The Abundance Choice (part 5) – The Fractured Farmers

“We cannot support your initiative if you include the Delta Tunnel as an eligible project. And to be clear, we also cannot support your initiative if you do not include the Delta Tunnel as an eligible project.”

This statement, which I heard with my own ears sometime in early September 2021, was made by someone painfully aware of the paradox it expressed. It epitomizes how California’s farmers confront the existential threat of not enough water to irrigate their crops. They are bitterly divided over what solutions to support. If your farm is located north of the California Delta, you don’t want Southern Californians to build a giant straw that will suck the Northern Central Valley dry. And if your farm is south of the Delta, escalating restrictions on pumping water into southbound aqueducts from fragile Delta ecosystems makes a tunnel an elegant solution.

Disagreement over how to transport water through, around, or under the Delta is just one of many causes of gridlock in California over water policy, but the scale of the project and the effect it would have make it central to discussions over state water priorities. Taking an unequivocal stand on the Delta Tunnel—for or against—will immediately either alienate or attract about half of California’s farming community, along with every water agency, urban or rural, northern or southern, that is affected by it.

Not only are farmers in the Sacramento Valley to the north generally set against constructing the tunnel, while farmers in the San Joaquin Valley to the south generally support construction. There are also the farmers within the Delta, a vast area of reclaimed land, much of it lying slightly below sea level and protected by over a thousand miles of levees. These farmers, for the most part, oppose the Delta Tunnel because a tunnel will divert water north of the Delta, possibly leading to less available water to irrigate their fields. In this they share the concerns of Sacramento Valley farmers, but they also have an equally urgent concern regarding levee maintenance.

As it is, the Southern California water districts that receive water thanks to the Delta pumps are paying much of the cost to maintain the Delta levees. Once a tunnel bypasses the Delta, the incentive for powerful Southern California water districts to provide financial and political support for Delta levees, and by extension, Delta farming, will disappear. And if that happens, the Delta farmers will lose the allies they need to maintain their levees and resist pressure from environmentalists to systematically eliminate the levees and the reclaimed agricultural land in favor of turning the entire Delta back into a nature preserve.

These conjectures serve just to offer a glimpse into the complexity of the issues affecting whether or not to construct a Delta tunnel. The gridlock over the tunnels has a negative impact on many other projects. For example, if the Delta tunnel is built, the Sites Reservoir—a proposed off-stream reservoir that would capture storm runoff in a valley west of the Sacramento River and north of the Delta—would be able to release its water to customers south of the Delta with none of the pumping constraints currently in place. Without the Delta tunnels, runoff pumped into the Sites Reservoir would be more likely to be reserved for use north of the Delta.

The Many Ways California’s Farmers Are Divided

The distinct and often conflicting interests between northern and southern farmers is further exemplified by the separate peace negotiated between environmentalists and California’s rice farmers, who are nearly all operating north of the Delta. The historical treatment of rice fields in the off-season was to burn the rice straw. From the perspective of modern sensibilities this was a rather unenlightened practice. Every year, smoke and soot from nearly 500,000 acres of burning fields would foul the air for hundreds of miles. But starting in the 1990s, in cooperation with environmentalists, California’s rice farmers began to flood their rice fields after the harvest instead of burning the straw, creating winter season wetlands. The practice spread, and by 2010 open field rice burning had been reduced by 90 percent. From October through February, the fallow fields become wetlands for migratory waterfowl.

This is a laudable accomplishment. Storm runoff is diverted, helping to prevent flooding. Aquifers are replenished as the sequestered water percolates. Rice straw decomposes and enriches the earth, instead of fouling the atmosphere. Migratory waterfowl along the legendary Pacific Flyway are given massive areas of new habitat. Along the Sacramento River, these flooded areas are now even being experimented with as potential habitat for salmon hatchlings.

This is a win-win, but it also may serve to further divide the farming community between north and south. Farming interests in the north, where the rice farmers are very influential, have less incentive to rock the boat. Environmentalists are powerful. They don’t want new water infrastructure and they believe farming at the current scale in California is not sustainable and must be reduced. Meanwhile, California’s rice farmers have made a deal with environmentalists, which could be in jeopardy if they support anything that environmentalists oppose. When they’re not coming after you, that is a rational business decision.

The problem with all of this becomes clear when you adopt a statewide perspective. And as we have seen, conservation is simply not enough to solve California’s challenge of water scarcity. There are solutions that can preserve farming in the San Joaquin Valley that ought to constitute reasonable compromises environmentalists can accept. But these solutions aren’t as obvious or as affordable as letting fallow rice fields accept winter floodwater in the water-rich north. A lot is at stake.

The Sacramento Valley, for all of its vast agricultural capacity, is only 40 percent as big as the San Joaquin Valley. North of the Delta in the Sacramento Valley there are 2.1 million acres of irrigated farmland. That’s a lot, but it is dwarfed by the San Joaquin Valley, where there are over five million acres of irrigated farmland. Finding a way to preserve this industry, which is the reason Californians consume affordable food and export food all over the nation and around the world, is something that ought to unite California’s farmers to work towards solutions for all of them, not just those north of the Delta.

Another geographic schism occurs within the San Joaquin Valley, where the impact of water allocations and regulations affect farmers on the west side much differently from farmers on the east side. This is evident when viewing a satellite image of the San Joaquin Valley. All of the farmers in the San Joaquin Valley are reliant to some extent on groundwater, to which access has also become problematic for them. And all of the farmers in the San Joaquin Valley also rely on northern water from the aqueducts. But the older, smaller farms on the eastern side of the valley are also able to tap surface runoff from the Sierras, which has been their historical source of water for farm irrigation. To the west, the much larger farms have no option but to rely almost exclusively on water from the California Aqueduct.

It isn’t just geography that divides California’s farmers. They are divided by what crops they grow, with rice only the most obvious example among many. In each case, the economics differ. Farmers growing crops that, for the same water input, have a high value, such as pistachios, can adapt to water restrictions that would put farmers specializing in row crops such as tomatoes out of business. On the other hand, farmers growing perennial crops in orchards and vineyards cannot skip a year of irrigation, or their trees and vines will die. Farmers planting annual row crops can choose which fields to leave fallow in a dry year.

Finally, farmers in California are divided by the scale of their operations. As regulations and restrictions have increased relentlessly over the past few decades, the size of the farming operation that can bear the overhead cost for compliance has grown proportionately. Wayne Western, Jr., who farms row crops in the San Joaquin Valley, said that a 10,000 acre farm used to be considered big, certainly big enough to apply economies of scale sufficient to adequately spread the cost of capital equipment and compliance overhead. Now a 10,000 acre farm is considered economically marginal. Many agribusiness holdings today are in excess of 100,000 acres, and consolidation is ongoing.

When it comes to which water policies and solutions to support, this division between big and small farmers is possibly the biggest source of disunity. The financial interests of large farms are not furthered by a thriving, diverse, and decentralized farm economy. To the extent very large agribusinesses supported, or considered supporting our initiative, it was not just an act of pure self interest. An environment of scarce and expensive water, and other inputs which have also seen sharp increases in price, are an opportunity for large farming corporations to buy out small farmers and increase their holdings. An operation with economies of scale and a strong balance sheet can withstand financial hardships that put the small farmers out of business. At the same time, as will be seen, scarce and expensive water makes speculation on land for its water rights an attractive proposition.

Failed Attempts to Increase Water Supply Infrastructure

If California’s farming community is divided over what to do about water, they are also frustrated by several recent attempts to increase their supply of water. All of them failed, or, in the case of Proposition 1 in 2014, are failures to-date. When Proposition 1 was approved by over two-thirds of California voters, the expectation was that the storage projects it specified would be funded and built. Not only have none of them been built so far, the Temperance Flat Dam proposal—which would have captured storm runoff on the San Joaquin River, above an already existing dam—was all but killed by the bureaucrats in Sacramento. How they performed this sleight of hand is illustrative of why many farmers feel betrayed by their own state government.

When the California Water Commission began to evaluate the projects approved by voters in Proposition 1 for funding, they came up with a scoring system whereby they awarded points based on “beneficial use.” But they defined beneficial use in a manner that overemphasized environmental benefits versus benefits to farm and urban water consumers. They then awarded funds to each voter-approved project based on the points each project earned. Temperance Flat, under these manipulated criteria, did not score very well, and the amount of money it was awarded was only a small fraction of what was needed.

By the time we began speaking with farmers about our water initiative, Proposition 1 in 2014 was just one recent example of how their efforts to affect water policy via an initiative had been thwarted. In 2018, proponent Jerry Meral had succeeded in putting Proposition 3 on the ballot. This expansive proposition, which Meral spent several years cobbling together in consultation with every interested party he could possibly identify, had something for everyone. In the $8.9 billion bond package, there was $855 million to repair aqueducts, $685 million to develop groundwater storage, and $472 million to develop and repair dams. The big bucks, $2.9 billion for “watershed and fisheries improvements,” and $3.0 billion for “safe drinking water and water quality,” may not have increased California’s water supply, but could be supported based on the improvements they would deliver to water quality in the state. Farmers supported Proposition 3 with donations and endorsements, joining a coalition that included every major environmental organization except for one—the Sierra Club. In a very tight race, Proposition 3 failed by only 155,000 votes out of nearly 12 million votes cast, a losing margin of only 1.3 percent.

