say they’re doing now. CALFED was to enhance the state’s water system by building more reservoirs, better managing groundwater, and figuring out better ways of moving water from north to south without killing the Delta.

But the consensus that built CALFED disintegrated. Neither the federal nor state governments delivered promised support. The parties to the deal backed out as prospects for progress on any of the basic issues dimmed. The new state legislation specifically supersedes CALFED. Except for that act–killing a moribund program–you wonder how much the new laws will accomplish. Important components are widely denounced, the state’s in no shape to take on the increased debt, and neither are the voters in a mood to write big checks to bureaucrats. And the political climate for the water bills seems simply poisonous: the bills were written virtually in secret, the bond has been faulted for being chock-full of earmarks, and only a small minority of voters express approval of the Legislature or the governor.

What’s next, then? It would be nice to believe some sort of open process could result in solutions that could win support from most of those affected, that would be feasible, and that would be investments in the state’s future. There’s talk of an alternative bond measure that would be much more precisely targeted than the one the Legislature approved. That could be a start, because I would guess that that’s the only way the voters approve a water bond in 2010. And if no money is approved, then California’s looking at another still-born attempt at tackling its water problems.

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November 11: The Notebook

Item 1: I’ve wondered to myself at what point I’ll consider deer roaming around central Berkeley as unremarkable as, say, crows. A picture of a deer in the front yard comes to mind, maybe eating some choice vegetation (though the plants in yards to either side of us are probably a lot more delectable). It seems we’re getting pretty close to that day. During our late evening walk, The Dog and I had two encounters with big hooved springing mammals. The first was a little startling as an adult-sized deer bolted from a front yard across the street and make a pretty good racket as it crossed a couple of hedges. Then it did that sproingy run that deer do all the way up the street into the dark. A few blocks away, The Dog got alert to something across the street, and two more deer went clattering up the pavement, paused at the next corner, then hung a right and vanished. I wonder who the next arrivals in the neighborhood will be. Mountain lions looking for a snack? No — coyotes are a lot more likely.

Item 2: Sometime in the last couple months, an old colleague of mine called attention via Facebook to a remarkable series of articles in the Ann Arbor Chronicle–what I’m guessing is an “alternative weekly.” The serial is running under the title “Washtenaw Jail Diary.” The Chronicle hasn’t announced a publication schedule, but a new installment seems to appear every couple of weeks. Elsewhere, I said I look forward to the new chapters the same way mid-19th century Londoners probably looked forward to the next piece of “A Tale of Two Cities.” But this jail diary isn’t fiction. It’s a story of an anonymous 40-something middle-class white guy who gets tossed into the county lockup. What makes the stories riveting is the writer’s skill in narrating his sudden passage from what he took to be “normal life”–telling the boss he’d be in late for work while he takes care of some business–to felony inmate. The Number One asked question about the series: What did the author do to wind up in jail? He hasn’t said yet.

Item 3: It’s November 11th. Veterans Day. Armistice Day. Remembrance Day. An occasion to reflect on a war so monstrously costly that a sequel was unimaginable. Today, we can imagine anything except, perhaps, an end to the killing.

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Spare-Time Work Project

As I was saying the other day, California’s new water bond measure sure is interesting. The voters will be asked next November to let the state borrow $11.14 billion for a whole slew of water projects: water conservation efforts, water reclamation, water recycling, groundwater monitoring, drought relief, and measures that will let local and regional agencies do semi-water-related things like build bike paths near rivers. A good piece of the $11 billion will simply be a pile of cash for the Legislature to sit on and hand out to worthy dam projects and other water-development initiatives. Governor Schwarzenegger signed the bill calling for the bond measure yesterday, and he’s talking as if it’s a done deal. At the same time, snipers have appeared. Legislators from both parties are saying the initiative is flawed and padded with unnecessary spending. Some reporters are getting in on the act, too. I decided to find the text of the bond bill myself and pore through it. Once I started to do that, I started thinking of ways to highlight the spending provisions. A spreadsheet? That’s good if you like raw data. A map? It seemed doable, so I went to work on Google Maps. The result–still a work in progress, and sing out if you have any suggestions–is here and also embedded below. We put it up on a KQED page, it’s gotten passed around some on Twitter and maybe elsewhere. And tonight I found out that one of the governor’s press aides was consulting it (well–the press aide is a former colleague of mine).


View California’s Water Bill: Where Would the Money Go? in a larger map

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California Water: A Taste of Pork

Tomorrow, our Action Governor is going to star at a media event at Friant Dam, near Fresno. He’s using the dam, which impounds the San Joaquin River, as a prop for a ceremony at which he’ll sign an $11.1 billion bond measure that will go onto next November’s ballot. The money’s supposed to go for building new dams and reservoirs and for environmental restoration of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which has been laid waste by earlier generations’ water schemes.

It’s a big bond. In ordinary times it might be a tough sell. But these are lean, lean times for the state, which is suffering through a staggering series of budget deficits and will have to pay interest of $700 million or $800 million out of its general fund every year once all the water bonds are sold. Schwarzenegger said last week he thinks voters will go for the measure because they’ve recently passed other big infrastructure bonds, such as last year’s $10 billion initiative to finance a California high-speed rail system.

