On the public record

BOOOOO!! Booo! BOOO! Boooo! BOOOO!!! A bureaucrat got hold of this plan! BOOOO! If I wanted to read bureaucratic weaseling, I could read my own professional work. BOOOOO! Fire someone! (Not me.) What the hell?! Booooo!

The first plan was so swashbuckling. It was awesome. It asserted things clearly, and announced that it was boss of the whole world. Now it says bullshit things like, ‘there are two types of action, and some local governments should heavily consider our advice if they take one kind and strongly consider our advice if they do the other kind although we make no mention of enforcement and our appeal process is complicated the end.’ BOOOO! They lost their courage. It was way better before. Now it is another boring bureaucratic plan detailing an overly ornate process that will need infinite additional bureaucratic interpretation. I have been in so many rooms where we parsed out bureaucratic interpretations of complicated bifurcated processes, and I always know that this is why the public hates us.

Bring back the old plan! ACTION! Smackdown! LAW! Clarity!

OK, now I’m on to reading more of the content. I’ll give you something substantive in a bit.

NO I WON’T: Here! On page 27, where the DSC is ‘supporting creation,’ ‘urging consideration,’ and ‘supporting extension’ of mild things. Are you serious? Urging consideration by whom? Christmas elves? This is so very sad. First draft, the DSC was saying stuff like, “These are our badass regs and if you’ve ever so much as sipped water that could have flowed through or come from the Delta, they apply to you.” Now they’re urging other mysterious people to consider possible forms of districts? How did this happen?

What happened to you, DSC? Did they find your kryptonite? Are they holding your children hostage? I would personally lead the rescue operation if it meant we’d get the old DSC back.

Watch this until it converts you. This video shows the best case scenario. Water rushing over ag land, destroying relatively few buildings and killing relatively few people. It is dissipating energy the whole time as it approaches the highway that is acting as a levee. This is why we need set-back levees. This is how we should disperse floods. The only improvement I could see is to send floods over less capital-intensive agriculture, but even so, it isn’t a subdivision with houses full of children.

Also, that leading debris line is something to see.

ADDED:

Up until that wave hits the houses, this is what success would look like.

Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack talked to Ezra Klein on the phone, and couldn’t come up with any practical reasons to subsidize agriculture. He relied on an assertion that rural folks are, like, totally awesome and great people and the repository of American values.  Ezra Klein sensibly replied that so are most people, including city dwellers*.  Klein is a better person than I am, so he didn’t offer the perspective that rural folks also include unsavory types (like narrow-minded bigots and meth-heads) right along with the awesome ones.  But we don’t have to debate the quality of rural souls, because even if they are all shining angels, we don’t generally support people for awesomeness.  We pay them to produce something that society wants or because we want to correct a classic market failure.   There are substantive reasons that I would subsidize some forms of ag in some parts of California.  I shouldn’t have to do Secretary Vilsack’s work for him, but here goes.

I would support subsidies for a type of Californian agriculture that looks a lot like the original vision of the Reclamation Act.  I don’t support indirect subsidies, like:

But I would like to see a certain type of agriculture in the state, and would be willing to spend our collective money to directly pay farmers (of the sort I like) to exist.

Promoting dense, interlinked communities that support a lot of additional jobs.

If agriculture escapes the expansion treadmill, it can provide a decent, outdoors, self-directed life for people willing to work extraordinarily hard.  It converts sunshine and water into storable calories at a fairly constant rate (except for disasters).  As the first producer of a resource, it can support a large number and variety of secondary jobs, in processing and support.  It has been and should be possible to support densely interlinked towns with a variety of jobs on agriculture.  You can see the remnants of those towns along the 99, with attractive abandoned main streets.  That model isn’t necessarily economically efficient, however, and gets undercut by large-scale agriculture.  Farms and towns like that are, however, pleasant things to have in one’s state, for the quality of life they provide their residents and for local tourism.  So long as we are wealthy, I want us to buy more of those.

Entry point for migrants

I don’t think of farming as unskilled labor, but it is a sector that can use the labor of people who don’t have formal educations.  Agricultural skills from their countries of origin may be useful in agriculture here.  I subscribe to the “Give me your tired, your poor” vision of America.  If we are to accept immigrants, it is good to have work available to them that doesn’t rely on formal schooling or draws from their existing skills.  I am also in favor of paying farm laborers decent wages, which would likely increase the cost of food.

