Monthly Archives: January 2014

I assume you have a copy of the proclamation to hand. I’ll go point by point with my first impression.

1. Calling on Californians to reduce their water usage by twenty percent in one year doesn’t seem like enough when reservoirs are so drastically low. But if they do reduce by that much, after this year Twenty by 20XX will be relatively easy. I know some of the behavioral changes backslide when the drought ends, but this drought will be a big boost to that effort.

This drought feels very different than 2007-2009. People mention rain and guiltily enjoying the sun everywhere I go. I’ve heard so many mentions of the dry hills. The dry reservoirs are so blatant. I have come to believe that humans can only deeply identify with problems they can see (literally see –problems without a visible element (groundwater, greenhouse gases) will not be solved.) and this drought may be stark enough to qualify. I’d urge water conservation people to put pictures of empty reservoirs on billboards.

2. This point cracks me up. I read this as: do your fucking water management plans. Back when 20xtwentytwenty was written, the only enforcement mechanism for the requirement to write ag water management plans was that if your district didn’t do a plan, it wouldn’t be eligible for DWR loans and grants. Not much of a hammer. But I am very sure that any agency approaching the Drought Task Force for assistance will be welcomed with a sweet “What does it say in your Drought Contingency Plan, appendix to your water management plan?”. If the reply is that they don’t have a Drought Contingency Plan yet, I expect they’ll be told to finish that before coming back.

I see there’ll be a publicly posted map of which districts have updated plans. It is eighteen years since I proposed doing that at Reclamation and was told that was too sensitive. I am glad water districts have become less delicate since then.

3. State agencies implementing water conservation in our own facilities? Dude. I’ll believe that when I see it. DGS is invariably cited as the barrier to making green changes at state buildings. Maybe it will be different in the Brown administration, but I haven’t seen Governor Brown show any interest in shaping the state agencies.

4. They have to say this about water transfers. Water transfers are the politically acceptable win-win solution. Willing sellers, willing buyers, no one loses anything, the State “facilitates” but doesn’t dictate. From what I saw in the last drought, inter-regional transfers were nearly negligible, primarily because rice prices were high and because there weren’t available pumping windows that weren’t already being used for project water. This time I think inter-regional transfers will be even more trivial, because I don’t think many will have water to offer. There is real utility in local and regional transfers, so I hope those get “expedited”.

From what I understand, the danger in a rushed transfer process is that there may be secondary damage on the seller’s end. The transferred surface water may be immediately replaced on the seller’s end with groundwater that wouldn’t have otherwise been pumped. If that damages an aquifer or taps nearby connected surface water, that’s a transfer that wouldn’t be approved. “Expedited” transfer evaluations may miss this. My real opinion, though, is that transfers allow people to pretend that there is a pleasing solution, a feelgood thing the State can do. I think the real volumes are tiny and the secondary damages from transfers correspondingly tiny.

5. I don’t know what this item means in real life, so I don’t have impressions to type up.

I liked the Pacific Institute’s report on future water financing from back in November, but I’ll use this quote from the Conclusions as a springboard to one of my standard rants (just because it is something I hear around, and here is a version I can use).

New financing mechanisms and alternative revenue sources need to be explored for water conservation and efficiency, research and development, monitoring and data management, ongoing operation and maintenance, and upgrading failing water systems.

Look, y’all. This is not that complicated. The revenue sources are the wallets of the people of the state. If we aren’t using bonds to transfer the costs to future people, there are two financing mechanisms. There are taxes, where someone with authority takes an amount in a way that isn’t directly linked to a water bill, or there are fees, where someone with authority takes an amount in a way that is directly linked to a water bill. That’s it. That is the whole range of options. We talk about creative financing mechanisms and looking for alternatives, but in the end, if we decide to pay to keep our level of service up to first world standards, someone with authority will dip into the wallets of the people of the state.

I have some patience for discussions of whether taxes or fees will better accomplish policy goals, but I roll my eyes at discussions of “creative financing mechanisms”. Far as I can tell, the phrase is a placeholder for magic outside wealth appearing.

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I loved every word of this Valley Econ post on making tree crop growers self-insure. Nut crop growers put a whole lot of capital into their orchards, then point to their orchards as hostages in drought time. “But we must get water, or our trees will die!” I’ve never understood why the public at large should be the backstop for the bad choice to plant crops with a constant water demand in a variable climate. If there is a state interest in growing nuts and grapes in particular, it hasn’t been explained to me. I understand the grower’s interest in growing a valuable crop, but since the profits from that aren’t returned to the state, I don’t see why the risk should be.