Maybe so. But enter the Associated Press. One of its Sacramento reporters has been leafing through the bond bill. Here’s what she found:

“… Dozens of projects … were injected into the bond bill to secure enough votes to get it passed. The projects will add tens of millions of dollars to the interest taxpayers will have to pay on the bond if voters approve it next year.

“Many of the projects are only peripherally related to the purpose of the legislative package, which is intended to increase California’s water supply and restore the ecologically fragile Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

“For example, $30 million was earmarked to the state Department of Parks and Recreation for grants for watershed education facilities. Another $20 million is set aside for the Baldwin Hills Conservancy, which manages land for recreation and wildlife and is the Los Angeles district represented by Assembly Speaker Karen Bass.

“In the final days of negotiations, lawmakers in both chambers padded the bond bill with an additional $1.7 billion, despite previous statements by legislative leaders that the state could not afford such a large bond.”

The AP is following up here on what was widely rumored around the state Capitol when the bond was passed In fact, a reporter asked Schwarzenegger about the add-ins during his a self-congratulatory press conference the governor held after the Legislature acted. Here’s what the governor had to say last week to the suggestion that some of the projects in the bond measure might be “pork”:

QUESTION: Governor, how can voters support this package when you passed it in the middle of the night and the — so the pork, so-called pork, inserted in there including (Inaudible) pulled out?

GOVERNOR: Are you talking about — I don’t know what you’re talking about, because the end package does not have any pork whatsoever, so I don’t know what you’re talking about.

QUESTION: Late in the evening the bill, as it was being drafted, contained — was amended and contained — and these projects were added for various counties and for various projects. So the tab grew from 9 billion to 11 billion. So how can the voters take on something like this at a time when they’re still feeling the pinch and how can they be sure that all the money will be spent well?

GOVERNOR: Well, first of all, as you know, I’m not as interested in the process as in the end result. So throughout the process we went from 8 billion to 12 billion, to 9 billion, to 11 billion, back to 9 billion and back up to 11 billion. So I think this is maybe something interesting for the journalists but it definitely is not as interesting to me. To me always what’s interesting is the result and the result was a great, great package of approximately $11 billion.

One of the things you have to love here is the way Schwarzenegger, reputed to be a hard-headed businessman, so breezily dismisses the appearance of billions of dollars of extra stuff. That’s something that’s only interesting to journalists, he says. And, he may find out very soon, to the people who will have to pay the tab.

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Deck the Halls with Piles of Initiatives

If you could do anything to make California better–anything at all–I’m sure you’d do exactly what Merry Susan Hyatt is doing: promoting a ballot initiative that will require public schools to offer real, honest, genuine Christmas music (in effect, Christian Xmas carols) during the holiday season. Ms. Hyatt’s initiative is creating a little buzz now that state officials have given the OK for signature gathering. Mostly, the critics (we plead guilty) point to it as another example of how dumb the state’s initiative process can be.

The would-be doctors assessing the civic illness that seems to afflict California look at their clipboards and see a long list of other symptoms, too: broken budget process, hopelessly polarized Legislature, a disconnect between what people say they want and what they’re willing to pay for.

Then there’s the initiative process, nearly a century old and the chief reason the state’s Constitution has been amended more than 500 times. It’s become a system for the voters–or actually, a select group that’s whiter, richer, and older than the electorate at large– to dictate sweeping policy shifts and budget priorities without much regard for the long-term consequences. The most famous example, probably, is Proposition 13, the 1978 measure that overnight leveled and reduced property taxes and forever restricted local governments’ ability to raise them. But there are plenty of others, including the series of bond measures that fueled a prison-construction boom in the 1980s and ’90s and made possible the rise in the state inmate population from 25,000 in the late ’70s to 170,000 now. And just to make sure the new institutions were filled, the voters also approved tough anti-crime measure like the Three-Strikes Law.

Lots of people are talking about trying to rein in the initiative process. One modest proposal, which comes from UC-San Diego political scientist Thad Kousser among others, is to require initiatives that will cost the state money to say how it will be paid for. The thinking is that with the cost made clear, voters would be less willing to continue writing checks that the governor and Legislature have to find a way to cash even when the state is virtually bankrupt.

The talk about reform is coming on the eve of what may come to be known as the Year of the Initiative. Right now, the June 2010 primary ballot lists a modest total of three measures that have qualified to go before the voters. One is a constitutional amendment that would change the way seismic retrofits are assessed for property taxes. One would set up a system of public financing for state elections. One would create a sort of open-primary system for state offices.

But those three June 2010 initiatives? They’re just the tip of the iceberg. The calm before the storm. The overture to a grand electoral opera. The California Secretary of State’s office lists 68 initiatives–68!–that could wind up on the ballot next year. Of that number, 24 are out in the wild, with organizers and their (often paid) volunteers collecting signatures. Forty-four are under review at the state attorney general’s office to make sure legal i’s are dotted and t’s crossed.

Next year’s ballot booklet will be the size of a phone book.