Tag Archive for: California water

California Water Facts for Legislators

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Everyone in California agrees that water policies need to adapt to changing times. There is even growing agreement that enforcing draconian reductions to farm water allocations (which will eliminate all but the most powerful corporate agribusinesses) and outlawing household outdoor watering will not only fail to solve the problem, but is a tough and undesirable solution. And so the debate over more rationing versus more water supply projects goes on.

Missing from the debate over water policy in California, however, especially among the state legislators who need to do something about it, are some basic overall metrics regarding how much water we need, what various types of water projects cost, how much potential capacity each type of project delivers, and how much energy is involved. Here’s a summary.

When quantifying macro variables of this nature, first it is important to note that for any project category, costs are not uniform. A wastewater recycling plant, for example, will cost more to construct and more to operate depending on the type of wastewater it has to process. The cost to build and operate a conveyance to deliver water from a recycling plant or desalination plant direct to the consumer or to a storage facility will vary depending on the length of the conveyance and any necessary elevation changes. So these are rough numbers. They are nonetheless vital to begin a more informed discussion of water policy options in California.

The primary measurement used to describe large amounts of water are units of one million acre feet (MAF). To provide an overall perspective, in a wet year, up to 300 MAF of rain falls within California’s borders. With the exception of the upper Klamath Basin, and a few lesser examples, California’s geography is such that our watersheds are roughly congruent with our state border. In a dry year, as little as 100 MAF of rain falls in California. This rainfall either percolates, transpirates, evaporates, or runs down the streams and rivers to the ocean.

Also each year, Californians currently divert about 75 MAF as follows: about 8 MAF to urban water consumers, 34 MAF to farmers, and 34 MAF of “environmental water” to maintain wetlands, river ecosystems, and the health of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. These numbers represent the seven year average between 2011 and 2018 as reported by the California Dept. of Water Resources.

During these same seven years, to divert 75 MAF each year, California got 5 MAF from the Colorado River, 19 MAF from groundwater extraction, 15 MAF from reuse and recycled water, 6 MAF from federal projects, and 7 MAF from local projects. For much more details on what’s behind these numbers, refer to the 2018 update of the California Water Plan.

To harvest more water from increasingly unpredictable rainfall, to recycle more water that would otherwise be treated and released into the Pacific, and to desalinate brackish water inland and ocean water on the coast, here are some cost estimates. As an aside, this is a hypothetical plan. Do not be alarmed. Plans change. Let’s all work together.

The total amount noted here, $118 billion, is not chosen by accident. The 1957 California Water Plan had a total estimated construction cost of $11.8 billion.  In early 2022 dollars, $11.8 billion is worth $118.5 billion. The state budget in 1957 was $1.9 billion, with capital outlay of $440 million, 23 percent of the entire budget. Through a combination of bonds and general fund allocations, back in 1957 the California state legislature resolved to spend an amount equal to six times their annual budget to build water infrastructure. Yet $118.5 billion is only 40 percent of today’s $286 billion state budget.

When evaluating the economics of water supply projects, the construction cost divided by the annual output (or “yield” in the case of a reservoir) is a useful ratio. For example, the projected cost to build the proposed Temperance Flat Reservoir divided by its expected annual yield is equal to $20,000 per acre foot, exactly the same as the cost/output ratio to build a desalination plant.

One may argue that Temperance Flat is on the extreme end of the cost equation – which by the way should not eliminate this critical south-of-the-delta reservoir opportunity from consideration – but desalination costs are also overstated.

For example, raising the height of the Shasta Dam is an extremely cost effective way to secure more water supply, at $4,000 of construction cost per acre foot of yield. But that cost-effectiveness is matched by desalination projects in Israel today that are not subject to California’s insane regulatory environment, protracted permitting process, needlessly inflated materials costs, and endless and very costly litigation. Desalination projects cost one-fifth as much to build per unit of capacity in Israel as they do in California, and as with all infrastructure in this state, most of the difference is the result of political choices.

Surprisingly, surveying various proposals for urban water recycling to potable standards yielded a range of costs much higher than anticipated. These costs, however, also displayed the widest range of variation, depending on every imaginable factor – differing topography, real estate values, labor costs, design standards, the local political and legal environment, and the character of the wastewater being treated. In general, expect construction costs for wastewater treatment to cost less than desalination in most cases, but not much less. The $18 billion cost cited above to treat 2.0 MAF/year is based on a proprietary study examining a statewide solution. It’s a lot of money, but worth every penny.

What about energy?

California’s average electricity consumption is 57 gigawatts. Very best case, to convert all end user energy to electric – transportation, heating, everything – would require California’s grid to expand its capacity to deliver on average just over 100 gigawatts. What about the energy needed to increase California’s water supply?

Using electricity to pump a million acre feet per year via the California aqueduct to Los Angeles consumes about 400 megawatts of continuous power, less about 100 megawatts that is recovered as the water flows back downhill into the Los Angeles Basin.

Desalinating one million acre feet of seawater per year requires 400 megawatts of continuous power, which is a mere 0.4 percent of California’s 100 gigawatts minimum targeted future generating capacity. Therefore to deliver five million acre feet of new water in either of these manners would consume less than two percent of 100 gigawatts.

The energy cost to reuse wastewater is typically less than half that, i.e., about 150 megawatts of continuous power per million acre feet per year. In the case of desalination and wastewater reuse, energy is also required to deliver the water, but because these facilities are typically located near municipal groundwater basins or municipal water systems, the required delivery energy is unlikely to ever require more than half-again as much power, i.e., no more than 75 megawatts of continuous power per million acre feet per year; depending on the topography, potentially much less. Water pumped via aqueducts will typically develop enough pressure as it is pumped over the hills from inland sources and then piped downward into coastal cities to not require additional power for final delivery to consumers.

Providing general information on any specific water project is fraught with controversy. But the energy costs for new water can be easily debunked. If California’s politicians are committed to an electric age, the energy cost for more water is trivial compared to what’s going to be necessary to electrify the state’s residential, commercial, industrial and transportation sectors.

Critics of building more water infrastructure are also on thin ice when they claim it will cost too much money. Capital investments in water supply infrastructure yield long-term economic returns and greatly improve the quality of life for every resident. Spending $100 billion or more on these projects is well within the capacity of California’s economy to sustain. And at the risk of committing conservative heresy, putting $100 billion into the pockets of skilled construction workers will stimulate the economy in the short term, just as having all this new water will stimulate California’s economy in the long term. So channel some of those public education bucks into vocational training. We need the workers, and skills pay better than BAs.

