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It has been heavy on the policy side around here, so I wanted to get back to some science.

On some quiet day when I haven’t posted anything, remind me to write about how the form of a meeting shapes the outcome and why Robert’s Rules of Order are terrible for representative democracy and soliciting real comment.

Alex, thank you so much for posting that footage of a board meeting about a surcharge on groundwater.  I’m looking forward to your story on it this weekend.  Hey, reporter people.  You should do more of that.  You’re our eyes and legs, and now that we have some internets, you have the capacity to give us so much more than a written story.  I glean what I can from your written stories, but here’s what I got from that footage Mr. Breitler posted.

I’m mostly looking at it with the sound off.  I do not understand the battling ballot measures and don’t have a dog in that fight.  But here’s what I see:

• A horrible bland room with no windows.  I cannot tell you how much of California’s water business gets conducted in utterly stifling rooms, disconnected from the physical processes the people are talking about.  Real things, like a budding orchard or a cracking canal gate, are an abstraction when you’re crammed into a box with no windows.
• Six or seven ordinary looking people, behind two folding tables.  Folding tables.  I’m telling you, this is not a glamorous business, despite what you hear about oligarchs and the-new-oil and all those devastatingly handsome engineers.
• Those six or seven people are sitting opposite tens of people, massed together.  The lopsided bulk of the room is intimidating, especially since the set-up of sides facing each other looks oppositional.
• The audience is very old, overwhelmingly white (did I see one Asian dude?) and mostly male.  All of the speakers were old white men.  Doesn’t make ’em wrong; doesn’t mean that they’ll agree with each other.  Does make it likely that the range of views in the broader population isn’t going to get aired at that meeting.  And OLD.  Succession alone is going to transform California water policy.  I should have put that on my last list.  I bet it is in the top five transitional forces (climate change induced scarcity, coming to the end of mined wealth (gw, topsoil, carbon absorption capacity), something or other, something else, generational succession).
• Hostile body language from the speakers, to a board that has to live with those people as neighbors every day.  Also, folks, you should remember.  The poor saps who sit up front and get yelled at get no pay for their efforts.  Maybe they get some minimal per diem for meeting attendance.  They do this work because they’re good citizens, interested, and want an outcome for their community.  They’re pretty much the saints of representative democracy, and I have a ton of respect for them.*

That’s what I can tell without knowing anything about the issue.  And I got that because that brilliant reporter Alex Breitler thought to post a video.  More of that, please, reporters.  This way all the sharks in the blog waters can look at the same things and offer analysis.

*Which reminds me.  I did listen to the Glenn County meetings on whether to keep membership in NCWA.  (Search for “ncwa” to get to the two recent relevant parts.)  First, every time I do that I’m blown away again, at how carefully and conscientiously local elected officials consider the issues.  I often don’t agree with the outcome, but I’m so impressed at how diligently they approach the questions.  Second, two listens in a row, and I still have no idea why they’re mad at NCWA.  There are some politics I’m not getting.  It might be about water transfers, like I speculated.  But they were real coy, talking about their disappointment with the recent direction of NCWA, and they didn’t say why.  For all I could tell, it could be personal animus.

You know what?  Screw that.  Levine’s not some big radical on the water blogs.  What is Levine talking about anyway, a powerful cabal of billionaire farmers?  That’s conventional wisdom in California.  That’s baby talk for amateurs who watched Chinatown and read Reisner.  You want to know who’s saying really revolutionary shit that will up-end people’s lives?  Me.  I made a list, from least to most controversial.

Less controversial, but often goes unsaid:

We should save fish species because ending a species is morally wrong.  If the cost includes the end of some human lifestyles, then we should still pay that cost.

My faction is part of the problem and should pay for that part of the solution.

DWR should follow the fucking law and write EIS/EIRs for its programs before it does them.

California’s water rights system is massively unjust for current citizens.  Some people are awarded huge wealth by historical chance; others who are no less worthy as citizens and people are expected to pay the winners for any additional water supply.

Trade-offs should be explicit, and not left undefined.  The reader may prefer the other side of the trade-off, so it shouldn’t be hinted at darkly or left as an unconscious assumption.

A process-based objection is not proof that the policy that resulted from the process is wrong.

If an enterprise is not profitable once it has internalized its environmental and social externalities, it is an ongoing loss to society and shouldn’t exist.

Medium controversial:

Society as a whole will become poorer; at the same time, the costs of everything ecosystem-based will rise sharply.  People will be herded in from the exurbs and suburbs by the cost of everything.

Agriculture will substantially contract due to lack of water.  The ballsy part here is that I actually estimate an amount of three million acres, down from 9 million.   I predict the lost acreage will be from the west side, the Delta and most lands currently in alfalfa.

People will live in smaller places and eat less meat, because meat will become very expensive.

A market should be designed to do something, accomplish a goal that is bigger than existing as a market.

Subsidies themselves are not inherently bad.  Subsidies become bad when society shifts away from the goals they continue to promote.

Very controversial:

Local jurisdictions cannot be relied upon to work against narrow self-interest.  Where those conflict, a larger entity should compel them to act (to maintain, upgrade or move infrastructure), at their expense.