There was yet another attempt to go to voters to fund water supply improvements in 2020, the “Dams Not Trains” initiative, led by proponent Aubrey Bettencourt. As its title indicates, this initiative would have redirected funds allocated for high speed rail to funding water storage infrastructure. This innovative bill also called for a redefinition of “beneficial use,” something we emulated in our initiative, and it took responsibility for approving water projects away from the California Water Commission, something we decided against. Once again, and for the third time in six years, many of California’s farmers stepped up with their donations and endorsements, but this time, the initiative failed to qualify for the ballot.

No wonder finding support from farmers proved to be problematic. They’ve been betrayed and they’ve been frustrated with initiative efforts three times in the past eight years, and many of them feel all that money was wasted. But the reality for most of them is only going to worsen. They face a hostile, do-nothing legislature, a hostile press, and an environmentalist movement that wants to eliminate most of them. California’s farmers will either successfully advocate for massive investment in new and upgraded water infrastructure, or, taking into account how many small farmers still operate in California, most of them will go out of business. But it isn’t as if, collectively, they don’t still have the resources for another fight.

Agribusiness in California directly employs over 800,000 people, with agricultural cash receipts estimated in 2020 at $49 billion. The indirect employment and GDP contribution as agricultural products are distributed and retailed, and as farm employees participate in the economy, multiplies those amounts. California’s farm industry may be fractured, but each of its constituent sectors have trade associations, with annual lobbying and political campaign budgets in the tens of millions and marketing budgets in the hundreds of millions.

Without more water infrastructure in California, i.e., without a comprehensive statewide plan to spend $50 billion or more, right away, on an all-of-the above program of water investments ranging from new reservoirs and reservoir upgrades to recycling all urban wastewater, the future for most of California’s farmers is grim. California agribusiness needs to think big, identify what it is they agree on while taking into account the needs of the entire state, pool their resources, form stronger alliances with urban water agencies and others; they need to identify, expose and resist environmental extremism, and they need to unite and fight for the changes necessary for all of them to survive and thrive.

This article originally appeared on the website of the California Globe.

The Abundance Choice (part 4) – Crafting a Water Initiative

To be fair, Assemblyman Devon Mathis didn’t come up with the idea of allocating a percentage of the state budget to accomplish a policy priority. He got that idea from the California Teachers Association, which in 1988 convinced voters to approve a constitutional amendment that required a minimum of 40 percent of California’s general fund to be spent on K-14 education. But Mathis did have the temerity to be one of the first legislators to emulate the concept when, in 2019, he introduced to the state assembly the “Clean Water for All Act,” which would have given voters a chance to allocate another slice of the general fund to a specific purpose, in this case, funding water infrastructure.

Assembly Constitutional Amendment 3 died in committee, but the precedent was set. Ballot box budgeting was back in play. When I talked with Mathis about our initiative in July 2021, it was clear that water was still a top priority for this moderate Republican from the San Joaquin Valley. And as soon as he brought up the “two percent solution,” I knew we had something we could run with.

Up to that point, we had been on the right track with our focus on getting funding for projects that would increase the supply of water to Californians, but we had been planning for the initiative to rely on bond financing. The problem with this approach was that the amount we estimated California needs to spend on water infrastructure starts at around $50 billion, and voters have never approved a bond at anywhere near that amount. Two percent of the state general fund, on the other hand, sounded like a reasonable amount, if not a pittance. After all, for a mere two percent of the state general fund, water scarcity in California would be eliminated forever.

These numbers were big. And they worked. In July 2021, the state general fund budget was projected at $196 billion for the 2021-22 fiscal year. Two percent of that would be $4 billion per year. And here is where we decided to add some creativity, by providing for half of that $4 billion, or one percent of the general fund, to be used to pay principal and interest on bonds. At four percent interest spread over 30 years, that would unlock $35 billion in immediate funding. Even at five percent over 20 years, the state would have immediate access to $25 billion.

These amounts would be sufficient to allow the state to begin funding several major projects at once. They would be sufficient to permit the state to provide 100 percent funding to projects of statewide benefit where local matching funds were not available, but there would also be plenty left over to fill in the required funding where the local or regional partners had raised a significant portion of the project cost but couldn’t fully fund it on their own. And while this $2 billion per year would be committed to financing $25 to $35 billion in bond funding, there would still be the other half of the two percent stream, another $2 billion per year, available to fund hundreds of smaller projects and fill in wherever needed.

Uniting Farmers and Urban Water Agencies

The steering committee we formed included people from urban water agencies as well as from agriculture. One of the founding members was Kristi Diener, part of a farm family in the San Joaquin Valley who now have to cope with unprecedented water scarcity. The Facebook group that Kristi founded, California Water for Food and People, has a mission “To unite in one place all of California’s water-for-food-and-people advocates, coalitions, organizations, groups, bureaus, alliances, growers, etc. wishing to come together to form one large action force, to compel immediate long term solutions to protect and provide water for humans.” With over 24,000 members, for several years they have been sharing information and educating the public and politicians on the topic of water policy. Kristi was one of the first people I called, and together we recruited several other participants.

Other notable steering committee participants included three experienced urban water agency executives and directors based in Southern California: Steve Sheldon, president of the Orange County Water District, Lisa Ohlund, recently retired general manager of the Eastern Municipal Water District who now consults for several water agency clients, and Shawn Dewane, vice president of the Mesa Water District. Three more members of the farming community were significant participants, including Martin Chavez, a member of a multigenerational farming family, and a board director of the Stratford Public Utilities District, Wayne Western Jr., the general manager of the Hammonds Ranch which is located in the absolute heart of the San Joaquin Valley, and Geoff Vanden Heuvel, director of regulatory and economic affairs at the California Milk Producers Council.

Getting this group together on one steering committee, along with others, insofar as they represented farming interests on one hand and Southern California urban water district interests on the other, was itself an accomplishment. These groups do not necessarily see eye to eye on which water policies and water projects should be prioritized in California. But within our committee, there was strong agreement. Everyone saw the urgency of the challenge California faces, even if the politicians and water bureaucrats in Sacramento still do nothing but ratchet up rationing and hope for rain. Our goal was to come up with an initiative that would create water abundance.

We recognized early on that if we consistently maintained a statewide perspective that treated water as fungible, that would make agreement on an initiative much easier. From a statewide perspective, if an urban water recycling project results in 250,000-acre-feet per year of wastewater being reused, that means 250,000-acre-feet of water elsewhere in California no longer has to be diverted and imported via aqueduct into that urban area. Similarly, if an off-stream reservoir captures storm runoff and yields another 250,000-acre-feet of water each year for farmers, that frees up 250,000-acre-feet that can be available for urban use or, for that matter, released into rivers for ecosystem health.

Another fundamental provision our committee agreed on very early was to build a sunset provision into the two percent mandate. Once new water projects were supplying 5 million acre-feet of water per year, the two percent allocation would go away. We stipulated that these new projects could be funded entirely without any money from the general fund, or make exclusive use of general fund allocations. What mattered was that new water infrastructure projects would yield 5 million-acre-feet of additional water to Californians. We didn’t care how they would be paid for.

Between July and September 29, 2021, when our final amended version of the initiative was turned in to the California attorney general, we worked nonstop on crafting this initiative. We regularly emailed updated drafts to a list of experts around the state that grew to more than 300 recipients. The initiative went through 12 full revisions and countless minor revisions, and we worked hard to cover all eventualities. Among the hundreds of experts we talked with, many scenarios were shared. As these mostly cautionary what-ifs piled up, the provisions we added piled up commensurately.

For example, we added a redefinition of “beneficial use,” stipulating that it would include urban and agricultural use and not be restricted to environmental benefits. We stipulated that the water supplied from new projects would only count towards the 5 million-acre-foot goal if it was for agricultural and urban use. We also stipulated that any new government regulations that further restricted groundwater or river withdrawals—or demolition of water-yielding assets such as reservoirs—would trigger a proportional increase to the 5 million-acre-foot per year goal.

An “All of the Above” Approach to More Water

Finally, we agreed that it was important to keep all water supply solutions within the project categories eligible for funding, and instead of picking specific projects, we carefully defined the eligible categories. These included projects to expand reservoirs, build new reservoirs, wastewater recycling plants, desalination plants, as well as facilities for runoff capture, and aquifer recharge and recovery. Also included were the conveyances—new or upgraded pipelines and aqueducts—necessary to transport this new water from source to consumer.

In one concession to picking specific projects, and out of respect both for the will of the voters and the many people around the state who had relied on this going through and been let down, we specified that the top priority for funding would be those water storage projects approved by voters in 2014. As previously noted, $2.7 billion was allocated for those projects, including the desperately needed Sites Reservoir, and as of May 2022, not one of them has yet broken ground.

There was much more. In our discussions with board members and executives at water agencies, the giant Metropolitan Water District of Southern California in particular, we agreed that 1 million of the 5 million-acre-feet goal could be achieved through making funds available for additional urban and agricultural conservation programs. We believed this was an appropriate compromise, since it acknowledged that conservation still has a vital role to play in solving California’s water crisis, but still preserved 80 percent of the goal—4 million acre-feet of additional water per year from new water supply projects.

The folks at Met, and others, suggested we include priority funding for disadvantaged communities. We not only added that as a priority criterion for which projects that conformed to the eligible project categories would first receive funding, but we modified our project categories. In addition to the categories explicitly defined to increase the supply of water—groundwater recharge and recovery, wastewater and stormwater reuse and recycling, upgrading existing and constructing new reservoirs, and desalination—we added the following:

“(5) Water conveyance development, maintenance, or expansion, for the delivery of clean, safe drinking water for homes and businesses, and water for agricultural uses consistent with area-of-origin water rights;

(6) Other projects designed to increase the clean, safe and affordable supply of water to all Californians with emphasis on California’s disadvantaged communities, and other projects designed to increase conservation.