Farms look nice.

I suppose the technical way to say this is that farms produce positive externalities: preserving open space and being visually interesting.  What I really mean is that I love the look of a working landscape.  I’ve got it bad; I even like the monotonous industrial ag by the 5.  Of course the smaller farms are more intriguing, with orchards that bloom and jumbled up machinery and little lambies that wave at passing cars.  I want to see small farms around, because they are often places that have absorbed decades of attention and work.  Farmers develop systems, and systems are always fascinating.

Providing food security.

Strangely for someone who predicts a third of the state’s irrigated agriculture will be retired in the next few decades, I take food security very seriously.  I don’t think we’re at risk of not providing enough calories for our people, first because we export lots of them out of the state and second because we waste 90% of the calories from field crops converting them into meat and dairy.  Even with two-thirds of the irrigated acreage in the state, we can grow plenty of calories for direct human consumption as soon as prices tell farmers to do so.

However, I would like us to retain the capacity to do that.  I have never understood the argument that we should specialize in something else that makes more money and use the extra money to buy food from elsewhere.  That may be rational in average or good years, but it leaves us fundamentally vulnerable when things go bad.  First, when food is scarce, it become infinitely valuable; even if we are relatively wealthy, what would we have to spend to extract it from another country?  If they have barely enough (which is when we’d need it), they won’t sell it at any price and what?  We take food from another hungry country by force?  This is morally untenable and not practically do-able.  Besides all that, why?  Why let ourselves get into the position of ever depending on some one else for the most immediate and powerful of necessities.  Money itself is not exchangeable enough in famine, and you can’t eat it.  I’m sure this sounds like a straw man but I have had economists earnestly promote this notion to me, so you begin to understand the source of my scorn for them.

Working landscapes can also support wildlife.

Farms can support biodiversity, if they are managed to do so.  More farmed acres might be managed to do so if farmers’  livelihoods didn’t depend on pure industrial production.

Improves my urban quality of life.

Having small agriculture nearby increases my quality of life, primarily by offering me greater diversity of produce than I’d otherwise have.  There are plenty of food-porn sites that will rhapsodize about farmers’ market shopping and fresh food, so I don’t have to do that here.  Besides, supermarkets have pretty good produce departments these days.  Nevertheless, I find shopping at farmers’ markets to be a nicer experience with a greater variety of produce over the course of the year, especially when a cute market Betty offers me samples.  Those markets are only possible when there are farmers nearby growing produce for local consumption.

Building on comparative advantage.

California has fantastic natural advantages for agriculture, in climate and soil.  We’ve invested heavily in infrastructure to develop that further.  You probably think I mean the water projects, but I’m actually thinking of our ag colleges.  It sounds silly to say the self-evident out loud, but it is important to produce food and fiber; places that are good for that should do so.  This is likely true of agriculture in the rest of the country, and Vilsack should have been able to say specifically why, but we all know that I don’t care about those other places.

Overall:

It is hard to argue that we should support (essentially) small truck farms, because what we would be getting in exchange is largely abstract.  We would be maintaining food-production capacity.  We would get the view of small farms.  Urban dwellers would get some qualitative experiences, like shopping at farmers’ markets or having intricate ag-based towns in the state.  We would also get resilience, since complex systems with diverse elements do better under stress than simplified systems.  So it is hard enough to say that the collective state should buy these abstract things.  It is even harder to make the case when economists offer specious counter arguments.

The counter argument from traditional economics is that the market itself has proved that people don’t want those abstract things as much as they want cheap food.  This is why I have severe doubts about markets; markets only let people express choices for narrow economic efficiency.  It is difficult to express any other choice in a market; if I deliberately pay more because I want to support boutique agriculture, is it clear that I’m doing that so they’ll pay laborers decent wages and clean up their ag run-off?  Or will some middleman snag those extra dollars, and the grower never gets that information from me.   But in a market, you can always send the signal that you want cheap food.  Purchasers’ ability to signal their preferences is asymmetric in a market, perpetually biased towards economic efficiency.  I won’t address incomplete information, because it is patronizing when advocates say that “if the public really knew, they’d support what I think.”   But I add that people have inconsistent time preferences.  They may want the abstract things I mentioned on an on-going basis, but sharply prefer to spend less on groceries in the moment.  This is why I doubt that markets reflect people’s true feelings.

