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I have two real topics (water and econ, and the LHC study), but those require that I think hard.  We all know that thinking hard is hard, so before that, a few quick reactions to the sudden rush of interesting news.

On the suit against the Kern Water Bank.  Mark Grossi’s commentary today (and the comments on the original story) prompted this thought: The usual distrust towards DWR and Metropolitan is based on what are usually half-baked contemporary conspiracy theories, and very real historical water grabs.  But it is interesting to see that for all that The State is mistrusted, private corporations are mistrusted even more.  Clearly, the Resnick’s and Paramount Farm’s interest is in maximizing their profits.  That’s not even wrong for a corporation.  But it is a facially evident mis-match for running a water bank that is supposed to serve public interests.  People know this in their guts, and it makes them mad.

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Look!  Here’s more evidence of people mis-trusting DWR!  I don’t know what to say about this one.  BDCP is the hope, right?  The Legislature punted during their big reform bill last year.  I thought that was a wise recognition that the decisions were too political for them to make, so someone else should.  And the Delta Stewardship Council is supposed to do that deciding, informed by BDCP.  Looks like the out-going high-ups really want BDCP to lock in a path for the Peripheral Canal, and the article suggests also locking in commitments to delivering set water amounts, which is pure folly since they won’t be possible.  Committing to those could create a liability for the state, but it won’t create water.

I think the gears are locked and grinding, man.  I don’t see any movement unless the levees collapse catastrophically or the new administration radically changes direction.  ‘Course, both of those are fairly likely.

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I still completely love the lawsuits brought by CWIN and their buddies.  They’re picking the huge fights.  Don’t know that they’ll win, but at least they’re testing the doctrines that environmentalists refer back to.  Let’s have this showdown over the public trust doctrine.  Why have it if we don’t use it?  When should we use if, if not as a last gasp effort for California’s salmon runs?

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Really, SacBee editorial board?  If downstream people want to use our effluent, they can pay for (some of) cleaning it?  Look, I know tail-enders get the shaft, but that’s an artifact of the physical world, not an admirable policy that we say out loud.  What happened to “Leave No Trace” and “Clean up after yourselves.”?

We all know that the ammonia problem has been turned into a political controversy by the State Water Contractors, who want anything but flow to be the problem for the Delta.  But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t solve the ammonia problem.  Then, when the Delta is still broken, they won’t be able to point to it any longer.  There have long been good federal funds for wastewater treatment, and yes, of course if they’re handing out money we should get in line.  But there is no moral argument for passing our costs on to downstream users or letting the voiceless environment absorb them. 

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As we learned last week, talk about the LHC study doesn’t have to be this dull.

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I don’t even know why I do this, since I mostly agree with the Pacific Institute.  I am nevertheless going to question a trivial aside that doesn’t change the results of their report.  In a text box on page 7 of their recent report, the authors put a million acre-feet in context.  We LOVE context!  This is great.  But they wrote that a million acrefeet is:

-approximately enough water to irrigate all the grain produced in California annually.

I cannot begin to guess what they mean.  Here are the acreages for field crops in California.  Rice alone is 550,000 acres.  At a minimum of four acre-feet per acre for rice, that’s 2.2 MAF.  They’ve got to be excluding alfalfa (900,000 acres, 3 MAF).  I can see excluding winter wheat, since it isn’t irrigated.  Either that is some very strange definition of grain (grains for human consumption only, but not rice?), or maybe they slipped a digit.  That’s not the main point, and doesn’t contradict their findings (which I can’t personally discount or support).  I’m just curious about that line.

Hey friends,

I got a letter from an actual economist. It said very thoughtful things, in a far more temperate tone than my post. This is great. On other occasions, I’ve started writing up my objections to using economic theory to water, but I had to stop, because I kept getting sidetracked into name-calling. But surely I could write to this economist in a better voice, so I’ll dig those pieces out and finish them. This is swerving away from the LHC study, about which I only wrote sort-of tangential things. If someone has real substantive questions about the LHC study, I’d take a shot at answering them.

The timing on all of this depends on whether my library delivers Mockingjay to me today. If it does, you won’t see me for a day or two.  No one will.

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[I’ve taken some identifying text of out the letter.]