The promise embodied in these two additions cannot be overstated. With these new categories included, urgently needed projects that lack any hope of getting rapid access to adequate funds could be built. One compelling example is the more than 400 small towns and school districts in California that do not have access to safe drinking water. Another is the need to replace the toxic pipes in the older schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District. That project will cost tens of millions—if not more—and they have no idea where they are going to get the money to do it.

This is a brief summary of what we came up with. There was much more to this initiative that weighed in at 8,071 words when completed. It is unlikely it could have achieved our objectives if it had been any shorter. We had engaged a lead attorney with extensive experience in California constitutional law and specifically in writing ballot initiatives. During the research phase prior to our campaign launch, various attorneys reviewed his work, all of them expert volunteers, involved in farming, water policy, water agencies, construction unions, and construction contractors.

The length of the initiative was dictated by the necessity to include a constitutional amendment component in order to, among other things, allocate two percent of the state general fund to water projects, and a statutory component in order to allow half of that money to be used to pay principle and interest on new water bonds. Other lengthy sections were necessary to include modifications to the Coastal Act and the California Environmental Quality Act, without which we were convinced this initiative would sail straight into gridlock just like Proposition 1 has for the past eight years, making all the trouble of gathering voter approval worthless. And then there was the actual meat of the initiative, the definitions of eligible project categories. Despite its length, this long-winded initiative was, and is, a highly refined product.

In subsequent installments the reasons for what we came up with, and why, to address concerns and objections from labor unions, environmentalists, and various and often competing farming interests. But throughout the process, we adhered to a few fundamental guiding principles: The policies necessary to solve urban water challenges and farming water challenges are not mutually exclusive. A statewide perspective is essential, and state funding should support projects to the extent local ratepayers cannot cover the costs. Conservation is not enough, and it is time now to spend tens of billions of dollars to bring California’s water infrastructure, still the marvel of the world, into the 21st century.

This article originally appeared on the website of the California Globe.

The Abundance Choice (part 3) – The Mechanics of Ballot Initiatives

By the spring of 2021, it was obvious the state legislature was not going to change its inadequate approach to water policy. As the state faced another year of drought, restricting water use was the only solution being taken seriously in Sacramento. And at the same time as cities were being told to prepare to ration water, farmers faced new regulations restricting not only how much water they could divert from rivers, but also how much groundwater they could pump.

For this reason, and after talking with people all over California whose businesses and jobs depended on a reliable water supply, I decided to form a group of volunteers to promote a ballot initiative that would focus on funding projects to increase California’s supply of water. The tentative name for our campaign, which we eventually adopted, was More Water Now.

The potential for initiatives to fundamentally change the political landscape in California is well documented. The now legendary Prop. 13, approved by voters in 1978, is the classic example. Prop. 13 limited property tax reassessments to two percent per year. And thanks to Prop. 13, if you own your home long enough, eventually property taxes become a manageable burden, instead of an inevitable eviction notice. California is one of 15 U.S. states that allow citizens to gather signatures from registered voters and qualify both statutes and amendments for their state ballot. But to say this is not easy is an understatement.

In California, petitions proposing initiative statutes must be signed by registered voters and the total signatures collected must equal at least five percent of the total votes cast for the office of Governor in the most recent gubernatorial election. For 2022, that amount would be 623,212 signatures, based on the turnout in the 2018 election. But as will be seen, we quickly realized a statute wouldn’t be enough to change water policy in California. We were going to have to ask California’s voters to amend the state constitution.

Using the initiative process to amend the state constitution is a much bigger deal than securing voter approval for a new law. Once the state constitution is revised, existing laws and proposed laws have to conform to the new amendments. And an initiative, whether it is a constitutional amendment or a statute, can only be overturned by subsequent statewide voter approval of a new initiative that repeals it. Because the political impact is so much greater with an amendment, petitions proposing initiative constitutional amendments must collect signatures numbering at least eight percent of the total votes cast for the office of Governor in the most recent gubernatorial election. For 2022, that amount would be 997,139 signatures.

As if that’s not enough, to ensure the verification process doesn’t turn up so many invalid signatures as to doom the effort, petition proponents typically have to gather at least 30 percent more signatures than the required total. This takes into account the spoilage caused by duplicate signatures, improperly filled out petitions, and those signatures from people who were not registered to vote. This means to qualify an initiative constitutional amendment for the state ballot, it is necessary to gather at least 1.3 million signatures.

These are daunting metrics. Filing an initiative is easy enough. Once you’ve written the language, you bring it to the California Office of the Attorney General, pay a $2,000 fee, and submit it for review. The Attorney General will prepare a “title and summary” for the initiative, which must appear on the signature petition. The AG’s office then refers the initiative to the Office of Legislative Analyst, which prepares a report on what they estimate to be the financial impact of the initiative. Typically during this phase the state’s legislative analysts ask questions of the initiative proponents. The total review process normally takes 65 calendar days from the date of filing to the date when the initiative is cleared for circulation. And that’s when the fun starts.

What our campaign was confronted with on the day we were cleared for circulation, November 1, 2021, was a six month period within which we would have to collect 1.3 million signatures from people registered to vote in California. For the math inclined, that equates to 7,222 signatures per day. If one assumes a 12 hour day, seven days per week, that’s 602 signatures to be collected every hour, for 180 days in a row. We had until April 29 to canvass the state and deliver those numbers.

The sheer logistics of a campaign on this scale mean that professional consultants have to be involved, including professional signature gatherers. Even Prop. 13 back in 1978, when “only” 449,846 valid voter signatures had to be verified, relied on professional consultants and professional signature gatherers to supplement their mostly volunteer driven campaign. A more recent example of one of the only successful signature gathering campaigns that was mostly volunteer driven was the 2020 attempt to force Governor Newsom to face a recall election. That recall effort, whether you consider it infamous or merely a healthy expression of democracy, made history, with unpaid volunteer signature gatherers contributing well over one million of the over 1.6 million validated signatures. But the exception proves the rule.

Normally, the cost for professional signature gatherers is what the market will bear, and a nationwide industry exists to serve initiative campaigns. In California in 2020, the price per signature was quoted to us by an assortment of credible bidders at around or just under $4.00 per signature. This equated to a total cost, just for the signatures, of $5.2 million. While that’s the biggest single cost, it doesn’t end there.

Add to this the cost to print petitions, which depending on the size of the petition, can range as high as $.20 per petition even in quantities in the hundreds of thousands, along with the cost of shipping petitions all over the state, and expect that to add at least another $100,000 to total costs. There is also the cost to do preliminary verification of every signed petition to avoid excessive rejections during the formal verification process, as well as the cost to sort the petitions into bundles to be submitted to each county. With tens of thousands of signatures arriving at a central processing center on any given day, this is also a process that requires professional support. Expect preliminary verification to cost about $.35 per signature, which pushes costs up by another $450,000 or so. These are just the basic costs.

The chart below summarizes the costs we projected when still in the planning stages of our initiative qualification campaign. The cost per petition ended up being $0.17 each, not $0.14 we had initially estimated, because the word count grew beyond our expectations which meant more paper. The cost per signature, $3.60, was a quote I believe would have been met if we had been able to come up with funding by the day our petition was cleared for circulation. In retrospect, the hybrid effort (column one) that projected 360,000 signatures coming from volunteers was not realistic, although we always showed donors both scenarios, and made it clear that we had a higher confidence in the scenario (column two) that relied exclusively on professional signature gatherers.

For a serious initiative qualification campaign, reality descends on proponents with every passing day. Major factors affecting the total cost come into play very quickly. In particular, a quote that comes in under $4.00 per signature is something that expires at a rate proportionate to how much time is left. To make it onto the November 2022 ballot, initiative petitions have to be turned in by June 24, 2022 at the latest. Our deadline of April 29, based on our initiative having been cleared for circulation 180 days earlier on November 1, put us just in front of that deadline. The meant we were going to be operating in the thick of the initiative season, and the longer it took us to gather the funds needed to launch our signature gathering, the more it was going to cost per signature.

The general rule for this year went something like this: With the full six months, your best price per signature will be around $4.00 each. With five months, expect to pay at least $6.00 per signature. With four months, expect to pay $8.00 per signature, and with only three months to work with, expect to pay $10.00 per signature or more. After that, it becomes impossible no matter how much you spend, because signature gathering firms operating at full capacity can rarely deliver more than 150,000 signatures per week.

It wasn’t always this hard, even if it has never been easy to qualify an initiative. Up until a few years ago, the cost per signature would escalate according to the same general timeline, but from a much smaller base. Signatures could be gathered for $2.00 each, or possibly even a bit less, and campaigns that ultimately spent $5.00 or more per signature were unusual. This changed for several reasons. There was the reality of a more hostile public environment for gathering signatures, including lawsuits by owners of retail stores and other common gathering venues against signature gathering firms. There was the arrival of companies like Uber and Lyft that were completely indifferent to how much they bid up the price to attract signature gatherers for their initiative. We had to account for the impact of AB 5 which caused some signature gathering firms to stop operating in California rather than have to argue in court why their signature gatherers still fit the new definition of independent contractors. Finally, of course, there was the COVID driven transformation of society which overall finds more people conducting the business and pleasure of life online, and fewer people venturing outside to fewer places less often.

