Tag: california

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Pac 10 Football

We’ve expended exactly zero words in this space on this year’s football season, college or pro. There is a local team worthy of regular comment–or ridicule–and that’s the Oakland Raiders. But enough about them. The two teams most avidly followed under this Berkeley roof are California, of the NCAA’s Pacific 10 conference, and Chicago, a founding club of the National Football League. Both perform their gridiron labors under the sobriquet “Bears.”

We don’t lose a lot of sleep over either Bears squad. They’re just not good enough to cause that or to merit it. But emotional attachments are hard to sunder and occasionally the teams are entertaining. Cal is a more immediate experience, seeing they play a couple miles from our house, close enough that when the stadium cannon is fired to celebrate a touchdown it’s clearly audible here.

The conceit for any fan of a decent college football program is that the team they follow is on the threshold or at least capable of greatness (some people root for teams that actually are great–such as the quasi-pro squads at schools like Florida, Texas, and the University of Southern California. I don’t know have any idea what it would be like to root for such a team, though a certain infuriating smugness seems to come with that rarefied territory).

California, at any rate, is a school with a consistently decent football program, a program good enough and rich enough that its coach is a millionaire and fans enjoy a week or two every season thinking that, “Gee, this year these guys are for real.” But Cal, millionaire coach and all, is also a consistently inconsistent team, capable of spectacular performances, weird lapses and blind stupidity–sometimes on the same play. The team won its first three games this year, badly abusing a collection of overmatched squads. Then it began its conference schedule with a game against Oregon in Eugene. Cal looked helpless and scored a single field goal while the Ducks ran riot. Cal made an identical impression against USC in Berkeley: a lone field goal while the Trojans cruised up and down the field at will. Since then, freed of expectations, the Bears have had an OK season. They lost to a good Oregon State team. They beat UCLA, Washington State, Arizona State and Arizona. Today they played Stanford.

Step back a moment from the Cal particulars. The rest of the conference has been pretty interesting.

Oregon demolished Cal, then went on to smash USC, the perennial conference power. It was Oregon’s year, until they played Stanford a couple weeks ago. Stanford whipped them.

USC lost an early game to Washington–continuing a string of seasons during which it has lost a close game to a weaker conference opponent (other upsets in recent years came by way of Oregon State and Stanford). Then the Trojans seemed to get back on track by dominating California. But USC didn’t really flatten anyone else. In fact, they got steamrolled themselves by Oregon in Eugene. And last week, Stanford not only beat them but racked up more points against them than any team in history. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of guys (by which I really mean: a more entitled-seeming group of fans).

So Cal vs. Stanford. The Cardinal took down Oregon immediately after the Ducks’ big win against USC, and then it simply overpowered USC. Both Oregon and USC stomped Cal. What chance could the Bears possibly have? Naturally, the Bears beat them. Not just beat them, dominated them — the 34-28 score hid the fact Cal held the ball for nearly 40 minutes out of 60 and got 31 first downs to Stanford’s 16.

Elsewhere, Oregon came from behind to beat Arizona and keep the inside track for the conference championship and Rose Bowl berth. But to get there, they need to beat Oregon State on December 3. It’s a home game for the U of O. I’ll give the edge to the Ducks over the Beavers.

But this is the Pac 10, so don’t bet on anything.

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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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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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Long-Distance Riders

I’ve meant to note for the last couple of days that this is the week of the Gold Rush Randonee. My explanation of a randonee usually prompts a reaction combining puzzlement (why would someone do such a thing?) with horror (you mean people really do that without being forced?). Here’s your basic randonee: 750 miles in 90 hours, with a series of checkpoints on the way to make sure you’re moving along smartly and not taking shortcuts.

So far, you’re just quizzical: “Yes? Hmmm. That’s a long way.”

You are correct. In ballpark numbers, 750 miles is a distance akin to San Francisco to Seattle. If you’re very motivated, you can probably do that drive in 13 hours up Interstate 5. On a bike, you want to build up to the adventure. Nice 50-mile increments would be pleasant. Take a couple of weeks to enjoy the scenery. Or maybe you’re a cycling animal and you do a 100 miles per diem, a century a day for eight days.

Here’s where curiosity encounters fear. “Ninety hours? How many days is that?”

Three and three-quarters. So to do your 750 miles in that time means pedaling a cool double-century a day. Yes, people actually do it. I can bear witness. But I won’t detour into some of the odder realities of the randonee–the night-time starts, the all-night rides, the naps in the ditches, the slow descent into an often less than coherent or rational frame of mind.