Finally, direct payments to farmers (to be the kind of farmers I want) are necessary because they consistently work with very high risk.   They absorb climate variability, which will become even more volatile.  If they are not perfectly resilient, we’ll lose a few with every shock.  Since I value their capacity, I think we should pay them to bridge them through disasters.  (I know insurance could handle this, but humans are not very good about risk and insurance, so handling that should not be left to the individual (in any context, car or health or crop failure).)

I don’t know what structure payments like that could have.  But if the vision were clear, direct subsidies could be shaped to deliver that.**  If we were buying the type of ag we want, we could also include ways to help new farmers enter the ag sector.  I know a fair number of people who think they want to farm.  I don’t believe most of them, but none of them get to try, because it is so hard to buy large farms (to compete at the economically efficient scale) and they can’t afford health insurance.

Those are my reasons to subsidize some forms of agriculture, and none of them have anything to do with inherent awesomeness of country folk.  They are self-interested reasons urban people should spend money to stabilize and promote ag.  Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack can thank me later.

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That’s all I got on the PPIC report, although it covered much more ground than I commented on. If you want me to pay serious attention to any other aspect of the report, please prompt me with a specific question. (In the comments is fine.) If I don’t get requests, I’m likely to go back to mocking House Republicans or something frivolous.

Yes. Of course we need a public goods fee. The state desperately needs consistent funding for water management. Lurching from bond to bond is terrible: expensive at best, makes for inconsistent projects at least. I saw firsthand that it damaged people’s lives; locals trying to do bond-funded work had to lay off people between bond-backed grants.

But, local agencies are invariably opposed to a public goods fee. They don’t want to raise fees for their constituents; nor collect the fee; nor send it on to Sacramento. My perception is that most water policy folks both admit the strong need for a public goods fee and the political difficulty of instituting one.

I’m not saying this with my usual certainty, but last week I got to thinking that combining the conversations about regional legal entities and public goods fees may be a way to get both. Maybe local agencies would fight a public goods fee less if it went primarily to support their Region (and the regional DWM office) and they had some voting control over its allocation? Maybe they should have to pay into the Region whether they join the Region or no, so they may as well join? Sacramento could skim a little to support statewide planning efforts that cross regional boundaries, like flood and water rights, but honestly, with the Regions and the Project spun off, there isn’t much of a Sacramento office left (which is probably fine).

There are difficulties in supporting Regions with their local tax base; poor areas like the northeast would have puny little Regions and the south coast area could pave their regional building in platinum. But we could look to school districts for strategies for evening that out.

I’m not completely sold on this idea. But while I can imagine a legislature setting up a structure for Regions without funding them, I can’t see much hope for a public goods fee unless it is tied into the conversation about Regions. Maybe combining the two is the way to get both.

I wrote about the state level governance structure proposed by the PPIC report back when it was the Little Hoover Commission suggestion. The PPIC proposal for state level bureaucracy is even closer to my preferences, and adds in cool things like a Public Trust Advocate. (Although, I’m never in private utility circles, so I don’t know whether people like the work of the PUC’s analogous Ratepayer Advocate. Has that worked out?) A new DWM would affect me directly, so I am naturally opposed just ’cause it is different. Aside from CHANGEBAD, however, it looks far better than our current messed-up bureaucratic structure.

I am more interested in the prospect for regional entities. I haven’t jumped on the bandwagon for regional management, for two reasons. First, my experience with regional offices has been that they are even more subject to regulatory capture than the Sacramento office, and come to consider their job to be buffering their local buddies from the outrageous edicts that come down from the out-of-touch central office. Which gets real frustrating, you know? I know that IRWM “Regions” are supposed to be more than that, but I’m starting with a bias against regions.

My second, and more reasonable objection to Regions is that they aren’t a thing. So far, they’re a set of agreements between a bunch of agencies with varying jurisdictions and authorities. That strikes me as wholly inadequate for serious water planning; what if the patchwork of eminent domain authority doesn’t reach the entire length of a proposed wetland? What if some local agencies can tax their constituents and others can’t? Who do you serve if you are suing a Region? There is nothing in there.

But, so long as the legislature is messing with the structure of California water governance, they could remove my objection by creating legal entities to bolster this notion of Region. Just like the legislature creates special districts and LAFCO regulates them, there could be something with more heft than a JPA behind the Region concept. I don’t know what shape it should take. A mixed appointed and elected board, with local agencies as voting members? Move county water authorities to the Region? Taxation and eminent domain powers? No doubt the lawyers could do a better job suggesting those than I can.