Because signature gathering has become so expensive, there is a point at which the cost of gathering signatures via direct mail becomes competitive with the cost to pay signature gatherers. Depending on the cost per direct mail piece and the rate of response, that moment of crossover can vary, but the equation is simple algebra. There are two distinct advantages to direct mail, assuming your petition isn’t a magnum opus that weighs over one ounce, and assuming you know your target voter and have done sampling so you have a response projection you can rely on. First, if necessary you can wait until much further into the 180 day period to launch your campaign. Unlike professional signature gathering that in most practical circumstances is limited to producing 150,000 signatures per week, a mass mailing of several million petitions can go out 30-40 days before the deadline, and if enough of them get signed and returned, your initiative will qualify. The other advantage of direct mail is that it constitutes a fundraising opportunity. Anyone willing to open your piece, read your cover letter, unfold and sign your initiative petition and follow all the instructions therein, is a hot prospect to also enclose a check with a donation. Direct mail campaigns for initiative signatures can defray a meaningful percentage of their costs when they include an appeal for donations in the package they send.

With a certain naivete, our early strategy was to rely on the virtue of our initiative – which after all was the product of an encouraging consensus we achieved between several key interest groups – along with the credibility of the signature gathering firm for which we had obtained a price for signatures. Our presumption was that by covering these two fundamentals, we had delivered all the necessary basics of an initiative campaign that donors would support. We prepared a website, commissioned a voter survey by one of the best polling firms in the state, prepared a donor package, and started dialing for dollars. How that played out will be described in later chapters. But a few lessons learned can be shared now.

First, raise money at the same time as you write the initiative. While there ought to be a billionaire donor out there that agrees that there is an urgent need for more water infrastructure – after all there are 186 billionaires living in California – that sort of fortuitous lightening probably won’t strike. The reality is that whoever ends up funding an initiative campaign is going to want to be involved writing it. While we did that, we didn’t secure commitments in advance.

Recognize that volunteer driven efforts depend on tens of thousands of people, each of which has to be willing to spend hundreds if not thousands of hours sitting in parking lots and parks, in front of shopping centers and libraries, clutching their clipboards filled with blank petitions and accosting passerby. To get significant numbers of signatures using volunteers requires more than writing an initiative that reflects a popular sentiment that polls well. There has to be a passionate, preexisting grassroots movement of unusual if not historic magnitude. Don’t count on it. Even well organized volunteer signature gathering efforts rarely collect more than a couple hundred thousand signatures. Without also hiring a professional signature gathering firm to do the rest of the work, these efforts fail.

If you still want to bypass or at least defray much of the expense of paid signature gatherers, keep the initiative short enough to print on just two sides of a single page. In our case, that was impossible. But the advantages of short petitions are compelling, and the shorter the better. A single page petition can be downloaded from a website by any registered voter, anywhere. They can sign it and mail it to the campaign. They can also print them and circulate them as a volunteer signature gatherer. This eliminates one of the primary logistical obstacles facing volunteer driven initiative campaigns, which is printing and delivering petitions to thousands of volunteers all over California. For direct mail, a short petition, no more than a few pages printed on one folded sheet of paper, can be mailed along with a cover letter and reply envelope and stay under one ounce, greatly reducing postage.

Finally, consider hiring political consultants, because most big donors will not take a campaign seriously that hasn’t engaged a professional political consulting firm. If you really want to win, consider hiring a firm that typically works for Democrats. No initiative in California has a chance of getting voter approval if it isn’t bipartisan, so why not shop for services among the consultant core that knows how to win? California’s Republican consultants, even those among them that do win campaigns, operate in an ecosystem that is a small fraction of the size of California’s Democrat consultant ecosystem. That means far less access to donations, institutional support, and far fewer firms to choose from. Not only are Democrat political consultants better connected politically and financially, and not only do far more of them know how to win and do it all the time, but having one of them working for you puts an imprimatur on your campaign, instead of a stigma.

That’s life in California. Adapt or die.

This article originally appeared on the website of the California Globe.

The Abundance Choice (part 2) – The Problems With Indoor Water Rationing

Perhaps the biggest example of misguided water policy in California are the escalating restrictions on indoor water consumption. As will be seen, the savings these restrictions amount to are trivial in the context of California’s total water consumption, yet are imposed at tremendous cost both in quality of life and in the required economic sacrifice. Despite alternatives that are objectively more cost-effective, California’s water policy continues to go down the path of rationing indoor water use.

In 2018 the California Legislature enacted laws to restrict residential water consumption, in the form of Senate Bill 606 and Assembly Bill 1668. For urban water districts, the laws “establish a standard of 55 gallons per person per day until January 2025, and then to 50 gallons per person per day in 2030.”

It is fair to point out that some of the more alarmist reactions to these mandates are unfounded. For example, the laws will only measure aggregate use within a water district, which means that how individual users are treated if they exceed the per person indoor water limits is left up to the local utilities. That’s hardly reassuring, but at least it leaves some wiggle room. On the other hand, it creates a powerful disincentive for water agencies to invest in developing an increased, more resilient water supply, because with aggregate maximums limiting how much water the agencies can sell, they’ll think twice before adding capacity. One of the dangerous consequences of this, yet again, is a system that is less equipped to withstand serious disruptions to supply.

In any case, enforcing these mandates will not have a significant effect on overall water consumption in California, and the cost of implementing them does not make financial sense compared to other ways those funds could be invested.

To estimate the statewide savings that could be achieved by imposing a 55 gallon per person limit on indoor water use, first consider the current statewide indoor water consumption as estimated by the California Department of Water Resources. This total has been fairly consistent over the past ten years at around 2.5 million acre feet per year. This yields somewhat surprising results. Based on a population of 40 million, as shown in the calculations on the chart, Californians are only using about 60 gallons of water per day, per person, indoors.

This indoor use varies by region, of course, but in aggregate, Californians have already nearly achieved what the state legislature has imposed on residential consumers as a new water conservation mandate. Perhaps that explains what’s next. Built into AB 606 was a provision to lower indoor water use from 55 gallons per day to 50 gallons per day by 2030. The next chart shows the statewide savings pursuant to this legislation. At 55 gallons per day, total statewide indoor water use is only reduced by 233,996 acre feet per year. At 50 gallons per day, total statewide indoor water use is reduced by 458,178 acre feet per year. To put this amount into perspective, based on the most recent data available, total urban water use in California has averaged 7.8 million acre feet per year. Which means that cutting the average residential indoor use by 17 percent (60 gallons per person per day to 50 gallons per person per day) will only yield a 5.9 percent reduction in overall urban use.

This realization has led to more ambitious proposals, such as Assembly Bill 1434 proposed by Laura Friedman (D-Glendale) in 2021. Friedman’s bill would have accelerated the pace of imposing restrictions on indoor water use and would have further reduced the allowed amounts. It would have lowered per person indoor water use to 48 gallons per day by 2023, to 44 gallons per day by 2025, and to 40 gallons per day by 2030. The bill did not pass, but a similar version will surely resurface in 2022. But how much does reducing residential indoor water use per person from 60 gallons per day to 40 gallons per day end up saving? Again, the results are unimpressive. In exchange for a 33 percent reduction in residential indoor water use, 906,542 acre feet per year of water are saved. This equates to an 11.6 reduction in total urban water use, and it must be noted that urban water use as a whole only represents 11 percent of total water diversions in California. Which is to say, a reduction of 906,542 acre feet of residential indoor water use equates to a reduction in California’s statewide water consumption of 1.2 percent. But at what cost?

It isn’t the intent of this analysis to disparage the achievements already made in indoor water conservation. But most of them have already been made, and the ones swiftly moving from recommended to mandated in many cases do not work very well. Most people would agree that low flow toilets, for example, are a good idea. If they don’t work on the first flush, it’s easy enough to flush them twice. But low flow shower heads and kitchen faucets cross the line into genuine inconvenience. The inadequate flow in a shower head makes it nearly impossible – especially with soft water – to rinse shampoo out of long hair. The constrained flow in a kitchen faucet means waiting sometimes several minutes before hot water arrives. Circulating pumps to remedy this don’t work very well, and the cost of flash water heaters is beyond the reach of most households. But it’s with washing machines that the misanthropic cruelty of mandating unproven appliances is clear for all to see. These machines damage fabric, they don’t clean very well, and their cycles take too long. The reality of owning and maintaining water efficient washing machines is the antithesis of the legendary Maytag television advertisement, where a repairman sits by the phone that never rings, because the machines never break. The ad was true back then, but not today. Not only do many of these machines have useful lives measured in years instead of decades, but the newest models are being marketed as “connected” appliances.

Volumes could be reported on the rapidly diminishing returns that currently accrue to water efficient appliances, once they reach beyond practical and reasonable limitations. But why are we having this debate? Doesn’t all that water flow down the drain, through the sewer mains, and into a water treatment plant where it is purified and returned to the rivers and aquifers? And in the case of California’s massive coastal cities, why isn’t treated wastewater, which currently is discharged into the ocean, instead treated to higher standards and pumped right back upstream? Existing treatment processes allow up to 90 percent of urban wastewater to be be reused. As will be seen, this solution is already being implemented in Orange County, where next year, what is already the world’s largest wastewater treatment facility for indirect potable reuse will complete its final expansion to recycle and reuse 100 percent of their wastewater. But this solution should be implemented in every county in California, starting with the coastal counties.

