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John Yoo is still an abomination who brings shame to my alma mater, but today I am very grateful for tenure.  Harris Ranch (big CAFO on the westside of the San Joaquin Valley, the one you see and smell at Coalinga*) has threatened to pull $500K worth of donations to CalPoly for bringing Michael Pollan to speak.  Valley Economy found the complaint letter, and was interested in a secondary complaint:

My second issue is of still greater concern, and has provided me with both displeasure and outright anger towards the university. In a recent (09/14/09) phone conversation Mike Smith had with Rob Rutherford in the Animal Science Department, … Mr. Rutherford then had the audacity to offer Mike an entirely unsolicited opinion that water should have NEVER been provided to farmers on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley. As Harris Ranch operates one of the largest farms in this region, Mr. Rutherford implies that Harris Ranch should not be farming! He went on to offer that this acreage should be converted back to the native forages once found there.

Full respect to Prof. Rutherford. Lest there be any doubt remain about the implication, I will say outright:

Harris Ranch should not be farming on the West Side.
No one should be farming on the West Side.
I don’t know whether it should go back to native forage or be turned into solar power farms, but the West Side shouldn’t be irrigated, which means it shouldn’t farmed.

Even more! Under climate change, I don’t think the junior rights holders on the West Side will get water more than 6 years in 10. If that. If they continue farming, they should stop whining about the other four years (which may happen back-to-back for more than four years.) They should accept that there will be less water in CA, that new dams would catch floods but not yield new supplies and besides will be dedicated to urban uses first, and figure out whether they want to scrape through under those circumstances. If they do, do it and stop whining. If they don’t, figure out how they can extort a good severance from the state, the feds, or someone who will buy their crappy water rights.

Anyway, Prof. Rutherford is awesome. I hope he doesn’t suffer any fallout from this. Also, I am encouraged that the locals around CalPoly SLO, one of the three remaining ag colleges in the state, seem to be Pollan supporters in a meaningless online newspaper survey. Opinions are shifting!

*Coalinga is not a Spanish word, like you might guess after a second’s thought. Coalinga was Coaling Station A. I don’t know whether there were other coaling stations and if they were re-named.

Gov. Schwarzenegger’s threat to veto the entire class of bills from this year unless he gets the water bill he wants is incredibly petty.  I hope the legislature calls his bluff, and if he does veto every bill the legislature produced this year, I hope they impeach him.  Further, the things Schwarzenegger is holding out for (two new dams, Sites and Temperance Flats) aren’t the crucial next step for California.  He could get the crucial next step (deep conservation measures and an entity with the authority to move ahead with a Peripheral Canal) from the bills the Dems have offered him.  But he’s insisting on two fairly trivial new dams, presumably because those represent a personal victory for him*. 

The insistence on getting this done this year is also silly.  Phil Isenberg says to do it now, and I generally give a lot of credence to his opinions.  But I think the machinery for what the big water bills would do is already churning.  The state is moving ahead on a big water conservation push (20% by 2020).  Right now that’s not mandatory and legislatively mandating it would be helpful.  But it is gathering steam and could be a stand-alone legislative effort next year.  Putting in place an entity to govern the Delta would also be great, but it will take a couple years to do it and frankly, whether that starts this, next or two years from now won’t make that much difference.  The first thing that entity will do is an EIR for the Peripheral Canal and a habitat plan for the Delta, and people are already working on that.  Don’t think that the specs, surveys, design and permits for a Peripheral Canal aren’t already under development.  They are, and if an entity isn’t created to manage that this year, the work that Canal proponents are doing now will be that much further along when some Delta governing entity comes into existence. 

Yeah, what’s at stake here is the governor’s reputation, which I care nothing for, and two dams that I’m ambivalent to slightly negative about.  The work that I think is crucial is underway.  Don’t cave, legislature!  Send the governor the water bills YOU want. 

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I do want to make a friendly amendment to this summary from Calitics:

We’ve mentioned the water issue for a long time, but there is no way to overemphasize one critical point: No matter how many projects you build, you do not get any additional water.

OK, that’s not true.  There are crazy projects that could get more water.  Those aren’t on the table, but, you know, bringing in water from the Great Lakes would actually be new water to CA.  There aren’t cost-efficient legal projects that would yield (noticeable amounts) of new water.  However, the state looks to be getting much less water under climate change, arriving in floods from rainy spring storms.  It is possible that new dams could catch some of that.  This isn’t new water, but it could mean that new dams would help us keep more of what we’ve got now than we could without them.  That increment is pretty important to whichever junior right holder is in line to use it.  New dams have a direct link to someone’s existing interests.  As for “substantial new amounts of water to grow on”?  No one serious is talking about that.  The serious discussion is about minimizing losses.