If heavy and perennial rains return to California, spending $100 billion on these projects will ensure perpetual water abundance. But if rains don’t come back stronger than ever, spending this money will create secure climate resilience. Either way, it’s a win.

This article originally appeared in the California Globe.

How the Scarcity Agenda Benefits Oligopolies

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AUDIO: How financial speculators benefit from politics designed to create scarcity, and how environmentalism is used as the moral justification for scarcity policies. Edward Ring with Kara McKinney on OANN’s Tipping Point.

Foreign Firms Siphoning Water From America’s Southwest

While California Dries out and Burns, Bureaucrats Hype Diversity

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A few months ago, a friend of mine in the water business participated in a lunchtime seminar in Sacramento on the topic of how to increase diversity in the water industry. Being a civil engineer, he thought the discussion would focus on how to develop diverse sources of water in a drought stricken state. Instead, as he later related to me with refreshing clarity, “the whole event was about how to get rid of white men.”

The man who hosted this event was Wade Crowfoot, who enjoyed media adulation in 2020 when he reportedly challenged President Trump on the science of climate change. Trump, who was being briefed by California state officials on the wildfires ravaging the state that summer, had said “It’ll just start getting cooler, you just watch.” Crowfoot responded, “I wish science agreed with you.”

When it comes to who’s running California, there’s nothing unique about Wade Crowfoot. In California, reducing the percentage of white men in any position of responsibility and hyping the “climate emergency” are behavioral prerequisites for any ambitious public servant. But to hear them endlessly parrot these themes can be quite frustrating, since it deflects attention away from their poor job performance.

Crowfoot’s portfolio includes management of California’s forests, which have suffered catastrophic fires in recent years. But the reason these fires have burned with such unprecedented ferocity is not primarily due to heat waves and drought, but due to appalling mismanagement, for which we have hostile bureaucrats and environmentalist extremists to thank

Over the past century, at a cumulative cost in today’s dollars that by now probably exceeds $100 billion, Californians have become very good at suppressing natural fires. Up until the 1990s, the resultant buildup of tinder was manageable, because property owners could still do controlled burns, graze cattle, and thin undergrowth, while the timber industry removed up to 6 billion board feet per year. Today, to burn, graze, or thin either requires preposterously complex, expensive and protracted permitting, or is simply impossible. And today, thanks to relentless harassment and overregulation, California’s timber industry harvest has been cut to less than 1.5 billion board feet a year.

That’s why the forests are burning like hell, Mr. Crowfoot. Once you’ve allowed them to get this overcrowded, they’ll burn like hell even if we weren’t having heat waves, or enduring another drought. The tree density in much of the state is more than five times what is historically normal. These desperately overcrowded trees absorb all the moisture from rain, reducing badly needed runoff into streams and reservoirs, but it still isn’t enough because there are too many of them. If California’s forests aren’t properly managed, soon, these fires will eventually destroy them all. As it is, every year California’s superfires foul the air with more CO2 and soot than millions of electric cars could ever offset, and the streams are choked with ash and eroded soil from every scorched and ruined mountainside.

And as this tragic destruction of the environment continues, California’s politicians and bureaucrats talk about banning electric cars, and purging their agencies of as many white men as they can. Crowfoot, by the way, and for all we care, looks to be about as white as Elizabeth Warren, despite his professionally advantageous surname. But we don’t care about Wade Crowfoot’s ethnic origins. We don’t care about anyone’s ethnic origins. We just want them to do their job.

They’re not. Crowfoot, along with Newsom and other public sector notables, recently announced a new Water Supply Strategy. It included completing the proposed Sites project, a badly needed off-stream reservoir that could store 1.5 million acre feet of storm runoff. Some environmentalist opponents of Sites even had the nerve to argue it isn’t economically feasible, after it was environmentalists who saw to it that 50 percent of the annual yield has to be used for “ecosystem improvements.” Hard to pay off an investment when you can only sell 50 percent of its output!

But more to the point, as soon as Crowfoot and Newsom announced a plan that included finally building the Sites Reservoir, the environmentalist bureaucrats and activists pounced, attacking the reservoir with the full complicity of a captive media. Because the plan also included expanding the Pacheco Reservoir, that, too, has attracted intensified opposition.

If environmentalists had always had the power they have now, California as we know it would not exist. Hardly anyone would be able to live here.

So why don’t Crowfoot and Newsom immediately and publicly stand up to these environmentalist zealots, who have done as much to harm California’s environment as they have done to help it, and who have stopped water infrastructure development in its tracks for nearly fifty years? Why don’t they call them out unequivocally, and tell them, flat out “you are destroying our civilization and you must back off.”

Instead, they go through the motions of their jobs, occasionally saying words that need to be said, but never seriously challenging a process that has become paralyzed by institutionalized green extremism. Get them started on diversity or the climate emergency, on the other hand, and they enter a safe comfort zone where they can drone from dawn till midnight, day after day, forever, and everyone that matters will nod approvingly.

To be clear: there is nothing wrong with seeing value in having a diverse assortment of ethnicities represented in leadership positions in the state bureaucracy. But if bureaucrats like Wade Crowfoot want to move closer to proportional representation by ethnicity in state agencies, they might start by renouncing the teachers union. This leftist political machine, exercising all but absolute control over public education in California, suffers from the same malady as Crowfoot’s natural resources agency. Instead of teaching math and English language fundamentals so graduates are qualified to compete for jobs based on their competence instead of their color, they focus on indoctrinating students to view themselves as victims of the white heteropatriarchy.

Similarly, if the bureaucrats controlling California’s regulatory agencies want to save the forests, instead of focusing on how many electric cars are sold, or working so hard to depopulate their agencies of white men, they might bring back responsible logging and streamline permits for mechanical thinning, controlled burns, and grazing to reduce tinder. If they want to save civilization, instead of bloviating endlessly about the climate emergency, they might do more than announce a new water supply strategy, they might actually finish new, major water supply infrastructure projects.

This article originally appeared in the Epoch Times.

California’s Water Mismanagement

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As Californians cope with another blistering summer during what is their third consecutive year of drought, the state legislature has still done nothing of substance to upgrade California’s water supply infrastructure. From the Klamath Basin on the Oregon border to the Imperial Valley on the Mexican border, farmers can’t irrigate their crops, and in every major city, residents are having their access to water rationed.