The ecosystem based part of our economy will contract for the next hundred years (at least).  We shouldn’t look for the gains of growth economies to lift us painlessly out of recession.

We could select and plan for a pleasant future; we could choose a transition that minimizes the pain of shrinking.  We are in the realm of minimizing pain, not expanding to additional consumption.

Population planning should be part of that transition.

Some of our dilemmas do not have win-win solutions.  The better choice for the whole state should be implemented even when there are people who are made substantially worse off.  (This is a taboo notion in a lot of state processes.  They simply dwindle to a stop when they can’t find win-win solutions.  We tactfully don’t mention the program again.  Four years later, the same problem generates a new program that won’t be able to do anything so long as no one can be made worse off.)

I only noticed Levine’s piece speculating that the Delta was deliberately neglected to support a water grab because Zetland objected to it.  My first impression was to laugh at someone expecting a piece by Levine to be prudent and accurate.  Levine was part of the Exile, which was pretty much a hole in civilization.  Levine’s role in water journalism is going to be provocation and extreme accusations, and we’ll value it as much as we value those two things.  Which I do.  With Levine out there, I’m mainstream.

After reading as much of Levine’s post as I could before my eyes blurred, I agreed with some of it.  I’ve said before that I expect us to end up with a Peripheral Canal, either by a planned orderly process that compensates landowners and averts a southern California water emergency, or by emergency powers if the Delta collapses first.  Further, I agree with Levine’s outrage that farmers (any of them, not just Westlands) would broker that water transfer and collect a huge windfall in the process.  That’s my main objection to our current water rights system, for example.  If we are at the point where the 22 million people in SoCal need drinking water for sustenance, I’m not much impressed with the notion of paying farmers for it.*

But I have two big objections to Levine’s piece.  First, enough with the idealization of Delta farmers.  They are, in fact, charming small players with a long history in a complex system.  But so fucking what?  There are charming and picturesque communities in Los Angeles and San Diego too, some of them with quainte customs that have been there for generations.  If the numbers and stakes were equal, I’d say to flip a coin and call it done.  But they aren’t equal, and the rationales and choosing of baselines get hopelessly tangled.  So then I go by the numbers.  In the end, choosing to maintain the drinking water of twenty-two million people over the lifestyles of five hundred thousand people is the right choice.  I couldn’t make that choice if I were choosing between two equal sized farming communities.  But the thing I’d like to see more Peripheral Canal advocates do is say outright, “Yes, the Delta won’t continue as it has been, and a small segment of society will feel the brunt of it, and it is still the right thing to do.”

The other thing I want to object to is the idea that there’s been a conspiracy about letting the Delta collapse, to drive need for a canal so that oligarchs can profit.  Dude, there’s no conspiracy.  The situation is just that mismanaged and fucked up.  For example, Levine writes:

The problem has been known for decades, and the estimated cost of fixing the levees is not particularly high — between $1 and $5 billion — but the issue just never figured high on the political agenda. California saw a whole legion of governors — Jerry Brown, Pete Wilson, Gray Davis and now Schwarzenegger — cycle through without giving it much attention.

Well, that’s because until 2003, it wasn’t the state’s responsibility to fix the Delta levees. It was the responsibility of the local reclamation districts, organized for that purpose, with tax assessment powers so that the people who lived behind levees could tax themselves to pay for the maintenance of the levees they live behind**. Which they didn’t do, for the better part of a hundred years. Then, in a surprise legal decision, a judge handed the whole problem to the state, who was shocked to find itself responsible for hundreds of miles of failing levees, and has since passed one bond measure, undertaken tens of emergency repairs, created a new branch of DWR and is writing the FloodSAFE plan. The state has been working on it pretty hard, in the six years it has been the state’s responsibility.

Mistakes like that, and assuming bad motives permeate Levine’s article. Which is fine, whatever, but without them, there’s no conspiracy. There’s just a deeply fucked up situation. There doesn’t have to be a conspiracy for us to get into a deadlocked situation with unpleasant winners and unfortunate losers. There just has to be a complexifying history*** and a battle over newly scarce resources to reveal the problems.

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Great article on the surprisingly large grape harvest last year.  Last time they got so many grapes, it took “at least two years to work off.”  The quote that caught my eye implies that growers consider grapes and almonds as the two alternatives, but sense that both markets are saturated.  They need more options that bring stable revenue.

Really? Glenn County is dropping out of NCWA? Because NCWA has moved in a direction that doesn’t suit their needs? What’s that about? My first guess is that NCWA is mostly dominated by water districts that support water transfers, since their rights are generous and valuable. But Glenn County supervisors, elected from the broader population,  are feeling more public pressure to keep their water home, lest someone in Los Angeles have a lawn somewhere. Perhaps the debate over the Peripheral Canal is bringing those different positions into relief.

The text minutes from the Glenn County BoS meeting aren’t very illuminating. Maybe I’ll watch the video later. Two thoughts:

• I freaking love that I can find the minutes of public meetings in seconds and watch the parts that interest me at my leisure.  This is an amazing boon to the citizenry.
• See?  Alliances shifting and splitting.  We’re gonna see a lot of this.  Hard time to be an overarching representative organization.