* Also, I imagine because if we delay on those two dams, the next time they’re considered, we’ll know even more about the new hydrology, which might well show that they’ll never be full.  The new hydrology might also show that we need them more than ever to catch the precip that used to be snow but will now be rain.  Nevertheless, I think new dams become less likely with time, not more likely.  Especially if a Peripheral Canal gets built in the meantime and the system doesn’t seem to be quite so broken.

South Carolina Senator DeMint must have watched Hannity; he suggests waiving the ESA for a year to restore farming on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley.  He’s from one of those teeny states that are far away, so maybe these numbers sound big to him:

A revised University of California-Davis study recently found that up to 40,000 San Joaquin Valley jobs will be lost by the end of 2009 and 500,000 acres of productive farm land will be fallowed because of water rationing — a direct result of these Biological Opinions. The same study also concluded that Central Valley could lose $1.6 billion to $2.2 billion as a result of this unnecessary drought.

OK, folks.  Here are some other interesting numbers.

The salmon industry that needs those Biological Opinions to recover is worth about $1.4B.

500,000 acres sounds like a lot, but the state’s total irrigated acreage is about 9 million acres.  You’re talking 5% of the irrigated acreage of the state, which is relatively not so much.  The state’s almond acreage is 710,000 acres, and so long as we’re growing luxuries like almonds, I’m not listening to worries about national food shortages.  Further, the state’s alfalfa acreage was 900,000 acres in 2009, and while I don’t hate alfalfa the way most people do, so long as we’re growing fodder for animals, I will not think we’re on the verge of a food shortage for people.

The majority of the idled acres are in Westlands Water District and on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley.  As a reminder, if those acres are returned to production, gathering and treating their selenium-poisoned farm run-off is predicted to cost $2.6B.

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I do feel bad for idled farmworkers on the west side (there is considerable active controversy about their number), but while this drought hits junior water rights holders like Westlands hard, it isn’t hammering all of CA agriculture evenly and CA agriculture is BIG.  Our best option is to use this drought as the start of a conscientious phazing out of west side agriculture, with support for transitioning growers and farmworkers.  That smacks of socialism, so of course we won’t do it.  I guess we’ll let it happen the hard way.

UPDATE 10/8: Saw the  USDA Disaster Declaration Requests for 51 counties for 2009.   I can’t find a link for them yet, but I’ll tell you that the total USDA drought reported losses are at $875M.  The better part of a billion dollars sounds like a lot of money, but the total value of California ag is about $36.6B.  Declared drought losses come out to 2% of the annual value of California ag.

UPDATE 10/16: Truly, this is too fun to stop. From here:

Lawmakers from the San Joaquin Valley have likened the economic devastation to their Hurricane Katrina.

Shall we?  Wikipedia says that Katrina cost $89.6B dollars.  Right now, the disaster relief funds to California agriculture from the drought are at $875M.   When the drought is a hundred times as bad, it’ll be roughly like Katrina.  Of course, for what Katrina cost, you could buy all of California ag for two years straight.

The only thing under the fold is the most trivial insider gossip about ag econ modeling.  Truly, virtually all of you aren’t interested.

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I shouldn’t do “outraged at Fox News” blogging, because I’ve never watched Fox News.  I am given to understand that it is biased in ways I wouldn’t like if I did watch it.  I knew someone named Hannity would be doing a show on water and the San Joaquin Valley, and despite my interest in those topics, I knew I’d never bother to watch it.  Nevertheless, I did see a write-up of the show here, and my craziest hope rose with every word I read.  They couldn’t have… they didn’t… there’s no way… but it sounds like.  OH HOLY CRAP.  They put Zeke Grader on the show!  I don’t know Zeke Grader, but he’s legendary.  He’s a super strong fishing and ecosystem advocate and he’s funny as hell.  I’ve loved him ever since this quote:

Commercial fishermen heaped blame Friday on the Bush administration for managing the [Klamath] river in a way they contend favors farmers, dam operators and timber companies at the expense of fish.