Still, you can’t help but ask: “How do you sit on a bike seat after all those miles?”

I just wanted to note the Gold Rush riders are out there, toiling from Davis, at the southwestern corner of the Sacramento Valley, across mountains and high desert to Davis Creek, just below the Oregon border on U.S. 395. They left Monday at 6 p.m., and the first rider of the 117 who started will be back in Davis in two hours or so — only 54 or 55 hours on the road. I’d like to know how much that guy slept. I know several folks on the ride, and it’s been fun to follow their progress in the Davis Bike Club’s updates. My friend Bruce, who will turn 63 this August, seems to be several hours ahead of his pace four years ago. Amazing, really.

Anyway, check out the proceedings:

Gold Rush Randonee ride updates

Gold Rush Randonee rider times

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Worst Ever

I note stories this morning calling the state’s 11.5 unemployment rate for May 2009 “a record.” It’s not really true. It can be said for sure it *is* the highest since 1976, when the state’s current record-keeping system began. But the rate was higher–much higher–during the Great Depression right up to the eve of World War II

Only guesses are available for the worst years of the Depression, in the early and mid-1930s, when 25 percent or more of the labor force is believed to have been jobless. That situation improved but only slowly during the late ’30s. State records cited in an April story from the Chronicle’s Tom Abate showed a 14.7 unemployment rate in October 1940. With the nation gearing up for war, the rate fell quickly thereafter. Last month’s figure of 11.5 percent appears to be the highest since January 1941, when the rate stood at 11.7 percent.

None of this is to minimize the enormity of the statistics reported today. The rate now is at the highest point in nearly 70 years and is a sign of an epochal economic failure.

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Rain on the Roof

Who owns the water that falls on your rooftop? In most of the western United States, it’s not you, and if you try to catch and store that water, you may be interfering with someone else’s water rights. NPR aired a story on the issue this morning, “Water Wars Out West: Keep What You Catch,” about a Colorado law that breaks with the usual legal regime. The law allows water collection by residential property owners who need to dig a well or get their supply trucked in (in other words, if you’re served by what city dwellers think of as a regular water system, it’s still illegal for you to catch and save rainwater and snowmelt in Colorado.)

The links:

An Act: Concerning Limited Exemptions for Water Collected from Certain Residential Rooftops

Southwest Colorado Water Information Program: Understanding Water Rights

U.S. Bureau of Land Management: Western States Water Laws

NPR: “Water Wars Out West: Keep What You Catch!“

And also, for generally interesting reading on water rights questions, Aguanomics, a blog from two UC-Berkeley economists.

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Evaporation

When you read California’s daily water-storage reports and pore over the columns of data–for instance, from Lake Shasta, the state’s largest reservoir–you happen across this one: EVAP. It’s a record of how much water escapes the lake by changing state from liquid to gas. We’re schooled very early on in our science education about the hydrologic cycle. You know, the process by which water evaporates from oceans, lakes, rivers, and your scotch on the rocks, is transported into the atmosphere to fall as rain or snow, and then is evaporated and carried into the sky once more. Still, it’s one thing to know that a theoretical process is operating out there in the world somewhere and another to see its monumental workings in a statistical read-out.

Go back to Lake Shasta. I’ve been to the dam that holds it back, and I’ve driven past it dozens of times. It sprawls in an endless series of bays and inlets — old river courses — among the mountains that wall off the northern end of the Central Valley. The lake is usually ringed by a collar of brilliant orange-red soil, the upper margin of which marks the reservoir’s high-water mark. That ring is a sort of drought gauge: the more of it you see, the lower the lake is and, generally, the drier the state is.

One thing I don’t think when I drive past Shasta is that I’m watching a massive machine pumping millions of gallons of water into the sky. But that’s what it is. According to the summary from the Department of Water Resources California Data Exchange Center, yesterday the lake lost about 316 cubic feet of water per second through evaporation. Here’s what that is in household terms:

–A cubic foot of water is 7.48 gallons, so the lake was leaking 2,363.68 gallons into the atmosphere every second; three seconds’ worth at that rate would be more water than we’ve ever used in our Berkeley household in an entire month.

–Every minute, 141,820.8 gallons evaporated. In rough terms, the evaporation rate was 1 acre-foot every two minutes and 15 seconds. That’s a generous annual supply of water for two water-guzzling U.S. household.

–Every hour, 8,509,248 gallons of water — about 26.1 acre-feet — departed the lake. That’s enough to submerge a football field to a depth of 20 feet.