Not only is California’s state legislature and various state and federal agencies failing to invest in new water infrastructure, but they are actively undermining attempts to deliver more water to the state’s residents. In May, the California Coastal Commission denied a permit to Poseidon Water to build a desalination plant that would have produced 60,000 acre feet of water per year.

If desalination is the irredeemable problem child of water infrastructure according to environmentalists, surface reservoirs are its evil cousin. Hence the proposed Sites Reservoir, which would provide another 1.5 million acre feet of badly needed storage capacity, still faces what may be insurmountable odds: the requirement to allocate half of its yield to ecosystems means the remaining water the Sites Project Authority will be permitted to sell to cites and farmers may not be sufficient to qualify the project for construction loan guarantees.

The environmentalist assault on California’s water enabled civilization, unchallenged by the state legislature, is full spectrum. On the Klamath River, with an urgency that is entirely missing with respect to constructing the Sites Reservoir, or any other reservoirs, plans to remove four hydroelectric dams are moving quickly towards realization. Similar plans to demolish two dams on the Eel River are also moving forward.

There remains only one politically acceptable solution to water scarcity in California, and that’s rationing. But the cause of scarcity isn’t merely the worsening droughts we’re experiencing. It’s the active demolition of existing water infrastructure assets, an active and very effective institutional hostility towards constructing new water infrastructure, combined with relentlessly escalating prohibitions on how much water can be withdrawn from rivers and groundwater basins.

Water is life. If the planet is getting hotter and dryer, the last thing we should be trying to do is turn our cities into heat islands with desert landscaping, and taking our farmland out of production. We should be producing more water than ever, using every innovative infrastructure solution possible. We should be greening our cities and protecting our agricultural economy. We should be adapting, creating water surpluses to mitigate the hotter, drier seasons, not retreating into a parched, micromanaged and rationed dystopia.

If environmentalist objections aren’t enough to stop water projects, the tremendous cost of these projects becomes the justification for inaction. But California’s state general fund, per capita and adjusting for inflation, has doubled in just the past decade. What have Californians gotten for all that spending? More crime, failing schools, mismanaged forests, outmigration of people and businesses, and water rationing? State funding of water supply infrastructure is necessary so amortization of the capital cost doesn’t impose an unsustainable financial burden on ratepayers. With so much growth in spending, no state politician can honestly claim there aren’t billions available to invest in water.

The clincher for opponents of water supply projects is the energy cost. But this, too, is inaccurate. Even the most energy intensive way of supplying water, though desalination, would require only a small fraction of the electricity Californians are planning to generate to usher in the electric age. If California’s grid eventually averages a 100 gigawatt load, and that is the absolute minimum necessary if the state legislature is serious about going all-electric, desalinating 2.5 million acre feet of seawater per year would only use one percent of that load. Even the massive California aqueduct, with six pumping stations to transport water 450 miles from northern rivers into the Los Angeles Basin, only requires a net energy cost per unit of water delivered of about two-thirds that of desalination. As for wastewater recycling, millions of acre feet can be recovered at an energy cost equal to only one-third that of desalination. There is plenty of energy available to eliminate water scarcity in California.

The message the state legislature clearly has not even bothered to acknowledge, much less promulgate, much less act upon, is the value of abundance. In a world of worsening water and food scarcity, it is the obligation of a place as wealthy and innovative as California to set an example not of austerity and rationing, but of abundance and resiliency. This is a pragmatic and a moral choice that will offer hope to everyone in the world.

Who will challenge politicians, media, corrupt bureaucrats, opportunistic oligarchs, and environmentalists, with a message of abundance and hope? Who will unswervingly assert that we do not have to succumb to rationing and impoverishing our lives in order to protect ourselves and the planet, that we can adapt, we can thrive, we can prosper, and we can set a inspiring example for the world to emulate?

Californians can produce surplus water. It is technically feasible, it is economically feasible, and it is environmentally sustainable. If the state legislature will not act, voters can accomplish these goals with citizen ballot initiatives, and by doing so can rapidly overcome decades of accumulated gridlock. We can change the conventional wisdom, and in the process return California’s culture to its essence of freedom, prosperity, trend setting creativity, and abundance in all things, starting with water.

This article originally appeared in Epoch Times.

The Abundance Choice (part 8) – The Union Factor

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The moment we met Robbie Hunter, then president of the State Building and Construction Trades Council, we knew we were in the presence of a man who does not lose. Assemblyman Mathis had urged me to contact the construction unions before we finished our research to write the initiative and began an actual campaign, and through one of his mutual contacts, the meeting was arranged.

Three of us arrived at the SBCTC’s offices in downtown Sacramento back in August 2021, all of us dressed in our Sunday best; suits, ties, dress shoes. Hunter met us in their lobby, dressed like a man who does real work, wearing a t-shirt with a union logo on the front. As someone without experience meeting a union president, much less negotiating with one, Hunter, a burly man with a trace of an Irish accent, fit the stereotype I’d imagined. And that first meeting was encouraging.

We quickly learned that Hunter and his colleagues were very much in favor of more water infrastructure. They were interested in learning about our proposal and willing to assist with the language. Over the next several weeks we carefully included language that would protect the interests of this union, which has 450,000 members in California.

While nobody on our steering committee had any objection to us reaching out to work with a powerful private sector labor union, we had friends in the conservative community who were going to want an explanation. It wasn’t hard to provide one. All major state-funded major construction projects already use union labor. Why on Earth would we hesitate to guarantee to these unions various provisions that they already had? Our primary objective was to make sure our initiative language didn’t needlessly invite opposition from the construction unions.

All of us knew we were going to need support from construction unions, or at a minimum, neutrality. As we moved from the research phase of our initiative effort into the campaign to qualify it, we attempted to gather together representatives from the various interested parties to work together to support the initiative. There were three primary sources of possible support. The unions were one of those sources. And then there were the farmers.

We knew that California’s farmers could not be the only source of funding to qualify the initiative. Some of the big farmers were betting on scarce water to drive small farmers out of business so they could buy them out. We weren’t going to get any help from them. Other big farmers with the capacity to fund the whole qualification campaign were recognizing, probably accurately, that if they paid most of the money to qualify this, it would get branded as a giveaway to “big ag.” The small farmers, on the other hand, were already squeezed financially, trying to cover their fixed costs without enough water to grow crops on all their land.