“The federal government has done absolutely nothing to help, and fishermen are angry,” said Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Assns. “It’s almost like they created this Klamath situation to make them look competent on Katrina.”

I still won’t watch the program, but apparently Grader pointed out that fisherman are also hurting, leaving Fox News watchers to resolve the dissonance of two competing groups of picturesque resource extractors, both real manly and conservative. I’ll leave them to their dilemma.

From the Daily News in Los Angeles:

 But after his stint on the Board of Water and Power Commissioners, [Nick Patsaouras] wants to be known as the Howard Jarvis of the DWP.
…

“I want to put a measure on the ballot that would put a ceiling on DWP rates,” Patsaouras said. “We need to put controls on the rates so that we aren’t pricing ourselves so high that people can’t afford it.

…
The idea for a rate ceiling came when the commission recently voted to lift the Energy Cost Adjustment Factor, a pass-through to ratepayers to cover the cost of fuel.

“That is the straw that will break the camel’s back,” Patsaouras said. “If that is adopted, the pass-through will exceed the base rates. We have to stop it now.”

This kills me. Dude wants to cap the amount of a pass-through for energy costs. I don’t understand. This fee, the one he wants to cap, is how customers pay for energy to convey and treat water. What does he think will happen if his initiative passes and LA DWP customers can no longer pay the market rate for fuel to move water? Does he think that fuel will magically cost what they want to pay? Does he think that LA DWP will buy as much fuel as they can under the new regulation, and then only convey that much water? There are fuel costs associated with moving and treating water and they impose a burden on the consumers of water. That is all true and sad, especially if those fuel costs are going up rapidly in a time when people don’t have much money. But these are supply costs on an open market, asked by fuel sellers who presumably have other customers. Voting to establish an absolute upper bound that DWP will pay for fuel is meaningless. DWP must have fuel to move and treat water and it must either buy that fuel for the market price or buy less fuel.

You know, I don’t even understand this guy on his own crazy terms. Why is he capping the fuel pass-through fee? That’s the part with no agency discretion. Why not go for the base-rate? The base-rate is some combination of stuff like costs of conveyance and treatment*, paying for their physical capital, staff salaries, and a maintenance reserve. It is perfectly legitimate for the board of a water district to decide to keep the base-rate low and have a shoddy, falling-apart water district. This is one possible choice that constituents might prefer, although City of Placerville is regretting it. But he isn’t proposing to cap the base-rate. He’s proposing to cap the part DWP has no way to change.

This is so staggeringly dumb it makes my head hurt, but I should have known that as soon as I saw that someone aspires to be the Howard Jarvis of something.  Please, please, please, voters in Los Angeles. Please see through this, please understand that this proposal is nonsensical. Please can we put an end to thinking that we don’t have to pay for what we use?
 

*I bet they separated the fuel pass-through from that because the cost of fuel changes a lot and they didn’t want to be tinkering with the water rates all the time.

UPDATE: Edited very slightly a day later.

I’ve read slight variations on this editorial a whole bunch of times, and the dominant theme is that the state government is abdicating responsibility to DO SOMETHING to FIX CALIFORNIA WATER.  The State should HAVE A PLAN.

But it’s the Legislature and governor — both past and present — who have failed to meet the growing water needs of the state.

California’s population has doubled since the last major water project was built in the state.

But state lawmakers continue to dodge this issue, fearing that they’ll anger one of the many interest groups involved in the issue.

We believe that agricultural, urban and environmental water needs can be accommodated with a comprehensive water plan. There would have to be compromises by all parties to the water debate.

The State does have a Plan. California’s Dept. of Water Resources puts out a Water Plan every five years, as mandated by the legislature. The new one will be adopted in December, but it has been released in substantial draft already. If you want to know what the state intends to do to fix California’s water, there is no secret involved. That said, I don’t think the authors of that editorial are going to like the upcoming Water Plan.

If the authors of that editorial are long time water watchers, they are probably pining for the good old days of the Water Plan, when it was a straightforward description of how state engineers intended to plumb the state. It was a plan in the sense of a plan drawing. Nowadays, the Water Plan is a plan in the sense of “an approach”, and anyone looking to the state to FIX CALIFORNIA WATER is not going to like this approach.

The theme of the new Water Plan is “integrated regional water management”, and that’s where DWR is putting their time and money. The state thinks “regions” should solve their own problems now, with money handed out from statewide bonds. The state is kicking responsibility for FIXING CALIFORNIA WATER down a level. Further, the Water Plan will not advocate a set of solutions. The Water Plan instead will describe about thirty options that regions could choose to do and leave the selection of options to, well, someone else.