However I was a little uncomfortable with some (of what I read to be) shots your took at economists in that post.  In the interest of full disclosure I’m a fellow anonymous public servant who happens to work as an economist for an unnamed agency, so it’s possible I’m just being hyper sensitive…but this is the 3rd or 4th time since I’ve been reading your blog that I’ve caught something of an anti-water markets vibe.

… .  However, there are a number of good water resources economists who do understand the complexities of California water management (not me by the way, I’m a total dilettante.  I stay as current as I can, know enough about irrigated ag. and groundwater pumping issues to be dangerous, and am familiar w/ the flow recommendations from various BiOps but I’m still pretty green).  And most of these guys will agree that markets are generally a pretty good way to solve a number of water allocation problems.

If I read your past posts correctly, I believe your position to be that too many economists want water markets just to have a market.  With issues as complex as water allocation one needs to think very hard about what the end goal should be and, if I understand your beef, you don’t believe many economists have done this…that they are guilty of, “When all you have is a hammer everything is a nail,” type thinking (which, ironically is the beef most economists have with engineers when it comes to water).  I can sympathize with you somewhat here … .
I would like, respectfully of course, to point out that some excellent economists have spent a lot of time thinking about:

• distributional issues – under what conditions would water markets tend to concentrate wealth and have secondary and tertiary community effects (i.e. if a market encourages fallowing how does that impact ag suppliers in the community?)
• issues related to the spatial distribution of water rights
• groundwater/surface water interaction issues and spatial externalities – do markets for surface water cause accelerated groundwater pumping?

Economists have been talking for a long time about these and other institutional/practical issues related to water markets and market design through the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Water Resources Research, and The Journal of Environmental Economics and Management and Contemporary Economic Policy.

In the interest of not writing you a book here I’ll try to summarize my points:

1.  Economists generally assume the goal of an allocation mechanism is to maximize total social surplus.  Whether that should be the goal of a water allocation policy is arguable…and economists generally are not well equipped to participate in that normative argument.  But if that is the goal (and economists generally assume it is) then markets are a pretty good way to get there.

2.  Some economists (like me) are in favor of more markets in water policy because…why the hell not?  We’ve tried lots of other ways to manage water and most of what we’ve done just ended up promoting an endless string of litigation.  Why not give markets a shot?  There are very few market based incentive structures in western states relative to number of watersheds with severe over allocation issues (where markets are likely to be useful).

A slight digression but…when it comes to California water issues the econ landscape seems to be thoroughly and unnecessarily dominated by predictive models.  That’s not meant as a knock on Dick Howitt or Jeff Michaels but we don’t need to get all our socio-economic info from input-output models that impose assumptions…we have data.  There are successful water markets in place on the Deschutes River in Oregon, Snake River tribs in Idaho, and the Scott River, in CA.

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The writer is perceptive; I do have a chip on my shoulder about economists, mostly because I think they believe their models more than the real world supports the model. I suppose I should lay out my thinking, rather than keep taking potshots.  Or lay out my thinking and then keep taking potshots.

I expect better from Scientific American, honestly.  But this piece rang warning bells early, and those started clanging ferociously by the section on water.  I can’t even deal with his Reisner-era characterization of California’s water situation (“It is well known that 80 percent of the state’s water goes to agriculture and that 40 percent of the state’s water goes to growing four crops: cotton, rice, alfalfa, and pasturage (irrigated grazing land).”), and far, far too facile resolution (“MARKETS!”), although maybe I’ll come back to that this weekend.

You know how I knew that the author’s thinking was shallow and facile in all respects, and not just because he’s applying one ideological lens to a problem that is vastly more complex than he understands, because he thinks he knows things about the real world because he studied economics is probably a layperson in Water?  I knew that on the first fucking page.  I knew that he isn’t a close observer of his actual surroundings, and that his stereotypes filter his perceptions when he wrote this bullshit:

This city self-selects people who want to live well. With the exception of me, we are well-tanned, physically fit, attractive people. There is an abundance of plastic surgeons; service providers offering you whiter teeth; swimming pools; and life coaches to pluck, wax, and generally improve every part of your body and mind.

