Yesterday I watched the CA Planning and Conservation League’s panel of law school profs releasing their recommendations for improving CA water law. Naturally I wish they had been bolder, but they likely anchored their starting point in currently existing law and that’ll drag you down. I’m not writing this to critique their report; rather I’d like to expose what appears to be engrained thought.
As an engineer, I had to laugh at the following contrast:
- The lawyer profs write that there should be more extensive real-time gauging (which is true). Said Professor Lee, this is California! The state of high tech! How could we not have more real-time gauging?
- Later they write: whelp, adjudications take many decades. Shame about that, but we just can’t do them faster and especially not big adjudications. Little ones might go faster, but your children will be grown before an adjudication of a big system is done.
We appear to believe in an unexamined default, where the laws of physics require multi-decade adjudications and real-time data collection just appears in your phone. In reality it is exactly the opposite. Real-time gauging and data collection and presentation is really hard! Gauges on water bodies are physically far apart, far from roads; you have to have electronics that can handle outdoor conditions; animals and people tamper with them; they require energy sources; data transmission requires dedicated communications systems. It is physically difficult and expensive and requires fulltime maintenance. California should do it! But it is hard to install and maintain.
Adjudications are just information in a room. I personally was hired to duplicate a historic adjudication once, for reasons; it’s just records and spreadsheets. Adjudications are not more difficult than personnel and project management. We could do them as fast as we care to purchase. That’s the key, of course. Doing them extremely slowly favors the water users that have already grown rich in the status quo. The only reason they take decades is that current water users and administrations are fine with them taking decades.
I would like to point out that if an administration wants to get something done, they expand their capacity to do it. The last two administrations have very much wanted to do the PeripheralTunnelsConveyance and they have created an entire shadow agency to design it and do the permitting. That’s a full JPOA, bylaws, directors, staff, consultants and an EIR. An adjudication is not more work than that. They simply aren’t a priority equal to this administration’s priority for Delta conveyance.