I am actually quite worried about Captain Knapp’s third point about Valley Fever. I would love to see his data on that, and would relay it to the Dept of Health Services if they don’t already have it. (For those of you who aren’t local, Valley Fever is an airborne fungus that makes people real sick. In seventh grade, it killed my best friend’s father. I came home from trip, asked my best friend how she was, and her father had died of Valley Fever within a couple days of getting it from a dusty attic. Oh.)

I also thought of a few critiques of the first story in the series, which was about the effects of pumping restrictions on the “human environment” of the west side. You guys want to see those?

KMPH, the Fox News Affiliate for Fresno, is running a story on how the pumping restrictions and regional water scarcity on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley are threatening the military readiness of the nation. I am skeptical, but the story lists three things that apparently threaten “half of the navy’s total offensive combat strike power”*.  According to the air station base commander, Captain Knapp, the lack of water on the west side:

1.  Increases the number of bird strikes.  Somehow, cultivating the 12,000 acres of surrounding farmland used to decrease the local bird population (and it is worth pausing over what that says about their farming practices).

2.  Increases local dust and debris, which Captain Knapp’s airplane engines are apparently sensitive to.

3.  Increases incidence of Valley Fever among people living on the base.

Now, I am no military expert**, so I will not venture a guess at the dangers increased bird strikes and dust on a California naval air station pose to the air strike capacity of the United States Navy.  It seems to me that they’d have encountered these conditions before, but what do I know?  I am, however, a California bureaucracy expert and a water expert.  So I have a few thoughts.

First, what is Lemoore Air Station doing entirely dependent on the water allocations of an agricultural water district?  Lemoore has about 5,000 people on base, which means I bet they have more than 3,000 water connections, which means Lemoore Air Station should be writing an Urban Water Management Plan.  Then, in the event that they suddenly have less water, they could go to the required Shortage Contingency Plan and implement their plan for dealing with these foreseeable problems.  I bet Lemoore fell through the cracks, because it is a federal installation in the middle of an ag water district, but the state requires other comparable-sized cities to plan for these events.

Second, I don’t think a small city should be dependent on an ag water district’s water supply; there are different minimum health and safety standards for each, for example.  But given that it is, that actually makes the lines of communication simple and direct.  If the lack of 12,000 farmed acres around Lemoore is a national security issue, the base commander can go straight to the Westlands Board of Directors.  They’re right there and they meet every month.  But the word “Lemoore” doesn’t appear in any of the last twelve Board meeting agendas.  Apparently the danger to naval air strike capacity is bad enough for base commander Captain Knapp to tell a newspaper reporter about, but not bad enough for him to go to his water supplier and ask for a specific allotment for a buffer against bird strikes and dust.

Maybe Navy Captain Knapp is shy and doesn’t want to disturb the Westlands Board of Directors with a national security matter.  In that case, he has other options.  He can’t go to DWR for an emergency transfer from the Drought Water Bank, because he’d need an Urban Water Management Plan with a complete Shortage Contingency Plan in it.  But considering that the half the navy’s air strike capacity is endangered by bird strikes and dust at Lemoore, perhaps he could make a case to another federal water agency, like Reclamation.  His 12,000 acres of cultivated buffer would require about 36,000 acrefeet of water to grow a crop and preserve the nation’s military readiness.  Reclamation had ten times that amount in carryover storage in San Luis.  They were holding that against a dry 2010, but if a direct link between 36,000 acrefeet of water at Lemoore Naval Air Station and a pressing national security crisis had been proven to them, I find it hard to believe that Reclamation couldn’t have given Lemoore water that was already south of the Delta.  Captain Knapp complains that Reclamation wasn’t responsive, and perhaps that’s true.  But perhaps they weren’t responsive to a general plea for more water in the region, instead of a specific request for a fixed amount of water to alleviate a well-demonstrated threat to the military readiness of the country.  I’m only speculating.

Which leads me to two more points.  First, how far do you want to take this link between water and national security?  Does it go any farther than giving interviews to Fox News reporters who are trying to undermine the Endangered Species Act?  I ask because I’m worried about your long runways.  Look at them out there on the west side, where overpumping has caused about seven feet of subsidence in the past few years.  Are they cracking?  Do cracked runways in California put half the air strike capacity of the United States navy at risk?  Seems like it is at least as worrisome as additional bird strikes.  That might be a good reason to call for groundwater regulation (or a halt to overdrafting altogether) in California.

That brings me to my last point, which is that you work for me, Captain Knapp.  I am one of your many employers, and I don’t like your giving interviews to biased news stations that are trying to undermine the laws of the land.  I think that you shouldn’t be using the gravitas of your military service to try to influence court decisions through the news.  I think that is bullshit, and you should be reprimanded for conspicuously inserting yourself into civilian politics.  Now, half of your employers might think different.  But half of your employers probably think like me.  Since you’re sure to anger half your employers, you should stay out of politicking about water and stick to your military duties, which I am sure you serve well and admirably.

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