The other source of potential support were the big construction contractors. With more time, we might have been able to reach out to more of them. With another dry year, we might have had them coming to us. But we knew that without at least three legs on the stool, the campaign would not have the support it needed. We contacted businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area and Southern California, pitching our idea to any of them that would give us the time. It is interesting to wonder how close we came, because in Sacramento, all of these interest groups – farmers, other business interests, and the unions – had lobbyists and trade representatives who talked to each other.

It was through our union contacts that we were introduced to one of the best polling firms in California, and we thought the polling results would help us. We learned that voter sentiment was overwhelmingly in favor of water infrastructure from almost every angle. Voters didn’t mind spending tax revenue on water supply projects. They ranked the drought and water scarcity as top issues of concern. The only area where the results were disappointing was in response to questions about the environment. Most voters in California will not support anything if they’re convinced it will harm the environment. And this was a dilemma. Because every expert we spoke with agreed that without some relief from California’s strict environmental laws, it won’t matter how much money voters approve for major water supply projects. They won’t get built.

And then it rained. The consensus based on the polling was that if we had a dry winter, this initiative would be approved by voters who would be frustrated by severe restrictions on water use through the summer and fall of 2022. But in December 2021, it rained. And rained. And rained. By the time the deluge subsided, people were headed into the Christmas holidays and focusing on family and vacation. While we redoubled our efforts in January, the momentum was lost and we ran out of time. We also ran out of rain, and we now know there is going to be a fourth year of drought.

But why wouldn’t the unions support our initiative? What factors prevented them, this time, from getting behind this project? When asked by Paul Rogers, reporting for the San Jose Mercury, Andrew Meredith, who succeeded Hunter as the SBCTC president in early 2022, said the campaign did not gather enough momentum. “We need to be diligent and ensure that our contributions translate to a net benefit for our members,” he said.

Meredith was making an understatement. While more major state-funded infrastructure projects would immediately and directly translate into more jobs for SBCTC members, for them to have supported our initiative would have constituted a declaration of war against many of the special interests they have historically fought beside.

In particular, the SBCTC would have gone up against the California Teachers Association and other powerful public sector unions representing state and local government workers, which would view allocating two percent of the state general fund to construction projects as taking money away from the programs that employ their members.

The SBCTC would have also had to stand up to the environmentalist lobby, which if anything is more powerful than the public sector unions. As we have seen, environmentalists in California are against almost all forms of land development or big civil engineering projects, and they attacked our campaign relentlessly for as long as we were active.

If taking on these two political superpowers weren’t enough, it’s worth asking whether the SBCTC really needed more jobs for their members. If their membership was at or near full employment, where would the tens of thousands of workers have come from to fill the jobs needed to construct off-stream reservoirs, repair aqueducts, and build wastewater recycling plants and the distribution pipes? One might see managing that membership growth as a tantalizing challenge, but perhaps too much trouble if it meant going to war with the public sector unions and the environmentalist community.

These realities put California’s high speed rail project into a revealing context. Very few competent analysts are left who are willing to claim this project will ever make economic or even environmental sense. It will be a drain on the economy and it is a deplorable waste of natural resources. It’s even destined for technological obsolescence, as high speed smart cars, car sharing, ride sharing, passenger drones, and remote work will obviate the need for high speed rail. But the high speed rail project was endorsed by environmentalists. With high speed rail, the union goal of providing jobs for their members was fulfilled without a war. It does not help California.

There is a larger question here for the unions, however, a bigger one than whether or not to have supported the now dormant Water Infrastructure Funding Act of 2022. When are unions going to stand up to environmentalists? And when are private sector unions going to stand up to public sector unions, with whom they have almost nothing in common, apart from the fact that they’re both called “unions”?

If the SBCTC, with 484,000 members, wanted to put our water initiative on the ballot, they could have done it themselves, at relatively low cost. They could have mailed the initiative petition to each of their more than 450,000 member households in California, instructing their members to seriously consider signing and returning the petition, preferably after getting some of their neighbors to also sign it. If this had been done, it is quite possible that they would have collected close to a million signatures with just a few direct mail efforts. And if they had done that, other players on the sidelines, the construction contractors and the farmers, would at that point have certainly joined the campaign.

The power of environmentalists in California is literally strangling the state’s economy. It is one of the primary reasons housing is unaffordable. It is the reason electricity and natural gas is so much more expensive here than in other states. It is the reason we can’t source our own lumber, gas and oil, fertilizer or aggregate right here within the state, and have to import most of it instead. It is the reason we are about shut down Diablo Canyon, a fully paid for source of cheap electricity. Environmentalist power is out of control in California, and private sector unions are one of the only forces in the state with the power to stand up to them, if they choose to do so.

The tendency in these discussions is to overstate each side of the case, so let’s pull back a bit. Nobody wants to destroy the natural environment in California. Nobody in their right mind isn’t grateful for environmentalist accomplishments, from phasing in unleaded gas and catalytic converters, to saving the California Condor. But environmentalists in California have succeeded, with the absolute complicity of the media and the education bureaucracy, in stigmatizing moderate views on environmental issues as extreme. There is nothing extreme about capturing runoff into a few more off-stream reservoirs, raising the height of the Shasta Dam, or, gasp, building one or two more desalination plants on the Southern California Coast. But to advocate these projects, or even to include them as we did as falling within project categories eligible for state funds, environmentalists did everything in their power to destroy our campaign.

The people running construction unions in California know better. They know that if you make it impossible, or nearly impossible, to build anything, the only people who benefit are the wealthiest owners and investors who control the limited and sanctioned means of production. You can put any label you wish on this model of political economy. Feudalism comes immediately to mind. But leave that to the intellectuals. For the workers on the street, what matters is the price of electricity, the price of natural gas, the price of gasoline, the price of housing, the price of food, and the price of water. And among those essentials, water is the enabling core. Water is life.

Our union friends can let California’s water become rationed and privatized, priced sky high to profit a small coterie of owners, and they can watch the ripple effect blow the roof off prices for every downstream essential including housing and food.

Or they can use their considerable power to help rein in environmentalist overreach, realign California politics, and save this great state for all working families.

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

The Abundance Choice (part 7) – An Environmentalist Juggernaut

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Environmentalists in California, who constitute much of the vanguard of environmentalism in the world, have normalized extremism. The solutions they’ve proposed to supposedly save the planet, and the premises they’ve convinced millions of people to accept as beyond debate, constitute one of the greatest threats – if not the greatest threat – to modern civilization today. It is these environmentalists that are themselves the extremists, not the common sense skeptics who question their edicts, or the beleaguered citizens trying to survive their mandates.