One more time.  Los Angeles is a huge, incredibly heterogeneous place, that is majority-minority and has neighborhoods of tens of thousands of people who are immigrants and first-gen.  They look, a whole lot of them, like third-world people  If what you see when you walk around LA is tanned, teeth-whitened people, your confirmation bias of your own stereotypes is so strong that you are simply not-seeing half the people who pass you on a daily basis.  I was suspicious by that paragraph, and was saddened to find out I was right when I got to the section on water. 

How does bullshit like that get published?  Are there really so many economists who like to masturbate to familiar, self-soothing market theory that they can support entire book runs?

The LHC report proposes spinning off the State Water Project to its own home, then combining the rest of DWR, the instream flows section of Fish and Game, and the water rights section of the State Board into one new Department of Water Management.

My first thought? But I don’t want to be a beaten, hollow-eyed wretch regulator.  I’ve seen it lots.  Bureaucrats with regulating authority become broken, twitchy husks defensive.  They’ve been yelled at so many times, abused in public meetings and left to twist in the wind unsupported by high-up political appointees that they change.  They start to pre-emptively self-censor, muttering caveats and qualifications like pleas to escape a beating.  They hedge and cringe before they are challenged, and make bold proposals like ‘consider proposing a study to gather more data’.  The poor things have learned fear, because the public actually pays attention to their work, hates them, and tries to undermine them in any political venue it can find.  I can only assume the same thing would happen to me if I were back at a regulatory agency (says the pseudonymous blogger), so I’m not sure about working at a (new) DWM with authority over the outside world.

That said, from a less selfish perspective, if DWM is going to take on water rights authority, it should have water quality authority as well.  Water rights and water quality are inextricably linked.  The volume of water determines pollutant loads, both concentrations and temperature.  The State and Regional Boards are putting a lot of effort into managing salts right now; moving water IS moving salts, so that goes straight back to permission to move water.   The famous State Board decisions about water quality standards in the Delta are also flow decisions about how much water is required to push the salt concentrations westward.  If Water Rights were to come over to (the proposed, new) DWM, I think it would rapidly become conspicuous that they still need to do their work hand in hand with Water Quality.  Further, an emailer pointed out that the Regional Boards actually write Basin Plans, and Basin Plans should be tied into Integrated Regional Water Management Plans, shouldn’t they? 

Frankly, I think that if we’re moving the project out of DWR, and combining the rest with the Water Rights, we should combine the rest of the State Board as well.  Except maybe their weirdo appointed board/administrative court level, which is bizarre and does unpredictable things.  I could do without that.  I am all about picking up a group from Fish and Game, since everyone knows that Fish and Game staff are largely cooler than the rest of us.  Maybe they could wear their uniforms around the office.  I’m just saying.

Posting one-liner responses to the news of the day is totally cheap, isn’t it?  I’ll write more thoroughly about that LHC study in a bit, but for now, I can’t help myself.

An editorial in today’s Silicon Valley Mercury News is all crazy talk about ocean-shipping water.  I’ll let rising costs of oil speak for themselves, although now I am intrigued by the idea of a third kind of ports: container, bulk and … canal ports?  It would make Northern California’s talk about “area of origin” rights look tame.  One has only to read the comments in any SacBee water story to see that people would far rather stop exporting water than become conscientious about their own water use.  Whatever.  I didn’t mean to give a substantive evaluation.  I was going to chat about a side point.   The editorial says:

Our challenge is to not only conserve more and clean up the polluted water we have, but also to transfer large amounts of water from areas that enjoy surplus resources, such as Russia, Canada, Alaska and northern Europe, to areas that face long-term scarcity, like California.

Back in grad school, I came across a World Bank? some sort of international gung-ho water project type of report that said something very close to:

Irrigation is the science of correcting nature’s mistakes.

I was righteously outraged, and immediately printed it out and posted it on my door, because I love outrageous things.  I doubt anyone ever got my irony.  Engineers don’t really look for irony, you know?  Anyway, our challenge of the next while is to get to work importing water (by sea!) from northern countries that have lots.

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Big story about Asian carp.  I was all blah blah blah Asian Carp for a long time, because we all know that I don’t care about things that are east of the Sierras, much less the Rockies where they don’t even irrigate and are therefore outside of anything I could possibly relate to.  Then I went looking for Asian carp on YouTube.  Check this out, at about forty seconds.  Or watch this and this. Dude. I guess I believe the problem is real.