After reading the PPIC report I started to imagine these Regions being housed in the same buildings as the regional offices of the (new, proposed) Department of Water Management. They could write Basin Plans together! All of a sudden I started to distrust Integrated Regional Water Management less. Maybe there’s some potential in that approach after all. But only when a Region is an actual thing. The legislature should go for it, so long as they’re rearranging executive water agencies anyway.

ADDED 3/8: These Regional entities could run intra-basin markets as part of their authorities and duties.

Dr. Gleick might or might not agree with my last post arguing that the PPIC report has an underlying theme of extracting water from ag. His complaint is elsewhere, that the report doesn’t recommend agricultural water conservation and include yields from ag water conservation as part of the solution.

The report’s biggest blind spot is agriculture, the state’s largest water user. The authors discount the vast potential for improving agricultural water-use efficiency because they misunderstand how it works in the real world, they overestimate its costs, and they misconstrue, misrepresent or minimize the benefits of these improvements. Why do they ignore this potential? Because they make the simplistic and false assumption, promulgated by some in the agricultural industry, that all excessive farm water use is already recaptured and reused.

This conclusion is at odds with history, science, field studies and the actual experience of California farmers. In reality, abundant water is lost to unproductive evaporation or to other sinks where it is not recaptured. Other benefits accrue from agricultural efficiency improvements as well, including better water quality, improvements in the timing of flows in important stretches of California’s rivers, reductions in energy demands and a savings of real water. Every one of these advantages would contribute to solving problems in the Delta and elsewhere. Efficiency improvements must therefore be central to any portfolio of recommendations for a new California water policy.

This editorial made me realize that I’m starting to see a schism around this issue. Dr. Gleick and the Pacific Institute are leading a faction that thinks there is enough inefficiency in ag water use that there are substantial salvageable amounts of water (and other benefits) to be gained from ag water conservation. I’m an example (although surely not a leader of anything) of someone who thinks that the basins have negative water (as shown by falling gw levels), that ag should switch to more efficient practices for the other benefits, and we’ll end up getting a good deal of water from ag by retiring irrigated lands.

On the one hand, this isn’t such a big difference. I strongly suspect both groups would call themselves enviros, and agree on prioritizing the existence of a bait fish while crushing out property rights of real Americans everywhere. We can all aspire to be the target of one of Devin Nunes’ rants together.

On the other hand, maybe there’s antagonism developing? I don’t love reading that my take on the situation is the one promulgated by the ag industry. Surely I’ve been clear enough here that no one mistakes me for an ag apologist. (More of a Kunstler-esque collapse pessimist, which is an entirely different motivation.) I read the Pacific Institute report, wrote about it here for a couple weeks. Then I came to a different professional judgment, which is that I don’t expect the SJV and lower Sac Valley to get much water out of conservation, although there are other good reasons for better ag water management. Which is what I imagine the authors of the PPIC report did, although I can’t speak for them, of course.

I hope I’m wrong about a schism forming, since I know (a little bit) and respect (a lot) people who hold both positions. They all care a great deal about getting us out of our current mess, and I am guessing they have substantial overlap in priorities (and that mine map fairly closely). Hmmm. Maybe one of the unlooked-for benefits of anonymity is that I can remain undeclared in my personal interactions with folk, stay low-pro. That will be my plan. You guys would not believe how mild-mannered I am in real life, all meekly polite and shit. They’ll never guess.

I was startled at Dr. Gleick’s editorial in the Sac Bee saying that the PPIC report lets ag off the hook for solving California’s water scarcity. I get that Dr. Gleick’s complaint is that the PPIC report doesn’t emphasize agricultural water conservation enough. But my consistent, recurring thought as I read the PPIC report was “Oh man, ag is NOT gonna like that.” My read was that extracting water from ag was a consistent theme throughout the report, starting in the first paragraph of the Executive Summary.

The third sentence of the Executive Summary, right after ‘things are bad’ and ‘everyone wants more’ is:

At the same time, the state’s economy no longer depends as directly on water to generate wealth: agriculture, which still consumes the lion’s share of water, represents a small fraction of overall employment and economic output, and manufacturing accounts for only a small fraction of total water use.