Current policies aimed at cutting urban water use are misguided with respect to indoor residential water use not only because the water savings are insignificant when compared to total statewide water use, or because indoor residential water can be reused over and over again merely by upgrading the treatment of the wastewater. They are also misguided because the economic cost of indoor water rationing is more than the economic cost of constructing upgrades to urban water treatment plants. This isn’t immediately obvious, since if urban water treatment plants aren’t upgraded, consumers don’t have to foot the construction bill through higher rates. But they will pay anyway. To accurately monitor indoor water consumption, urban water agencies are planning to install a second meter on every residential property. That cost will appear in the rates they pay. Moreover, water utilities only spend about 0ne-third of their budget on water, with the other two-thirds going mostly to pay overhead. This means that as residential water consumers use less, their water bills will not go down. They can’t. It would break the water utilities.

Another significant economic cost to ratepayers is that even if the utility manages to deliver less water without raising rates too much, there is still the burden imposed on every household to retrofit their appliances to conform to the new water mandates. It is not possible to reduce residential indoor water consumption by 33 percent without buying every gadget the major appliance manufacturers can possibly come up with. These new “connected” water appliances will cost every California household thousands of dollars, with new and ongoing payments for software updates and maintenance and earlier replacement that the old appliances never imposed on their owners. And those residents who cannot afford these appliances will be subsidized by the ones who can, with that cost reflected either in higher water rates or higher taxes.

There is an alternative. Instead of rationing residential water use, direct this economic value to investment in infrastructure. If the State of California subsidizes the construction of wastewater recycling upgrades, reducing indoor water consumption no longer has to be a legislative priority. This principle, that state investment can reduce the capital cost to local and regional water agencies, has applicability across all areas of water infrastructure. It is based on the idea that if a society must bear an economic cost to overcome water scarcity, that cost can either be borne on the front end by upgrading water infrastructure, or on the back end by imposing rationing and punitive costs on end users.

The premise of the initiative we developed was to adhere to the first option: Let the State of California again build a water infrastructure that solves the challenge of water scarcity, capitalizing on everything we’ve learned since the marvelous system we rely on was first constructed in the past century.

This article originally appeared on the website of the California Globe.

The Abundance Choice (part 1) – California’s Failing Water Policies

In October, and then again in December 2021, as the third severe drought this century was entering its third year, not one but two atmospheric rivers struck California. Dumping torrents of rain with historic intensity, from just these two storm systems over 100 million acre feet of water poured out of the skies, into the rivers, and out to sea. Almost none of it was captured by reservoirs or diverted into aquifers. Since December, not one big storm has hit the state. After a completely dry winter, a few minor storms in April and May were too little too late. California’s reservoirs are at critical lows, allocations to farmers are in many cases down to zero, and urban water districts are tapping their last reserves. In some areas of Southern California, water agencies are now penalizing residential “water wasters” by coming onto their property and installing flow restrictors.

Back in 2014, a supermajority of California voters, 67%, approved Prop. 1 to fund water storage projects. As of the spring of 2022 not one project has begun construction, eight years later. Meanwhile, in Southern California, a proposed desalination plant in Huntington Beach that could produce 60,000 acre feet per year of fresh water from the ocean has been held up by a mostly hostile bureaucracy and endless litigation for over twenty years. As you read this, the project faces another major hurdle – on May 12, the California Coastal Commission Board might defy the recommendation of their staff and grant “final” approval. But their approval may come with so many conditions that in effect it will be another denial. Or the army of litigants that for years have opposed the plant will find yet another basis for a lawsuit.

When it comes to water in California, there is a robust political consensus that something has to be done. There is agreement that multi-year droughts will leave Californians with inadequate water supplies; that once a drought enters its third or fourth year, the demands of the environment, agriculture, and urban water consumers are far in excess of what is deliverable. And that’s where we are today.

Back in the summer of 2021, knowing there was broad agreement as to the problem, I began to canvas the state to build support for a ballot initiative that would fund water projects. I entered into this project with only a basic knowledge of water policy. My goal was to talk with as many experts as I possibly could in order to come up with a comprehensive solution that, if approved by voters, would end water scarcity in California forever. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

Water politics in California isn’t what it once was. The water infrastructure that transports water from mountainous northern watersheds to coastal cities mainly in the southern part of the state remains the biggest plumbing system in the world. The first major construction began over a century ago. To supply water to the burgeoning cities of Southern California, the Los Angeles Aqueduct was completed in 1913. The Hetch Hetchy dam and aqueduct, supplying water to the City of San Francisco, was completed in 1934.

Major water projects in California were ongoing in the decades that followed. The Federal Bureau of Reclamation finished building the Shasta Dam in 1945, creating what remains the biggest reservoir in California. The famed California State Water Project, with its centerpiece the California Aqueduct, completed most of its big projects in the 1960s. These highlights barely begin to describe the scale of the investments that were made or the magnitude of the projects that were built.

How California built a system of reservoirs and aqueducts that enables a mostly arid state to support a population of 40 million and some of the most productive farmland in the world is an epic story. A detailed accounting can be found in the classic book Cadillac Desert, written by Marc Reisner in 1986. An even more detailed and more recent source is The Great Thirst, written by Norris Hundley, Jr. in 2001. But the historic achievements of earlier generations of Californians to supply this new civilization with enough water to thrive have not been matched in recent years. California’s water infrastructure has been neglected. In the face of epic droughts and soaring demand, these days, the only answer California’s politicians have been able to agree on is water rationing.

Such is the state of water politics today. There is universal recognition that there is a water supply crisis, but every solution that involves major new construction is hopelessly gridlocked. Around the state, incremental and inadequate steps are taken, but there is no statewide vision to solve the crisis. Water rationing, typically referred to using the less threatening term “conservation,” is the only solution. While some activist groups in California truly believe conservation is all that will ever be necessary, it is mostly imposed on Californians by default.

The Basics of Water Supply and Demand in California

After the two big storms in the fall of 2021, on January 1, 2022 the San Jose Mercury published an article with an encouraging headline “California has topped last season’s rainfall. Will trend continue in 2022?” Quoting the National Weather Service, the article announced that the “massive October atmospheric river and wet December” delivered 33.9 trillion gallons of rain to the state. This exceeded the 33.6 trillion gallons that fell during the entire previous water year, from October 2020 through September of 2021.

To express this amount in acre feet helps put this in perspective. 33.9 trillion gallons is 104 million acre feet. According to data compiled by the California Department of Water Resources, over the ten year period from 2011 through 2020, on average, 180 million acre feet of rain fell each year in California. The following table shows how that 180 million acre feet of water is used. Most of it either evaporates, percolates, or eventually makes its way to the ocean. But a significant amount is diverted for either urban, agricultural, or environmental use.

For the years 2011 through 2015, the data on this chart comes from the 2018 update of the California Water Plan, prepared by the California Dept. of Water Resources. Data for 2016 and 2018 was compiled on request by engineers working for the Dept. of Water Resources; they are still working on the 2017 data. For these most recent seven years for which complete data is available, diversions for urban, agricultural and environmental purposes averaged 75.3 million acre feet per year.

As can be seen, urban water use in California accounts for a relatively small percentage of the total. Just over 10 percent of California’s water use is to serve towns and cities, whereas the remaining 90 percent is split nearly evenly between agricultural irrigation and maintaining healthy ecosystems. While this obvious disparity could be the basis for suggesting that merely reducing allocations for farms and the environment ought to be enough to solve challenges of water scarcity, the basis for that argument is that water policy in California has to be a zero sum game. But that is a false premise. That premise can be invalidated by investing in new water supply infrastructure and upgrades to existing water infrastructure.

The next table, also taken from the 2018 update to the California Water plan, with data for the years 2016 and 2018 obtained from the Dept. of Water Resources, shows the sources of the 75.3 million acre feet per year of average annual water diversions. Analyzing this table will quickly reveal the vulnerability of California’s current water supply.

To begin with, the water California imports via the Colorado Aqueduct, nearly five million acre feet per year, relies on the Colorado River runoff that is stored in Lake Mead and Lake Powell, which are both at lower levels than they’ve been since those massive reservoirs were first built and filled up. At the same time as the entire Colorado River watershed continues to suffer a blistering multi-year drought, the burgeoning cities of Las Vegas and Phoenix are asserting their water rights. In the years to come, it is prudent to plan for a dramatic reduction in the amount of Colorado River water that will be delivered to California’s farms and cities.

Groundwater extraction, currently averaging 18.7 million acre feet per year, is also under threat. Withdrawing water from aquifers faster than they can be replenished by percolating runoff has caused wells to dry up, it has led to ground subsidence, and in some cases is causing underground aquifers to collapse and degrade to the point where they no longer can be refilled. To restore aquifers as a sustainable source of water storage and supply, not only will annual withdrawals need to drop well below 18.7 million acre feet per year, but until the water levels in the aquifers are restored, total annual withdrawals will need to be less than the annual amount of natural recharge.

As if that isn’t enough, the line items on the table indicating local, state and federal projects are primarily referring to sources of water that rely on California’s rivers, which, in most cases, rely on California’s Sierra snowpack. Because most of California’s reservoirs are in-stream, their first priority is to prevent flooding. For this reason they cannot be used to store water from early season storms, such as the deluge that fell in December of 2021. If those storms are allowed to fill these reservoirs, should a late season storm hit the state, there would be no reservoir capacity left to buffer the runoff and prevent flooding. But when the snowpack fails to develop, and no late season rainstorms inundate the state, summer arrives and the reservoirs are empty.

All of these factors combine to indicate a worst case scenario that is potentially catastrophic. It begs the question, why is the only significant statewide policy priority been conservation? Without Colorado River water, or unimpeded access to groundwater, or a viable snowpack, the “conservation” solution is disastrous: Every household will be limited to 40 gallons per person per day, outdoor watering will be prohibited, and a million acres of farmland will be taken out of production. Is that the future Californians are prepared to accept? Because that is the course Californians are on today.