This isn’t wrong or anything. A distributed approach might be a good tactic now that the good big sources of water are already being used. I don’t think it will satisfy anyone who wants the State to FIX WATER. I don’t expect the editorials to change much, or to get what they want either.

Two gauges that measure the flow of the Mattole River were vandalized over the weekend, temporarily throwing a wrench into the works of a program to monitor the amount of water in the drought-stricken stream.

The first U.S. Geological Survey gauge in Ettersburg was hit on May 31 at 10 p.m. The solar panel that charges its batteries was torn out and its antenna — which transmits the information — was cut and removed. Three hours later, vandals hit another gauge near Petrolia in similar fashion.

This article about vandalized gauges on the Mattole River cracked me up. I mean, it is actually sad, because that equipment costs money and we need the flow data. But it was still funny. There are three possible reasons for the vandalism. The article quotes some director-guy as saying that vandals did that deliberately to obscure information about the river. Maybe rights holders don’t want anyone to know how much they’re draining the river.

That’s possible, but I got to tell you. When I was taught to design anything, any stupid uncontroversial gate in a water district, my professors hammered home the design criteria that everything we make must be bullet proof. The folks out there shoot anything, all the time. If it stands out in any way, it is a target. Half the boxes (for circuitry and telemetry) at the gates we go to have bullet indentations in them, just because. No one hates them. No one is sending a message. They just get shot at. So you can’t rule out the possibility that this vandalism was the usual dumb vandalism.

My friend suggests a different reason. I’m so used to water scarcity and fish limits and policy disputes, but that’s not what she says. “On the Mattole?” she says. “Those are pot growers. They don’t want anyone seeing their unauthorized diversions and sending out helicopters.” Compared to all the usual complexity in resource disputes, that sounds like such a pure and straightforward reason to break a couple gauges.

Every apology, folks.  I simply don’t seem to be thinking extracurricular thoughts about water these days.  I am positive that I will again, and when my mind whirs with thoughts I don’t say at work, I’ll want a place to put them.  Until then, thanks for looking here.

I have expressed doubt about using center pivot irrigation systems here in California before, so I feel obligated to point to this piece on new center pivot systems going in on the West Side of the San Joaquin Valley.

This piece in the NYTimes gets at the ferocity with which growers in CA resist groundwater management, by the state or by mutual agreement.

If he lived in almost any other state in the arid Southwest, Mr. Watte could be required to report his withdrawals of groundwater or even reduce them. But to California’s farmers and developers, that is anathema. “I don’t want the government to come in and dictate to us, ‘This is all the water you can use on your own land,’ ” said Mr. Watte, 57. “We would resist that to our dying day.”

Wow. Mr. Watte is loosely linking governmental regulation of a commons to collective death of himself and his farming peers? If pressed, he probably wouldn’t admit that emotional connection, but speculating wildly, I bet he feels something close to that. Man. That makes policy discussions really difficult. On one side you’ve got a nerd saying “You’ll notice that in adjudicated basins, growers take approximately 83.4% of annual safe yield…” and on the other you’ve got people feeling, “They are coming and we will die.”

The strangest part to me is that I think this fervent resistance to groundwater monitoring and regulation is completely path dependent. It is coincidence that California doesn’t monitor groundwater; I don’t think it was ever a policy decision or anything. It just didn’t come up until growers believed they had a right to pump whatever they wanted and tell no one ever, falling groundwater levels be damned. Now I find it bizarre that they are so deeply vested in the right to unmonitored groundwater pumping. I bet that if they’d happened to come up in a system with monitored and regulated groundwater (like 48 of 50 states), they’d never once miss that right. As irrefutable proof, I point out that Google searches for “free our groundwater” and “deregulate groundwater” return no hits.  No one in regulated groundwater systems lobbies for the right to pump at will.  People don’t articulate that right when they don’t have it.  Look: nothing, in an otherwise long list.

We’re here now, and a big battle over regulating groundwater is on the horizon. Good to know how deep feelings run. But even though I want to respect people’s views in general, frankly, I think the opposition to monitored and regulated groundwater has become passionately and arbitrarily wed to a privilege that will end up hurting them most (if aquifers get sucked dry).  I’ll have to think about good ways to move people out of that position.

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