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Is the Pasadena Star News always so biased? I’ve never read it, so I don’t know. They’re urging their readers to go to the next board meeting of their water district, which I love, to object to the practice of paying board members to attend meetings, which I don’t love. The part that cracked me up:

As shown in stories we published in 2008, members of the Water Replenishment District of Southern California were getting paid $230 per meeting. Not far behind were members of the Upper San Gabriel Valley Municipal Water District at $200 a sit-down. This can add up to $20,000 to $30,000 in annual compensation.

My god! $20,000 to $30,000 of annual compensation, for something that is probably a 15 hour a week job!!!  The Pasadena Star News suggests those meetings are superfluous, created just for the $230 the board members get each time.  I have no trouble believing a district can generate enough real content to hold those meetings.  I particularly objected to this, from the same editorial:

Despite two directors saying this was wrong, the board majority voted to give members credit cards anyway, to charge up expenses at will. The ostensible reason was because one board member, Willard Murray, said he could not afford to front the money for trips, hotel rooms, meals and gasoline and then be paid back by the district 30 days after filing for reimbursement. Well, if he can’t play by the rules, he shouldn’t go on trips or eat meals on the district’s dime.

Does the Pasadena Star News realize that it is creating a situation where only wealthy people can afford to do the business of democracy?  Those committee members are doing the day-to-day business of the community: refilling groundwater basins and providing urban water in a manner that is open, public, and subject to voter approval.  We want every person in those communities to be able to afford to give their time, not just the people who can afford to advance the district for the costs of doing the district’s business as well as donate substantial time.

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See you later on today, when I plan to make gratuitous snide remarks about a sister agency.

On page ix of the Executive Summary, the Little Hoover Commission writes about what the new Department of Water Management would do as an entity.  After discussing Integrated Regional Water Management for a bit*, they say (page x):

While the state can help local efforts to change water use, there are some state-level actions which have the potential to produce immense benefits for California as a whole.  The state can increase the amount of water available for use and better perform its environmental protection role by managing California’s state and federal reservoirs as a single system, and optimizing their operations to maximize storage.  The process would require working with regional groups to integrate groundwater storage into a broader state strategy.

System re-op?  System re-operations is the only state-level action that promises benefits worth mentioning?  That’s it?  That’s what the (new) Department of Water Management can do to make water available for human and environmental use?  Oh friends.  What this tells us is that THERE IS NO NEW WATER COMING.  What we have in the system now is all there is going to be.  (Personally, I don’t think we’ll even have that.  I think we’ll lose more to climate change and environmental needs than we can squeeze out of system re-op.)  Little Hoover Commission listened to all that testimony and heard nothing about the (proposed, new) DWM planning more projects and building new dams, or opening up new sources.  The best thing they heard, or at least the only thing they mentioned, was system re-op.  Me, I can’t guess what system re-op could yield, but I’d be surprised if it is more than a million acre-feet or so.  Not nothing, but it shouldn’t be keeping a whole planning agency busy.  Actually, I think system re-op is small enough that it should go with the State Water Project to its new home.

Let’s be clear what system re-op is, conceptually.  System re-op is conceding we need new supplies so much that we are willing to incur more risk of flooding.  System re-op is being willing to cut into a margin of safety in exchange for more yields.  Many reservoirs are run by a historic rule curve that tells the operators how much to empty the reservoir each fall and winter to be ready to catch the season’s floods.  That drawdown, that rule about how empty to keep your reservoirs in the winter, can mean lost water.  Maybe it can’t be used for irrigation in the Fall and we don’t have a way to put it in groundwater, but we have to release it anyway.  The rule curves are decades old.  They may be too conservative now; our storm forecasting is better.  We could hold on to water until we know for sure that a big storm is coming.   Any piece of water that we can keep in a reservoir (when before we would have let it go to make sure the reservoir has space to catch a storm) that’s real, new water.  Maybe reservoir re-op is a way of claiming some of the new gains in our knowledge.  Keeping the reservoir fuller introduces more risk that we’ll have to pass along a flood, but maybe our better forecasting is enough of a risk buffer to even that out.  But maybe storms under climate change will be so much more variable that our old reservoir rule-curves aren’t conservative enough.  We don’t know.  It looks like we’ll be doing the experiment in real life.