There is an alternative. Runoff from the storms like the one that blasted through California last December can be diverted into percolation basins and into off-stream reservoirs. Indoor urban water, nearly three million acre feet per year, can be treated to higher standards then reused over and over. So why isn’t the Sites Reservoir, an off-stream reservoir that is a twin to the already existing San Luis Reservoir (built back in the 1960s), already completed? Its construction was approved by voters eight years ago. Why aren’t two or three more massive off-stream reservoirs already built and operating in California?

For that matter, why isn’t urban water recycling already being done in every urban county in California? Only one major metropolitan area, Orange County, recycles 100 percent of their wastewater. Why aren’t these desperately needed projects being constructed? There is a reason.

In our attempt to qualify an initiative to fund water supply projects, we encountered the opposition. There is a loose, extremely powerful coalition of special interests in California that want water scarcity. In some cases that policy serves their financial interests. In other cases, well intentioned zealots have embraced politically imposed water scarcity in the misguided belief that it will help the environment. Some of the opposition was more a function of gridlock than disagreement on principle.

In the opposition to more water projects, we encountered every conceivable motivation. There was avarice and there was selflessness, misanthropy and empathy. There were delusional arguments and arguments of clarifying lucidity; pragmatism and idealism. But the intricate array of political forces that influence water policy in California today, and their underlying ideologies and motivations, reduce to only one de facto consensus: Conserve. But conservation is not enough.

We also learned that with more time, the obstructionist consensus can be changed. Countless informed observers and political power brokers assured us, usually off the record, that new, big water projects must get built. The financing for these projects is not the insurmountable obstacle, nor are there technical constraints apart from the daunting scale of what is required.

To begin with, there are sustainable ways to create water abundance. And in normal years, the presence of lawns and the luxury of lengthy showers is a sign not of waste, but of resilience. These luxuries signify necessary surpluses that guarantee sufficient water in those extraordinary times when the water supply is disrupted. Having redundant sources of water in California not only bestows the capacity to withstand a crippling multi-year drought, but also to survive in the event of civil disruption or natural catastrophes that disable, for example, the Edmonston pumps that push millions of acre feet of water from the California Aqueduct over the Tehachapi Mountains into Los Angeles.

Water is the foundation of civilization. It is absurd that Californians, living in the wealthiest and most innovative place on earth, cannot design abundance into their water infrastructure. With abundant water, not only does California offer its residents a far more enjoyable quality of life in the form of less restrictions on residential consumption. Abundant water also means that Californians can develop more housing, for which developers cannot obtain permits without first identifying a reliable water supply. It means that California can remain an agricultural superpower, with affordable food for in-state sales and export. It enables essential businesses that consume water to flourish.

The remaining installments of this report will chronicle our attempt to qualify an initiative designed to fund massive investment in water supply projects. As part of that story, the various categories of water projects will be examined, as well as the many groups that affect water policy in California. This report, however, is about more than water, and affects everyone, not just Californians.

The challenge of water scarcity, and the reasons for it, are mirrored in other forms of politically contrived scarcity; not just water, but land for housing, practical transportation infrastructure, energy, lumber, and other natural resources. The entire consensus on all of these building blocks of modern civilization must change from a scarcity agenda to embrace investment in sustainable abundance.

Doing this creates the opportunity to create a future that nurtures upward mobility, affirms the economic aspirations of emerging communities and nations, and reduces the profits and prerogatives of established corporate and state rent seekers by forcing them to compete. This is the abundance choice.

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

How Unions Can Help ALL Workers

Last month on January 5, Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez resigned from the legislature to join the California Labor Federation. Gonzalez is likely to succeed the current Secretary-Treasurer Art Pulaski when he retires this summer. What will this mean for the labor movement in California?

Gonzalez has earned a controversial reputation in the State Assembly, partly by virtue of the legislation she’s sponsored, and partly by her Trumpian penchant for lobbing polarizing Tweets at her political opponents. But when Gonzalez takes the helm of the most powerful labor organization in California, as is expected, will the weight of the job moderate her political priorities?

It’s common for right-of-center politicians to criticize unions, and it’s worth repeating some of these criticisms. Public sector unions have an agenda that is inherently in conflict with the public interest, since the interests of their membership – more jobs, better pay and benefits – may be served regardless of whether or not public services are operated efficiently and effectively. They divert public funds out of public employee paychecks to wage campaigns to elect the politicians with whom they supposedly then “negotiate” labor agreements. The agencies they represent don’t have to compete for customers or make a profit, they can just raise taxes. Civil service laws offer ample protection to public employees, and voluntary associations that don’t engage in collective bargaining would still provide plenty of political leverage for public employees. Public sector unions should probably be illegal.

As for private sector unions, on the other hand, these unions often represent the only recourse that workers have when employers, for whatever reason, abuse their employees. The history of the labor movement in America is an evolution, whereby over the decades the rights of workers have steadily improved. While there is disagreement as to how much, private sector unions still have a vital role to play in the American economy. And union spokespersons who are always quick to attack “greedy CEOs” should reflect on a great irony: union encroachment into the private sector, along with increasing government regulations usually advocated and sponsored by unions, enables corporate consolidation because only the most financially resilient private companies can withstand the expense of excessive regulations along with union pay scales and union work rules.

The reality, in any case, is that in California, public sector unions exercise nearly absolute control over state and local elected officials, by virtue of the nearly $1.0 billion per year they collect in membership dues. And by this time next year, one of California’s most outspoken and arguably extreme advocates for union power is probably going to be running the most powerful union organization in California. With great power comes great responsibility. So in the interests of ALL the workers in California, here are three ideas that Lorena Gonzalez and her union colleagues are invited to consider.

Try Not to Restrict the Supply of Skilled Labor

The consequences of labor in short supply is that employers are required to pay more in order to attract workers. That’s good for workers. But if the pipeline that feeds trained workers into the marketplace is too narrow, there is an economic penalty that harms everyone. The shortage of nurses is a good example. There isn’t merely a short-term crisis in staffing health care workers because of COVID. There’s a long-term crisis as well.

An analysis from 2019, published by the California Policy Center, found that nursing programs in California turned away 62 percent of qualified applicants for lack of openings. The analysis reported, using 2018 data compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation, that by 2030, California will have to replace more than half of its nursing workforce, over 165,000 positions. Meanwhile, California is only graduating around 11,000 trained nurses per year.

There are solutions to the challenge of too few trained nurses. Some positions filled by nurses can be just as effectively filled by nursing assistants with vocational degrees. And the guidelines designed to limit the annual enrollment in approved schools of nursing, set by the California Board of Registered Nursing, can be revised to allow for more accredited private programs to be accepted.

If the union representing nurses wanted to, they could support policies that would safely eliminate the shortage of nurses in California. This may only be one step towards providing better health care to all Californians, but it’s a big one.

These shortages exist across many disciplines where unions could help. The State Building and Construction Trades Council has around 450,000 members in California. Most of their members are currently employed, which is a good thing. But what if California’s state legislature were to start making massive investments in, for example, badly needed water infrastructure? Is the SBCTC ready to support programs to double the number of their trained workers? Are they increasing available vocational training for high school and community college students, along with training for inmates and others who want to reenter the workforce?

It is possible that increasing the supply of workers puts downward pressure on wages. But releasing entire sectors of California’s economy from paralysis due to labor shortages helps all working families, not just those currently enjoying union pay and benefits.

Demand Public Projects That Offer Long-Term Economic Benefit

The classic example in California of a project of dubious value is the High Speed Rail project. Absolutely everything about this project is wrong. The project will never make an operating profit, even if amortizing the stupefying capital costs are not taken into account. It relies on imported rolling stock. It carves a scar across the land that disrupts thousands of private properties and sensitive ecosystems. It is mired in litigation and may never be completed. And supposedly we’re willing to squander countless billions on High Speed Rail because it creates thousands of good paying jobs.

If there is one example of where union power could have been used – and could still be used – to accomplish something truly great for all Californians, it would be to scrap the High Speed Rail project and instead direct that workforce to build something that will benefit Californians for generations. The checklist of worthy projects is urgent and obvious: Resurface and widen the freeways to prepare for green, sustainable, autonomous, high-speed next generation vehicles. Repair the aqueducts and seismically retrofit the dams, build plants to recycle 100 percent of urban wastewater, and add a few more offstream reservoirs to capture runoff, and bring California’s remarkable water system into the 21st century. These projects create just as many good jobs, but they also make California a better place.

Why won’t California’s unions demand these projects, instead of supporting High Speed Rail? Exploring the reasons for this exposes an ugly truth. California’s unions are unwilling to stand up to the environmentalist lobby, and the only major construction project that California’s powerful environmentalists apparently approve of is High Speed Rail. And even these environmentalists, if they’ve got any common sense at all, know that High Speed Rail isn’t going to do anything to help the environment. But unions want work, and environmentalists don’t want better roads and more water, so this hideous compromise is the best they can collectively come up with. Disclaimer: This is overstating the situation. But only slightly.

It isn’t labor costs that are the reason infrastructure costs so much in California. It’s the excessive cost of permitting and out-of-control litigation. California’s construction unions, if they want to advocate policies that will help all the workers in California, need to demand more spending on water and transportation infrastructure. At the same time, they need to demand regulatory reform so money can be spent on heavy construction instead paying bureaucrats and litigators.