The power of the environmentalist juggernaut, or, to be more precise, what has become an environmentalist industrial complex, almost defies description. Their grip on the media, as we have seen in the previous installment, is near absolute. They exercise similar control over how American children are educated in K-12 public schools, as well as what messages are reinforced in almost every institution of higher learning. They have coopted nearly every major corporation, investment bank, hedge fund, sovereign wealth fund, and international institution including the World Bank, the United Nations, and countless others. From every source, the message is always the same: We face imminent doom if we don’t take dramatic collective action immediately to cope with the “climate emergency.”

The good news is that if you want to build more water infrastructure in California, you don’t have to argue the intricacies of climate science. If the Sierra snowpack is to be permanently reduced if not nonexistent, and if all we can expect in a drier future are occasional and erratic but soaking downpours, then we have to build a new water infrastructure that is adapted to this new reality. But despite this logic, environmentalists seem to oppose all new water infrastructure, everywhere. Their endless opposition to the Sites Reservoir, which is designed to capture storm runoff and store it off-stream, ought to be inexplicable. It can only be understood in the context of their broader agenda, which in practice amounts to micromanaging residential indoor water consumption, mandating desert landscaping around homes, and taking half of California’s farmland out of production.

A front page article in the Los Angeles Times on April 13, 2022, written by Ian James, is a recent and very typical example of what environmentalists are planning for California. In the article, titled “California could shrink water use in cities by 30% or more, study finds,” environmentalist spokespersons are quoted with no tough questions asked or balancing perspective solicited. The crux of the study’s findings amounted to this:

“The state’s total urban water use is estimated at 6.6 million acre-feet per year [this does not square with the estimates from the California Dept. of Water Resources, which report average urban use at 7.8 MAF/year]. The study found that a host of existing technologies and standard practices could improve efficiency to reduce total urban use between 30% and 48%. These efficiency measures include fixing leaks in water pipes, replacing inefficient washing machines and toilets, and replacing lawns with plants suited to California’s dry climate, among other things.”

Imagine that. Cutting water use by 48 percent. Forty eight percent. Why would anyone want to do this, when there alternatives?

James’s article is worth examining in some depth, because it reveals additional claims from the Pacific Institute study, entitled “Waste Not, Want Not: The Potential for Urban Conservation in California,” that belie the need to curtail urban water use so drastically. In particular, it makes the following claims:

“The researchers estimated that California has the potential to substantially boost local water supplies by capturing stormwater and storing it in aquifers, instead of allowing it to run off the landscape. Depending on whether it’s a dry year or a wet year, they said, the state could capture between 580,000 and 3 million acre-feet of stormwater in urban areas.”

And…

“California now recycles about 23% of its municipal wastewater, an estimated 728,000 acre-feet, the report said, and has the potential to more than triple the amount that is recycled and reused.”

What this study therefore claims is that just by capturing regional stormwater and recycling wastewater, California’s urban areas can recover and use between 2.0 million and 4.5 million acre feet of additional water per year, meaning their net water consumption, i.e., the amount of water they are going to need from existing sources can drop from – using their numbers – 6.6 million acre feet per year down to between 2.1 and 4.6 million acre feet per year.

First of all, that ought to be plenty, although it would be interesting to find out if the Pacific Institute researchers actually had a serious discussion with any if the engineers at the urban water agencies and flood control districts that would have to figure out how, for example, to grab five inches of torrential rains hitting the Los Angeles Basin in 12 hours and get all of that runoff into an aquifer or reservoir before it made the at most 30 mile trip from the base of the San Gabriel Mountains to the Santa Monica Bay. We’d be all for that, if it were feasible. But maybe the feasibility wasn’t the point; maybe the Pacific Institute wanted to publicize these figures to help opponents of the proposed Sites Reservoir and Huntington Beach desalination plant. After all, who needs off-stream reservoirs or desalination, if we can just capture urban storm runoff?

More to the point, funding runoff capture and funding wastewater recycling were among the centerpieces of our proposed water initiative! And we left it up to the water commission to decide which project applications to fund, only stipulating that funding would not dry up until five million acre feet of new water could be supplied each year. The Pacific Institute, an organization as environmentalist as they come, has just provided a roadmap to finding up to 4.6 million acre feet of that annual goal, if their findings are to be believed.

Nonetheless, the title and the focus of the article in the Los Angeles Times, indeed, the focus of every policy most fervently supported by environmentalists in California today, is use less. Conserve. Cut back. Ration. Take short showers. Kill your water wasting plants and replace them with desert scrub. Sacrifice. And none of it is necessary, either to save the planet or to save money. But that’s the message. That’s their agenda.

The way environmentalists attacked our attempt to qualify a water infrastructure spending initiative gave no quarter. Early in our campaign phase, barely after we’d submitted our final amended version of the initiative, the board of directors at the Orange County Water District were voting on a possible endorsement (they ultimately did vote to endorse). But already the Sierra Club was on hand to object, making claims that indicated they may not have even read the text of the initiative.

In their public comment, made October 6, 2021, they wrote “OCWD would be best placed to funnel its resources towards increasing conservation, stormwater capture, implementing a green streets project similar to LA County’s, repairing leaks and replacing old pipes, earthquake proofing its water systems and remediation of its North plume including other PFAS contaminated wells.”

The problem with these arguments against our effort, to reiterate, is that our measure would fund all of those suggestions. They all would have qualified as eligible projects to be evaluated by the California Water Commission. All the environmentalists critics of our initiative needed to do was read Section 3, starting on page 2 of the full text, items 1-7. It’s all there. Our five million acre foot per year goal – which one may argue that even the Pacific Institute implicitly supports – was only the trigger to end funding. It did not limit eligible project categories only to those that would further achievement of the 5 MAF/year  goal. Everything the Sierra Club was suggesting ought to be in the initiative, was in the initiative.

None of these facts mattered. Including the forbidden solutions of reservoirs and desalination were unforgiveable sins. Within a few months, the environmentalist opposition had coalesced into a coalition that included the following groups: Sierra Club California, California Indian Environmental Alliance, Society of Native Nations, Idle No More, Restore the Delta, Azul, Golden State Salmon Association, Sunrise Movement OC, California Coastal Protection Network, Health the Bay, Surfrider Foundation, Los Angeles Waterkeeper, Orange County Coastkeeper, The River Project, Heal the Bay, and Social Eco Education.