On one hand, the LHC is right.  Re-operating the projects is worthwhile, especially operating the big projects conjointly.   Adding in flexible groundwater recharge as a place to store those yields will make them even more valuable.  But.  The fact that we need them, and the implication that they’re the next best option (after integrated regional management, about which I stay skeptical), tells me that we truly do not have any dramatic good next alternatives. 

Continue reading →

The LHC report on a new water governance structure proposes to make the State Water Project (the actual reservoirs, plumbing, water rights and operations) its own deal, separate from DWR who runs it now.  The LHC mentions a whole host of problems with using the state civil service to staff the water project operations; I have no firsthand knowledge about the severity of these problems.  I can vouch that getting hired with the state is profoundly screwy.  Maybe it does cause problems over at the projects.  Then the report goes on to say that the State Water Project (state) and the Central Valley Project (feds) should get married and live together forever in the State Water Project’s new home, which I have no problem with, because  I’m totally openminded like that (pg 65).

Now for the aspects of separating the State Water Project from DWR that I do have opinions about:

One of the reasons that the LHC gives for moving the project outside the (new) Department of Water Management is that having the project inside the Dept. of Water Resources “dominates the agenda of a state department that also is responsible for water planning and management and where these dual missions often conflict.”  I think that’s a polite way to say that the big boys believe that the point of DWR is to deliver water, and delivering water becomes a little too co-equal in upper management.  Since I talk to political-level state appointees about zero percent of the time, again, I have no way to assess that personally.  I’m willing to believe it, but I also note that the big boys at the top of the agency are implementing the governor’s agenda, which in Republican administrations means delivering water.   We’ll know a lot more about what is driving the perspectives of upper management (direction from the governor or inclusion of the water project within the agency) in a few months.

The report mentions the concern from within DWR that without the glamorous, sexy projects in the Department, they might have a hard time getting engineers to work for them.  Whatever.  There is plenty of water engineering that isn’t based on canals, and if people want to do flood work, or design fish-passage improvement structures, or work with gauges and telemetry, the (new) Dept. of Water Management will still be one of the few places to do lots of that.  I guess their thinking is still dominated by the projects, if they think that’s why most engineers are at DWR.

Further, I know plenty many people who would be very pleased if the (new) Department of Water Management weren’t so engineering-based.  An organization that is supposed to plan for the waters of the state could stand to have a lot more of the earth scientists, and (to my mind) more sociologists and demographers.

Couple more things:

The LHC report talks in nice ways about the (new) Dept. of Water Management keeping rights authority over the separate project, but I was thinking plainer thoughts about how there would have to be some sort of giant-ass control mechanism over a stand-alone project authority.  I mean, if DWR is captured by the industry it serves, at least there is some political balance from the other things the department is supposed to be doing.  Think how far a stand-alone project could go along the lines of single-minded water delivery, and how hard that would be to detect from the outside.

One odd thing about the LHC’s proposed structure is that the (new) Dept. of Water Management would keep doing a function called system or reservoir re-operation (more about that soon). I don’t see any good reason for that.  Seems to me that system re-op should go with the projects, who would have the data, controls, system knowledge and authority.  They would be pretty highly motivated, too, I’d guess.  I don’t understand the reasoning for keeping system re-op in the (new) DWM.  It doesn’t seem to me to be particularly connected to the rest of their (proposed, new) state-scale planning mission.  System re-op is reservoir level stuff; planning and management for the state is much broader stuff.

Friends, I’ll likely do a number of posts on the Little Hoover Commission’s proposal for a new structure for state-level water governance.  However, I can’t bring myself to summarize the whole report.  I am just going to have to hope that you are the junkies I think you are, and that you’ve read at least the Executive Summary.

Resources:  The Executive Summary.  The full report.  Links to the testimony they listened to.  Aquafornia gathering the news stories on the report.

The purpose of their proposed new governance structure:

From the Executive Summary, it seems like the purpose of their proposed structure is to remove existing barriers to implementing the big water legislation from 2009.  The LHC wants a governance structure that “address[es] the supply challenges ahead while supporting [California’s] environment, accommodating its population growth and ensuring the conditions that allow its economy to thrive.” (pg i)

From the Introduction to the full report, the purpose of the proposed structure is to “allow the state to determine its water future on its own, by managing its water assets and planning for its future needs, rather than running the risk of having conditions imposed on the state from the outside that might fail to serve California’s longterm needs.”  (pg 2)  I gather from the paragraph that precedes that line that the LHC doesn’t want the projects to be jerked around by the federal district courts enforcing the ESA anymore.  That’s reasonable.