Recognize that Lowering the Cost-of-Living is Equal to Raising Pay

Increasing wages in an inflationary environment is like a cat chasing its tail. You go around and around but never get to a better place. Unions are hardly the only culprit when it comes to the causes of inflation. But with the political power they wield in Sacramento, every time there is a new proposed law or regulation, they might ask themselves “this might be good for our members, but how will this affect the overall cost of living?” State spending on better roads and more water infrastructure, to stick to those fundamental examples, lowers the cost of living. Better roads and more water means it is easier to build new homes. More water means less expensive water, which means row crops such as lettuce and tomatoes, along with dairy products (cows eat alfalfa), can be produced in-state at lower prices than imported products.

California’s unions could use their power to deregulate the timber industry. Loggers have been driven out of California, relocating to states like Georgia, or nations like New Zealand, where the cost of operating is far less – not because labor is cheaper, but because regulations are more reasonable. Imagine if California’s timber industry were revived, producing 6.0 billion board feet a year again, like they did in the 1990s? Imagine if sawmills were back, and framing lumber could be imported from Redding instead of from British Columbia. Imagine all those union jobs for loggers and mill workers, but at the same time imagine the cost of lumber for homes costing a fraction of what it costs today in California.

There are cases, as noted, where literally hundreds of thousands of union jobs can be created at the same time as the overall cost-of-living is lowered, because the jobs that are created are producing a long-term economic return. Water and transportation infrastructure, along with a revitalized logging industry, are examples of this. The High Speed Rail project as it is currently envisioned in California, on the other hand, has the precise opposite effect. It is a long-term economic drain.

California has instead created a regulatory environment that in every way has priced people out of the ability to make a living. Home prices are out of reach, because there are not adequate enabling roads and supplies of water to facilitate home building, and because the price of lumber and other building materials is far higher than in other parts of the country. All of this can be fixed, and unions in California can take the lead in fixing it.

Lorena Gonzalez and the labor movement she is taking over must ask themselves: Do we want to continue on a path that suits our membership, but destroys opportunities for everyone else who is trying to run a small business or manage a household in California, or do we want to confront some tough questions and get out of our comfort zone?

This article first appeared on the website of the California Globe.

Proposed ballot measure would create water infrastructure

Silicon Valley is known for its startup culture where so-called angel investors provide financing to launch companies that aspire to change the world.

Innovations spawned in Silicon Valley have indeed changed the world, and in the process, made the San Francisco Bay Area home to thousands of near-billionaires and billionaires.

With wealth like that comes social responsibility and political power, and many of the individuals wielding this wealth have stepped up. Powerful individuals from Silicon Valley are changing the destiny of the world.

Might not the world’s destiny be improved if there was abundant water, everywhere? Shouldn’t California set an example to the world, instead of accepting a future of water scarcity and rationing?

The More Water Now campaign was formed to qualify the Water Infrastructure Funding Act to appear as a state ballot initiative in November. Nearly every expert in California agrees that more water infrastructure is necessary; that conservation alone will not protect Californians from the impact of climate change. Projects to capture storm runoff and recycle urban wastewater are urgently needed, and this initiative provides the funding to get it done.

Nonetheless, the campaign finds itself in the inexplicable position of having a solution everyone wants, but nobody wants to pay to qualify it for the ballot.

Private sector construction unions, who could enlist hundreds of thousands of their members to sign petitions, are hesitant to take on the environmentalist lobby. Construction contractors have deep pockets, but don’t want to see environmental activists target them in retaliation for their support. Water agencies all over California desperately need the funds this initiative would unlock, but don’t want to rock the boat too much.

Farmers offer the most poignant example of why the More Water Campaign still hasn’t attracted more financial support. With no water to irrigate crops, they’re just trying to survive. Now, with an initiative that focuses as much on urban water recycling as on storing runoff, the farmers expect help from other sectors, as they should.

So where are the angels? With the real cost of food, water, energy and housing higher now than they were 40 years ago, whatever happened to the Silicon Valley mantra of “better, faster, cheaper”? Does that value only apply to cyberspace, and not the real world?

There is a strong environmentalist argument in favor of more water infrastructure. With the threat of climate change, the need to upgrade California’s water infrastructure becomes more urgent, not less.

This initiative funds projects to store storm runoff in off-stream reservoirs and underground aquifers. It funds projects to recycle urban wastewater. It leaves the choice of projects to approve up to the California Water Commission, which environmentalists can hardly accuse of being hostile to environmentalist priorities.

There is also a compelling economic argument for more water infrastructure. Subsidizing water infrastructure is easily a tax neutral proposition, if not positive. Lowering the cost of water means lower prices for food, utility bills, housing and all other products and services that depend on affordable water.

This means tax revenues spent subsidizing water projects are offset by less government spending on subsidies and rebates to low- and middle-income households. And the economic growth enabled by more affordable water creates more profits and more tax revenue.

This simple economic argument, which leans old-school Democrat and decentralizes wealth, used to inform public infrastructure spending without debate. In the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration publicly funded roads, public buildings, rural electrification and water infrastructure that are still paying economic dividends today. Similarly, in the 1950s and 1960s, the California State Water Project publicly funded a water system that, despite decades of neglect, enables millions to live in coastal cities.

It is time to upgrade California’s water infrastructure for the 21st century. Voters deserve the chance to make that happen.

Where are the angels?

This article originally appeared as guest commentary on the website Cal Matters.

Here is a plan to create more water for California

Former Congressman Tom Campbell’s recent commentary “Why the delay on critical water storage projects,” published on these pages on January 3, criticized the California Water Commission’s ongoing failure to build the water storage projects that were approved by voters in 2014. There is an answer to the concerns raised by Campbell: The Water Infrastructure Funding Act of 2022, a constitutional initiative proposed for the November 2022 state ballot.

This initiative, currently being circulated for signatures, requires two percent of the state’s general fund be used to construct new water supply projects, and it doesn’t sunset until new projects add five million acre feet per year to the state’s water supply. Two million acre feet per year can come from waste water recycling, another 1 million from conservation programs, and the rest from runoff capture into off-stream reservoirs and aquifers. And to ensure projects are environmentally responsible, it still gives the California Water Commission the final authority over what projects to fund.

Instead of identifying specific projects for funding, this initiative carefully defines eligible projects to include everything that would produce more water, from conservation and water recycling, aquifer recharge, new reservoirs and aqueduct restoration to runoff capture and brackish/ocean water desalination. It also funds remediation projects, such as replacing the pipes in public schools in Los Angeles.

The initiative is attracting broad based and bipartisan support. The centerpiece of the proposed initiative is the requirement to set aside two percent of the state general fund until 5 million acre feet of water per year is produced by a combination of new water projects and new conservation programs. But this goal is accompanied by a provision of equal importance, a project category eligible for funding that focuses not only on water quantity, but water quality, and water equity. Quoting from the initiative itself (Section 3, subsection (b), part 6), eligible for funding are “projects designed to increase the clean, safe and affordable supply of water to all Californians with emphasis on California’s disadvantaged communities.”

There is a strong environmentalist argument in favor of more water infrastructure. If climate change is a genuine threat, then the need to upgrade California’s water infrastructure becomes more urgent, not less. This initiative funds projects to store storm runoff in off-stream reservoirs and underground aquifers. It funds projects to recycle urban wastewater. It leaves the choice of projects to approve up to the Water Commission, which environmentalists can hardly accuse of being hostile to environmentalist priorities.

There is also a compelling economic argument for more water infrastructure. Subsidizing water infrastructure is easily a tax neutral proposition, if not positive. Lowering the cost of water means lower prices for food, utility bills, housing, and all other products and services that depend on affordable water. This means tax revenues spent subsidizing water projects are offset by less government spending on subsidies and rebates to low and middle income households. And the economic growth enabled by more affordable water creates more profits and more tax revenue.

This simple economic argument, which leans old-school Democrat and decentralizes wealth, used to inform public infrastructure spending without debate. In the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration publicly funded roads, public buildings, rural electrification, and water infrastructure that are still paying economic dividends today. Similarly, in the 1950s and 1960s, the California State Water Project publicly funded a water system that, despite decades of neglect, enables millions to live in coastal cities.

It is time to upgrade California’s water infrastructure for the 21st century. Voters deserve the chance to make that happen.

Edward Ring is the lead proponent of the Water Infrastructure Funding Act of 2022, a proposed state ballot initiative.

This article originally appeared as a guest opinion in the Orange County Register.

California Needs an Angel to Promote New Infrastructure to Harvest the Rain

It’s raining again in California. In fact, it’s pouring. But nearly all that water, tens of millions of acre-feet, is running into the ocean. California has a water system built for 20 million people. Neglected and failing and strained to the brink, it nonetheless now serves a state of nearly 40 million people.

The conventional wisdom in California impels politicians to build nothing, attribute water scarcity to climate change, and limit household water consumption to 50 gallons per person per day. It impels them to redefine “infrastructure” as redistribution of wealth in order to achieve “equity,” while castigating actual infrastructure as an unwarranted consumer of planet-destroying energy and a stain on sacred ecosystems.

This is a scam. Saving the planet may be the supposed moral imperative behind policies that create scarcity, but the true motivation is power and greed. In reality, imposing scarcity is a convenient way to consolidate political power and economic resources in the hands of existing elites, who hope and expect the multitudes will assuage their downward mobility with online Soma.