On a website called StopTheWaterScam.com, funded by the “Stop the Water Scam Committee (ID# 1442883),” some amazingly misleading representations were made. On their home page, our initiative was depicted as “a new threat to literally every priority California faces, from public health to education to affordable housing to climate action.” On the website’s “FAQ” page, they made the following claim about our alleged backing, writing “They’re financed by powerful multinational corporations and polluters who want a bottomless slush fund to profit at taxpayer expense.”

All of these are preposterous allegations. How is abundant water a threat to public health? If having a reliable water supply is a prerequisite for building new homes, how does our initiative threaten affordable housing? If climate change is causing less snow and more severe but erratic rainstorms, don’t we need new infrastructure to capture and store the runoff? And if we build infrastructure that makes more water available for farms and cities, then wouldn’t we also have more water available to manage ecosystems? As for “powerful multinational corporations” supposedly behind our effort; which ones? When? Where? Who?

The reasons environmentalists might have had more arguable objections to our initiative centered on the revisions it proposed to the California Environmental Quality Act and to the Coastal Act. But the revisions we made were thoughtful and measured. Virtually everyone we spoke with believed that without the proposed changes to these laws, the initiative would suffer the same fate as Prop. 1 from 2014 – a voter mandate that is stopped in its tracks by a hostile bureaucracy and environmentalist litigants.

What follows are some of the serious questions raised by environmentalists, and how we responded to those questions:

The initiative creates a mechanism to use public funds to subsidize private, for-profit enterprises such as Poseidon desal. Why should the public fund such a project when Poseidon has indicated they are able to proceed without additional subsidies (they are counting on an annual operating subsidy from the Metropolitan Water district)?

The California Water Commission will have the discretion to allocate funding to eligible projects according to a set of criteria and priorities set forth in the measure. Section 3 of the measure provides that projects proposed by public agencies should be prioritized. Thus, the ultimate funding decisions will be made by the Water Commission in accordance with the goal of the measure—completing projects to begin delivery of water to California’s urban and agricultural consumers. There is no guarantee that any private projects would receive funding under the measure. And if a project does not need funding, it will not get funding.

Why is the streamlining of environmental review necessary?

There is NO streamlining of CEQA proposed. Section 5 of the measure provides for streamlined review of judicial CEQA challenges to eligible water projects. Currently, important water projects can be and are stalled through litigation that can last for many years. Under the measure, any challenge to an eligible water supply project is to be resolved (e.g., decided by a court) within 270 days after the certified administrative record is filed with the court. This is substantially similar to previously adopted legislation including AB 900 and subsequent acts based on AB 900 (which expedited treatment of various projects—See the California Office of Planning and Research website), and various other statues providing for litigation streamlining (see also SB 9 Atkins – Jobs and Economic Improvement Through Environmental Leadership Act of 2021 -adopted this year). Water projects must still comply with ALL CEQA substantive reviews.

Specifically, why should the Coastal Commission rely on the EIR submitted to the lead agency without the ability to require “new or revised environmental review”? (First paragraph, p. 15).

First, the Coastal Commission is a responsible agency under CEQA and can fully participate in the CEQA process of any agency involved in a project in the Coastal zone. The Coastal Commission nearly always acts on a project after a local agency has completed a full CEQA review and approvals have been issued. The Coastal Commission then has a certified regulatory process that operates as a functional equivalent of CEQA. This provision would avoid delays associated with “re-creating the wheel” late in the permitting process.

Also, why should the secretary of natural resources’ override authority be applied retroactively?

This provision allows flexibility so that any project that receives funding or is certified as a drought resiliency project may be reviewed, without imposing an arbitrary deadline.

Coastal Commission Executive Director Jack Ainsworth said, ” “This is an insidious maneuver that could allow wealthy corporations to overturn Coastal Commission actions protecting California’s precious coastal resources, public access and coastal communities. Drought in California is our new normal and the Commission understands that responsibly designed desalination facilities will be an important part of California’s water portfolio going forward. We don’t need to gut the Coastal Act in order to provide safe, reliable, affordable drinking water.” Would you respond to that?

We view the Coastal Commission as playing an essential role in projects that are located along California’s coast. That is why Coastal Commission process is retained in the measure, rather than exempt water supply projects which are crucial to the State from Coastal Commission review entirely. The measure simply provides some timelines for the Commission to act on drought resiliency projects and clarifies the environmental review process before the Commission. The measure also provides for an administrative appeal process to the Secretary of Natural Resources. This is very similar to the appeals process within other agencies, such as the Regional Water Board, whose decisions can be appealed to the State Water Board.

What CEQA protections remain if eligible projects are “exempt from CEQA.” Is there a contradiction between what the campaign is saying about the CEQA provisions and what the CEQA provisions actually say? In the language of the initiative at the top of page 14, it says: “(b) Notwithstanding subdivision (a), the Water Commission’s determination to (1) allocate funding pursuant to Section 2.5 of Article X of the Constitution or the Water Supply Infrastructure Bond Act of 2022 or (2) certify a project as a drought resiliency project pursuant to Section 21159.52 shall not constitute a ‘project’ pursuant to Section 21065 of the Public Resources Code and shall be exempt from CEQA.” How does this initiative still incorporate “substantive CEQA review?”

The initiative does not exempt water supply projects from substantive CEQA review. The initiative exempts certain funding and certification processes at the Water Commission from CEQA review – namely, the Water Commissions’ decision to provide funding to an eligible water supply project or certify an eligible water supply project as a “drought resiliency project.” However, the initiative does not eliminate CEQA review triggered by other discretionary actions, such as local or state permitting processes. For example, a water supply project requiring a discretionary city or county approval would still undergo CEQA review in connection with that approval. As for “drought resiliency projects,” they are any projects that fall within the definition of eligible projects in Section 3 (b) on page 2.

If the California Water Commission were the only agency approving a project funded under this measure, then it would be exempt from CEQA, but if the project required other approvals, like from a city, a county, a regional water board, the state EPA or Department of Fish and Wildlife, it would be subject to CEQA?

Yes. If a project required a discretionary approval from any other agency, it would be subject to CEQA (unless some other CEQA exemption applied independent of the measure). The chances that a water supply project of any size would not require at least one additional discretionary approval is very remote. Virtually any project involving water resources will trigger a local review and a review from various state agencies including the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. For example, a water project impacting a stream or river would require permitting from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Can you explain the streamlining of filing lawsuits? It appears that after a project is approved, opponents have 270 days to file a lawsuit under CEQA. Is that right? Or does the ballot language say a court must decide the appeal within 270 days?