If I were a good blogger, I’d be thinking about whether their proposed structure will give the state ways to meet those goals.  But what you’re more likely to get out of me in the next few posts is commentary on whatever caught my eye enough to write a few hundred words.  Let’s do it…

(Oh, and y’all could ask me questions and stuff in the comments, if you want my take (worth exactly what you pay for it) on any particular aspect of the report.  I mean, I’ve read it now, and that kind of effort shouldn’t go to waste.)

I dunno, man.  I sorta mostly agree with some of what this article talks about.  But I can’t get really worked up about it.  I believe what the author writes; that oil production didn’t see any restrictions on water use in the past drought.  The stuff about how yucky the water is after it gets used in oil production is new to me.  Maybe that’s a problem.  But overall, I think he’s bucking some pretty conventional wisdom with this piece, and for me at least, he isn’t persuasive.  Yes, oil production got all the water it could use during the drought.  By and large, most people agree that industrial processes should get priority for water, because they’re making things.  That may not actually be the case and perhaps this article is the kind of muck-raking that will start changing minds.  But I bet that if you ask laypeople how water should be allocated in the state, they’d say: me first, business second, fishies third, cute farms fourth, non-cute farms last.  You could maybe switch around the cute farms and the fish.  But saying that oil production, or industry in general, got their water in the drought isn’t going to raise a lot of eyebrows.

I have to complain about the attempt to make this sound like a big problem.  The oil industry got 8.4 billion gallons!  Eight point four BILLION!  Except, like, gallons are tiny.  You can even carry a gallon.  What is 8.4 billion gallons in real units?  Oh.  Twenty-five thousand acre-feet?  You wrote an article about 25,000 acre-feet of water in California?  Yes, every bit is precious, but unless you’re telling me a small town halved their consumption and saved 25,000 acre-feet, I’m not that intrigued.  We can all do this in our heads by now.  You’re talking the equivalent of 8,000 irrigated acres.  In the San Joaquin Valley, that’s rounding error.

Now that the State Water Contractors are so concerned with ammonia from Sacramento’s wastewater causing fish declines in the Delta, I keep imagining myself sitting down to chat with some lobbying flack for the State Water Contractors, a group that until now has been all about engineering water solutions to deliver water to agriculture.  I like to think of them leaning earnestly across the table, to tell me things like:

• “Even small amounts of pollutants can greatly disrupt ecosystems. Matter is always conserved, you know. Diluting the problem just makes it all the harder to clean up later.”
• “The food web is crucial to ecosystem stability. Small organisms can have much larger importance than you might think. We don’t mean some minnow, of course, but beautiful little phytoplankton.  It is so shallow to focus only on charismatic mega-fauna.”
• “What you can see in these complex systems are threshold events, where different effects combine to cause an unexpected crash.  The only way to prevent that is to protect natural ecosystem functions and processes.”
• “We should spend what it takes to keep the Delta ecosystem stable. There’s no balancing test for keeping Nature alive.”

I am pleased to welcome the State Water Contractors to the world of Ecology, where everything is complex and inter-related. They are going to just love the concepts of resilience (how much ammonia can one dump into a system before it re-sets to less complex functioning) and appreciating how each small part contributes to a rich larger system. Spend enough time hanging out in Ecology, and they’ll start to love the precautionary principle, because it turns out to be really hard to patch ecosystems back together. If a small and ignoble part of me thinks that their newfound love for phytoplankton is something of an opportunistic attempt at distraction from the much larger effects of lack of water through the Delta, well, I think it could be good for the State Water Contractors to start thinking like biologists and ecologists anyway. 

Now that the State Water Contractors are all about ecology, where might they turn their attention next? I’ve loved their recent emphasis on invasive species. Are they going to get very interested in upstream creek restoration and spawning grounds? They should. How about water quality besides ammonia from Sacramento’s wastewater?  Methyl mercury from gold mining?  It all combines to influence the Delta ecosystem, as well they know. I’m looking forward to more lectures from them about food webs.