Genuine infrastructure creates opportunities for everyone. Neglecting public infrastructure—the real kind, i.e., water, energy, and transportation assets—is itself regressive. The wealthy don’t care if their water bills or their electricity bills triple. Corporate monopolists benefit when basic utility inputs triple in price, because it kills the emerging competition which increases their market share. This is an elemental truth that everyone from John Steinbeck to Ayn Rand warned us about. But the progressives in California ignore it, to the incredulous delight of every hedge fund predator on Earth.

If Californians are to avoid a future where they have to endure permanent water rationing because of inadequate infrastructure, it would only require a few individuals among the economic elite to break with the pack. As it is, in the wealthiest, most innovative place on earth, ordinary citizens are being conditioned to accept algorithmically monitored lives of scarcity, supposedly to save the planet.

Where Are the Angels?

Silicon Valley is known for its startup culture where so-called angels provide financing to launch companies that aspire to change the world. Innovations spawned in the Silicon Valley have indeed changed the world, and in the process, made the San Francisco Bay Area home to hundreds, if not thousands of near-billionaires and billionaires.

With wealth like that comes social responsibility and political power, and many of the individuals wielding this wealth have stepped up. Whether nurturing new startups with the potential to usher in the next generation of innovations, or political activism at a scale rarely seen in American history, powerful individuals from Silicon Valley are changing the destiny of the world. Might not the world’s destiny be improved if there was abundant water, everywhere? Might not California set an example to the world, instead of accepting a future of water scarcity and rationing?

So who among the elites will expose the scam? Who will be a populist angel? For a few million dollars, a sum that any one of California’s hundreds of mega-millionaires might throw down the way normal people buy a latte, an initiative to fund water infrastructure could be placed on California’s state ballot. This, at least, would give Californians a choice.

The More Water Now campaign was formed earlier this year to qualify the Water Infrastructure Funding Act to appear as a state ballot initiative in November 2022. Virtually every expert in California agrees that more water infrastructure is necessary, that conservation alone cannot guarantee a reasonable and reliable water supply to Californians, much less cope with climate change. Projects to capture storm runoff and recycle urban wastewater are urgently needed, and this initiative would provide the funding to get it done. California does not have inadequate water. It has inadequate water policies.

The campaign nevertheless finds itself offering a solution everyone wants yet nobody wants to fund.

Private-sector construction unions, who could enlist hundreds of thousands of their members to sign petitions, have an understandable reluctance to take on the environmentalist lobby. Construction contractors who design and build infrastructure have deep pockets but don’t want to see well-funded activists target them in retaliation for their support, jeopardizing existing projects. Water agencies all over California desperately need the funds this initiative would unlock, but worry that the proposals for which they currently await approval would be denied by state bureaucrats with a demonstrated hostility to new infrastructure.

Farmers offer the most poignant example of why the More Water Campaign hasn’t attracted more financial support. With no water to irrigate crops, they’re just trying to survive. And for the few with the resources to fight, why bother? They already supported a 2014 water bond that passed; but still nothing has been built. Then farmers backed the 2018 water bond that was narrowly rejected by voters, and the 2020 “Dams Not Trains” initiative that didn’t qualify for the ballot. Now, with an initiative that focuses as much on urban water recycling as on storing runoff, the farmers expect help from other sectors, as they should.

So where are the angels? Where is the angel who famously said, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters?” Doesn’t that reflect a more sweeping sentiment, that we need to invest in genuine productive assets, because the real costs of food, water, energy, and housing are higher now than they were 40 years ago? Whatever happened to the Silicon Valley mantra of “better, faster, cheaper”? Does that aspiration only apply to cyberspace, and not the real world?

Water Abundance Helps the Environment and the Economy

There is a strong environmentalist argument in favor of more water infrastructure. If climate change is a genuine threat, then the need to upgrade California’s water infrastructure becomes more urgent, not less. This initiative would fund projects to store storm runoff in off-stream reservoirs and underground aquifers. It funds projects to recycle urban wastewater. It leaves the choice of projects to approve up to the Water Commission, which environmentalists can hardly accuse of being hostile to environmentalist priorities.

There is also a compelling economic argument for more water infrastructure, but despite its merit, it has no effective constituency today. Subsidizing water infrastructure is easily a tax-neutral proposition, if not a net positive. By lowering the cost of water, the price of food, utility bills, housing, and all other products and services that depend on affordable water go down. This means the tax revenues spent subsidizing water projects are offset by less government spending on subsidies and rebates to low and middle-income households. At the same time, the economic growth enabled by more affordable water creates more profits and more tax revenue.

This simple economic argument, which leans old-school Democrat and decentralizes wealth, used to inform public infrastructure spending without debate. Now it’s rarely even discussed, and when it is, it’s dismissed by libertarian Republicans as wasteful folly and by progressive Democrats as crony capitalism. But back in the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration publicly funded roads, public buildings, rural electrification, and water infrastructure—all of which are still paying economic dividends today. Similarly, back in the 1950s and 1960s, the California State Water Project publicly funded a water system that, despite decades of neglect, still enables millions to live in coastal cities.

It is time to upgrade California’s water infrastructure for the 21st century. It is time to upgrade all of California’s infrastructure. But thanks to institutional fear and hidden economic agendas, the conventional wisdom is to frame inadequacy as virtue. Where are the rebels with the means to challenge this destiny? Where are the rebels with the temerity to embrace a future of abundance?

Where are the angels?

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

God Sent the Rain, But We Need an Angel to Build the Infrastructure to Manage It

If Californians are to avoid a future where they have to endure permanent water rationing because of inadequate water infrastructure, a few members of the economic elite will have to break with the pack. As it is, in the wealthiest, most innovative place on earth, ordinary citizens are being conditioned to accept algorithmically monitored lives of scarcity, supposedly to save the planet. But in reality, scarcity is a convenient way to consolidate political power and economic resources in the hands of existing elites, who count on the multitudes to assuage their downward mobility with online Soma.

So who will break with the pack? Who will be an Angel? For a few million dollars, a sum that any one of California’s hundreds of mega millionaires might throw down the way normal people buy a latte, an initiative to fund water infrastructure could be placed on the ballot. This, at least, would give Californians a choice.

The More Water Now campaign was formed earlier this year to qualify the Water Infrastructure Funding Act to appear as a state ballot initiative in November 2022. Virtually every expert in California agrees that more water infrastructure is necessary, that conservation alone cannot guarantee a reasonable and reliable water supply to Californians, much less cope with climate change. Projects to capture storm runoff and recycle urban wastewater are urgently needed, and this initiative would provide the funding to get it done.

Nonetheless, the campaign finds itself offering a solution everyone wants, but nobody wants to pay for.

Private sector construction unions, who could enlist hundreds of thousands of their members to sign petitions, have an understandable reluctance to take on the environmentalist lobby. Construction contractors that design and build infrastructure have deep pockets, but don’t want to see well funded activists target them in retaliation for their support, jeopardizing existing projects. Water agencies all over California desperately need the funds this initiative would unlock, but worry that the proposals for which they currently await approval would be denied by state bureaucrats with a demonstrated hostility to new infrastructure.

Farmers offer the most poignant example of why the More Water Campaign hasn’t attracted more financial support. With no water to irrigate crops, they’re just trying to survive. And for the few with the resources to fight, why? They supported the 2014 water bond that passed but still nothing has been built, the 2018 water bond that was narrowly rejected by voters, and the 2020 “Dams not Trains” initiative that didn’t qualify for the ballot. Now, with an initiative that focuses as much on urban water recycling as on storing runoff, the farmers expect help from other sectors, as they should.

So where are the Angels? Where is the Angel who famously said “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters?” Doesn’t that reflect a more sweeping sentiment, that we need to invest in genuine productive assets, because the real cost of food, water, energy and housing are higher now than they were forty years ago? Whatever happened to the Silicon Valley mantra of “better, faster, cheaper”? Does that value only apply to cyberspace, and not the real world?

There is a strong environmentalist argument in favor of more water infrastructure. If climate change is a genuine threat, then the need to upgrade California’s water infrastructure becomes more urgent, not less. This initiative funds projects to store storm runoff in off-stream reservoirs and underground aquifers. It funds projects to recycle urban wastewater. It leaves the choice of projects to approve up to the Water Commission, which environmentalists can hardly accuse of being hostile to environmentalist priorities.

There is also a compelling economic argument for more water infrastructure, but despite its merit, it has no effective constituency today. Subsidizing water infrastructure is easily a tax neutral proposition, if not positive. By lowering the cost of water, the price of food, utility bills, housing, and all other products and services that depend on affordable water go down. This means the tax revenues spent subsidizing water projects are offset by less government spending on subsidies and rebates to low and middle income households. At the same time, the economic growth enabled by more affordable water creates more profits and more tax revenue.

This simple economic argument, which leans old-school Democrat and decentralizes wealth, used to inform public infrastructure spending without debate. Now it’s rarely even discussed, and when it is, it’s dismissed by libertarian Republicans as wasteful folly and by progressive Democrats as crony capitalism. But back in the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration publicly funded roads, public buildings, rural electrification, and water infrastructure that are still paying economic dividends today. Similarly, back in the 1950s and 1960s, the California State Water Project publicly funded a water system that, despite decades of neglect, enables millions to live in coastal cities.

It is time to upgrade California’s water infrastructure for the 21st century. It is time to upgrade all of California’s infrastructure. But thanks to institutional fear and hidden economic agendas, the conventional wisdom is to frame inadequacy as virtue. Where are the rebels with the means to challenge this destiny? Where are the rebels with the temerity to embrace a future of abundance?

Where are the Angels?

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.