Any challenge to an eligible water supply project is to be resolved (e.g., decided by a court) within 270 days after the certified administrative record is filed with the court. This is substantially similar to previously adopted legislation including AB 900 and subsequent acts based on AB 900 (which expedited treatment of various projects—See CA Office of Planning and Research Website), and various other statues providing for litigation streamlining (see also SB & Atkins – Jobs and Economic Improvement Through Environmental Leadership Act of 2021 -adopted this year).

If you’ve waded through the preceding series of questions and answers, at the least you may understand that in no way was our intent to gut the protections embodied in CEQA or the Coastal Act. Rather our goal was to streamline the process, so project proposals would get a yes or no answer within years instead of decades. One would think that is a reasonable expectation.

Moreover, nothing in our initiative affected the many strong Federal regulations designed to ensure that infrastructure projects don’t harm the environment. Nor did we curb the ability for the California Dept. of Fish and Wildlife to scrutinize, and as they all too often do, derail any project. Finally, as cannot be emphasized enough, we left final decisions as to which projects would receive funding pursuant to our initiative up to the California Water Commission. To say that body has been adequately attentive to the concerns of the environmental community in California would be a gross understatement.

None of this mattered. We offered a solution that replaced scarcity with abundance, insecurity with security, punitive rationing and intrusive demand management with practical water supply infrastructure. In short, we offered a pathway out of the gloom and doom narrative that is the currency of environmentalists in the world today. And that was unforgiveable.

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

The Abundance Choice (part 6) – Biased, Hostile Media

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You can say this for Michael Hiltzik, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Los Angeles Times columnist for the Los Angeles Times: He doesn’t conceal his biases. When we talked in late November, his skepticism concerning our initiative felt overt. And while that may only have been my subjective impression of our conversation, Hiltzik’s column, published as a “Perspective” piece by the Times on December 2, removed all doubt.

Hiltzik’s column was called “This proposed ballot measure would make you pay for the ag industry’s water inefficiency,” and featured on page two of the print edition’s front section. Hiltzik fired an 1,800-word salvo at our campaign, making assertions, starting with the title, that were designed from beginning to end to convince readers that we were pushing a terrible idea.

In one of the opening paragraphs, Hiltzik wrote “In California, water is for scamming. The newest example is a majestically cynical ploy being foisted on taxpayers by some of the state’s premier water hogs, in the guise of a proposed ballot measure titled the ‘Water Infrastructure Funding Act of 2022’—or, as its promoters call it, the More Water Now initiative.” Nothing subtle there.

Hiltzik’s hits came one after another. He called the initiative “costly and dishonest,” claiming it would “wreak permanent damage to the state budget,” and “force taxpayers to pay for ecologically destructive and grossly uneconomical dams, reservoirs, and desalination plants.”

But Hiltzik’s bias against “wasteful and overly costly projects” may violate his own principles.

In an irony that ought not be lost on a journalist of Hiltzik’s stature, within a few weeks after he attacked our campaign, he wrote a column headlined, “Wall Street can now bet on the price of California water.” But Hiltzik can’t have it both ways. Either the state will help pay for water infrastructure with “wasteful” projects, or the price of water will rise to the point where private investors and financial speculators will end up dominating the industry. They will buy up farmland for the water rights and invest in costly, privately owned water supply infrastructure because they will then own that water and profitably sell it at a high price. That’s already happening.

Our initiative would socialize some or all of the cost of capital projects to increase the supply of water. This would lower the price of water in California. How can Hiltzik warn us about private-sector water speculators right after he trashed our plan to socialize a major portion of the cost of water supply infrastructure?

Of course Hiltzik’s report on our campaign included obligatory quotes from environmental experts, starting with Peter Gleik, co-founder of the Pacific Institute, which has a focus on “water conservation and demand management”—rationing, in other words. A column with more logical integrity would examine that premise. Is rationing enough? Gleik’s comment is predictable, given his background, saying “This proposed initiative is a desperate throwback to the idea that there is still more water that can be extracted from California’s already massively overtapped rivers and aquifers.”

But California’s rivers are not “overtapped.” They have inadequate or obsolete infrastructure which is not suited for an era of less snow and heavy, but erratic, rain. The appropriate new way to tap California’s rivers is by using off-stream reservoirs, percolation basins, and underground aquifers to capture storm runoff. And there is plenty of that.

An authoritative 2017 study by the Public Policy Research Institute describes so-called “uncaptured water,” which is the surplus runoff, often causing flooding, that occurs every time an atmospheric river hits the state. Quoting from the study, “benefits provided by uncaptured water are above and beyond those required by environmental regulations for system and ecosystem water” (italics added). The study goes on to claim that uncaptured water flows through California’s Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta “averaged 11.3 million acre-feet [per year] over the 1980–2016 period.”

Let that sink in. Coming from some of the most respected water experts in California: The average quantity of “uncaptured water” flowing through the Delta that is “above and beyond those required by environmental regulations for system and ecosystem water” averages 11.3 million acre-feet per year. And we were just trying to find another 5 million acre-feet, with many options to accomplish that, including capturing storm runoff.

What Hiltzik wrote was unfair, but he was just one of many. Orange County Register reporter Martin Wiskol published a hit piece in December titled, “Environmentalists sound alarm over proposed water initiative.” If all you read are headlines, that headline sends a clear message (as does the rest of the article). The alarm bells are ringing! This is a bad thing! And we’ve become so used to this sort of bias, it’s hard to even imagine how an equally accurate headline for Wiskol’s article might have been “Grassroots activists propose common sense solutions to California’s water crisis.” Imagine coverage like that.

Leading off the media campaign against our initiative was the San Jose Mercury News with an editorial published on November 19: “Pull the plug on proposed California water ballot measure.” Typical of media and environmentalist critics of our initiative, it appeared the Mercury News’ editors hadn’t even read the initiative, as they wrote, “Historically, California’s water projects have been paid primarily by those who generate the most benefit. But this proposal would flip the scales. It would use general fund tax dollars to primarily increase the water supply for the state’s wealthy Big Ag interests.”

An honest fact checker would rate this assertion as “mostly false.” Our initiative would have funded projects to recycle 100 percent of California’s urban wastewater, at a cost estimated at around $20 billion. Our initiative would have funded remediation of urban aquifers, urban and small town water systems; it would have paid to replace the toxic pipes in the L.A. Unified School District schools. It would even have paid to restore portions of the Los Angeles River to its natural state. The only constraint was not funding, but retaining flood protection. But the Mercury News never bothered to ask.