–For the day (and the evaporation rate is a 24-hour average), the lake lost 204,221,952 gallons, or 627 acre-feet. That’s a minor part of the reservoir’s net change for the day–the overall level fell by 7,271 acre-feet, mainly through water released for power generation–and it’s a tiny fraction of the lake’s current storage, about 3.15 million acre-feet.

Last stat for now: the process of evaporation is highly dependent on local weather, just like the grade-school lesson on the water cycle would suggest. When it’s warm, more water evaporates as the surface layer of lake water heats up. When it’s cool, the process slows. For the past month, the highest daily evaporation rate was 362 cubic feet per second, in the midst of a spike of very hot weather. The low point was 14 CFS, during a stretch of cool, rainy weather.

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Wind and Water

aqueduct040508.jpg

From the archives: Last spring, Kate and I drove out to Bethany Reservoir, just south of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta at one of the key points in the state’s complex water system. The site is also on the lower eastern slopes of the Altamont Pass country, a big wind-generation site. Pondering the state’s water story and how to tell it–do you take the narrative back to Genesis and/or The Big Bang and talk about where water itself comes from, and how long would it take from that point to get to a discussion of a salmon in the river?– I thought of that visit tonight. Here’s a shot of a wind farm virtually on the bank of the Delta-Mendota Canal–part of the federally developed Central Valley Project–just southeast of Bethany. Whatever you happen to think of the way the water systems were built here and the damage they have caused to salmon and other parts of the old California environment–the engineering is never less than impressive and sometimes beautiful.

The aqueducts move water through a combination of gentle flow and brute force: huge quantities of water are lifted from pumping stations to artificial lakes like Bethany. Then gravity takes over, and the water flows down the manmade rivers to the next set of pumps, maybe 60 or 100 miles away, and the process is repeated. (One of the more surreal sights in the state is along Interstate 5 as the highway climbs the Tehachapi Mountains. The aqueduct runs along the highway, and the water is pumped up nearly 2,000 feet through a pair of above-ground tunnels.) One beauty in the aqueducts is the way they follow the contours along the border of the Coast Range hills to the west and the great valley to the east. The engineers had to work with and respect the lay of the land here.

(Here’s the satellite view, with the hills in their full-on golden summer hue. The image shows Bethany Reservoir. The water comes in from a channel at the northwest corner, having been pumped out of the Sacramento River to a holding basin called Clifton Court Forebay. The California Aqueduct flows out to the south and east (below and to the right). Drag the map to follow the course of the aqueduct. In this image, the California Aqueduct is on the left and the Delta-Mendota Canal is to the right.)


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Special Election

As you Californians know, and as you non-Golden Staters may have heard, we have a statewide special election today. “Special election” is a misnomer of sorts, since we’re deciding not on any candidate but on a series of ballot initiatives that putatively address the state’s fiscal crisis. The state’s finances are in a royal mess thanks largely to the housing bust. The budget process has been subjected to a galaxy of special conditions thanks to decades of initiatives and ballot-box constitutional amendments. So the Legislature and governor are reduced to, and have let themselves be reduced to, the role of managers of the voters’ contrary and self-contradictory whims.

Expression of these whims may seem like a form of democracy. But it’s a twisted and extremely limited form of democratic expression. The simple arithmetic of our electoral process — about two-thirds of eligible voters register, and about two-thirds of the registered voters go to the polls in a good year, and decisions are usually rendered by a simple majority of those who cast ballots — guarantees a form of minority rule. And it’s a minority with an identifiable character: the active electorate tends to be older, whiter, more affluent, and more conservative than the population in general. Today’s vote will be even more skewed than usual. The guesses out there are that just 25 percent of registered voters will go to the polls. That means that the agreement of just one-eighth of those registered, and less than one-tenth of those eligible, will be enough to set state policy for years to come.

Not that I blame voters entirely. The propositions before them are singularly unattractive. The people are confronted with a palette of taxes, theoretical spending limits, special set-asides for education, and changes in the operation of the California lottery. They’ve been told that whatever the outcome, the state is about to undergo another round of deep budget cuts. To vote yes on most of these initiatives is to opt into a dim future; to vote no is to invite a dreadful one. The only measure people seem to really comprehend and support is one that will prevent state officials from taking a pay raise when the state is running a deficit.

California is one of those enterprises that is too big to let fail. It’ll be here tomorrow, next week, and next year, 38 million strong. It’ll have all its problems and its promise. But it’s stuck with a hell of an inefficient way of running things. It makes you think that some time soon it might be a good idea to consider tearing up the rule book we have and starting from scratch.