For that matter, the editors at the Mercury News apparently didn’t even bother to read an article written by Paul Rogers, one of their staff journalists who for decades has been writing about water policy in California. Published two days earlier in their own newspaper, Rogers’ article was the only example of fair coverage of our campaign by a major media property. Rogers described our initiative as one that would “fast track” water projects in the state. But the exception proves the rule.

What would it take to get fair media coverage? It isn’t as if our initiative was anathema to environmentalist values and objectives. And it even called for more government spending, which typically attracts support from mainstream media. So why did the media attack our initiative without any attempt at balance or nuance? Why did they march in lockstep with environmentalists bent on destroying our effort before it got any real traction?

The answer to this may go back to one of the core premises of the modern environmentalist movement, backed up by the media, which is the belief that a middle class lifestyle is unsustainable. Humanity’s harrowing descent into a self-inflicted global “climate emergency” is the dominant message we get from environmentalists today, and it is reflected uncritically by the media.

But the greatest transgression by the media isn’t that they accept and promote this doomsday message and suppress dissenting theories, although that is bad enough. What is worse is that every project environmentalists oppose, even when there is minimal connection between that stopping that project and preventing climate change, is opposed by the media. Examples of this are plentiful.

More housing on single-family lots will cause climate change, they maintain, but building high density apartments and condominiums will prevent it. Constructing roads will cause climate change, but constructing high-speed rail and light rail will prevent it. Responsibly thinning our forests with commercial logging will cause climate change, but letting them get overgrown and burn like hell every summer will prevent it. Had enough? For each of these examples, there are obvious and compelling counterarguments, but it doesn’t seem to matter.

Trying to explain what is behind the collective hostility of the media not just toward water projects that violate the climate emergency narrative, but against all development unsanctioned by environmentalists, is the topic of another essay. But a big part of the problem is there isn’t much of an alternative narrative, because there isn’t much of an ecosystem of organizations promoting an alternative narrative.

Notwithstanding media bias, one of the reasons there aren’t more quotes from experts in favor of more water infrastructure is because there aren’t enough organizations promoting water infrastructure, and the ones that are out there are underfunded, do not allocate resources to mobilizing grassroots support, and behave with an abundance of decorum and a scarcity of passion. By contrast, whenever there is a public meeting for or against a water project, the Sierra Club can be relied on to have mobilized dozens if not hundreds of their members to show up. Where are the statewide organizations that can mobilize hundreds of activists to show up at meetings in favor of more infrastructure?

Maybe that idea was ahead of its time, but life is unaffordable in California for a reason. It’s time now for organizations that support fewer regulations and more infrastructure spending to get more aggressive. Meanwhile, can anyone reading this name one expert in California in favor of more water infrastructure who has managed to make it onto the shortlist of people journalists call whenever something is proposed that might increase California’s water supply? I can’t think of anyone.

Without organizations willing to unite to make the case for more water infrastructure on the same scale as the environmentalist dominated organizations that only promote rationing, all that is left is the competence and integrity of journalists. On that topic, Kristi Diener, a media expert and key member of our steering committee who has interacted with journalists on water issues for many years, had this to say:

“There is a lack of critical thinking in the media. There are many facets to this. If someone makes an argument like, ‘Why should taxpayers pay for capital projects?’ they stop there without exploring the benefits which more than balance the expense. For example, there are projects that enable groundwater recharge and reduce the implementation costs of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, dilute toxic contaminants in well water and replenish wells which eliminate the need for the emergency bottled water delivery program, and arrest subsidence and the sinking of multi-million dollar vital infrastructure which reduces the millions of tax dollars necessarily being allocated to these fixes. Because creating water abundance also lowers water bills, and enables our farmers to put more job-creating land back into production, consumers have more to spend. That economic enhancement to other businesses bumps up tax coffers for community services like police, fire, and education. The media relentlessly criticize beneficial water projects, but neglect any independent exploration. Their conclusions and written opinions effectively become predicated on one-sided, dead-end statements. This is lazy, incomplete journalism.”

Diener continued:

“Another facet to the lack of critical thinking occurs due to the fact that California’s water laws, Opinions, Management Plans, Flow Requirements, Acts, systems of water rights and exceptions to those, Endangered Species Act rulings, etc. have piled up for decades, if not all the way back into the 1800s. They are extremely complex and require explanations and interpretations from experts. But the fact-givers who are supposed to be the water experts and the keepers of the knowledge frequently either get it wrong, or intentionally cherry pick the data. The majority of the media is unwilling, or unable, to fact check the fact-givers. For years the media has accepted what they are told, and the result has been generations of widely spread misinformation packed onto the public, who now believe they know the facts. The difficulty in promoting more water infrastructure sometimes is in having to rewind and replace what people think they know to be true, with the parts that have been omitted that make those arguments false.”

It is unlikely the bias and hostility of the media towards more water supply infrastructure will change on its own, or before Californians run out of water. But it is possible that some of the special interests that currently either oppose water projects or sit on the sidelines, will change their priorities and begin to support new projects. Ultimately, and perhaps contrary to their own self-perception, journalists as a group tend to reflect and promote the political preferences of the elite influencers that own or advertise on media platforms. For that reason, we may hope that if the consensus on water policy among elites begins to shift in our favor, that shift will be reflected and accelerated by members of the media.

When it comes to projects to increase the water supply in California, the media today is predictable and hostile. Scarcity is good, development is bad. Somehow they’ve internalized the false impression that more water supplies will only harm the environment, rather than consider the possibility that more water creates more options for maintaining the health of ecosystems. And California’s journalists are apparently blind to the economic fact that water scarcity only serves the interests of investors and speculators who want to privatize and profit from high-priced water. It harms everyone else.

California’s hostile media can change its tune. But it will take enlightened altruism—i.e., demanding more water supply projects without further delay—from a critical mass of California’s moneyed elites, helped along by massive anger from California’s disenfranchised grassroots.

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

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

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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.

Creating Water Abundance in California

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AUDIO/VIDEO:  Is water scarcity and water rationing inevitable in California? Is it the only moral and practical choice? Or can a balance be struck between practical conservation measures and new investments in infrastructure that will increase the annual supply of water and guarantee there will never be a shortages  – 24 minute Epoch Times interview – Edward Ring with host Siyamak Khorrami on California Insider.