This is not pro-ag sentiment; it goes straight to one of ag’s favorite myths, that they’re an economic powerhouse in the state. And if ag isn’t a big part of the economy, perhaps it isn’t a bad thing if the water they’re using now goes to other things. Other parts of the report echo that.

In chapter 7 (p 317-322), the report recommends putting both the reasonable use clause and the public trust doctrine to work. Under the heading “Reallocating Water for the Environment” they talk for ages about the two doctrines, and end up saying they are necessary “for responsive adaptation to changing conditions.” The writing is still a little soft, but the truth of the world isn’t. If we “reallocate water for the environment” it will come from ag, because it surely won’t come from urban. Five pages about how legal it is to do that is not pro-ag. (Page 328, on bringing pre-1914 rights and riparian rights into alignment with the rest of our rights system, is a direct challenge to one of ag’s sweeter deals.)

The PPIC report recommends a public goods charge. Right there on page 344, they write define it as “a volumetric charge on all surface and groundwater used in the state”. This is another measure that lands heavily on ag, because they use a great deal of water. Imagine a fee of $10/af-year. Urban households now use somewhat less than an acre-foot a year; that’ll go down in the next decade, but a public goods charge will cost a household $10 or less per year. Farmers use a great deal of water. If Stuart Woolf irrigates his entire 20,000 acre farm in Westlands, he’d buy 60,000 af/year, roughly. He would pay $600,000/year into the public goods fund for water. Recommending a volumetric public goods charge puts ag squarely on the hook for the water they use.

Several aspects of their governance recommendations are about extracting water from ag. Frankly, I think that’s the primary motivation behind a water market they talk about at length. They suggest directly compensating people (like farm laborers) who suffer third-party impacts from water leaving ag. I thought their recommendation to re-examine the lengths of ag water contracts from the projects (currently 40 years) was one of their most dramatic recommendations (page 372). I haven’t heard much chatter along those lines, so it is a pretty bold thought.

I understand Dr. Gleick’s complaint (more on that in the next post), but this is not a document that lets ag off the hook. The entire report is based on the premise that much less water will be used for ag. It discusses legal mechanisms to loosen the water rights of ag users. It provides governance mechanisms for arranging the flow of water out of ag. It proposes that ag pay big dollars to the public goods fund, in proportion to their big water use. The text of the report isn’t quite as direct as this post, but for all of these recommendations, all that is required to see the implications for ag is one more obvious interpretive step. I can’t imagine that ag likes the report any.

If you guys have specific questions about my read on the PPIC report, I’d give them some thought (with a caution that my expertise is not on the ecosystem side of things, so my thought there would likely be: “Huh. Dunno.”)

Otherwise, I’m planning three posts. One responding to Dr. Gleick’s critique in the Bee. One on my take on the proposed governance structure. One on the potential to implement a public goods fee. If you want more than those three posts, you should ask.

A judge invalidated the incidental take permit for the Scott and Shasta Rivers? Good. That was always a horrible idea. The Department of Fish and Game was bending over for the ranchers in the Scott and Shasta Valleys, saying that if they signed on to the valley-wide take permits for endangered coho salmon, they didn’t have to get separate take permits for each of their own diversions. But the ranchers might still see restrictions on their operations, even under the more lenient valley-wide permit, (because they damn near de-water whole stream reaches) so they hated it anyway. If everyone is going to hate a compromise, then you might as well scrap it and have winners and losers. That way at least someone will be getting what they want.

By the way, this quote comes at the end of the article.

Park declined to say whether the groups would begin targeting individual landowners. Etna, Calif., rancher Jeff Fowle acknowledged there’s a risk of such suits, but he said landowners have taken many measures to protect fish and have only diverted water in accordance with their adjudicated rights.

…

Ranchers have put in Fish and Game-designed fish screens and permanent rock weir structures so they don’t have to use push-up dams, Fowle said.

You might not know what a push-up dam is. I didn’t. We didn’t learn about push-up dams in my engineering classes. Turns out they aren’t real technical. A push-up dam is when a cowboy gets his tractor out in the spring, and pushes the gravels in the streambed up to form a hump across the stream. Water stacks up behind the loose hump of gravels so the rancher can divert it to flood his pastures. Those gravels maybe had salmon eggs or hatchlings in them, but fuck ’em. The tractor probably crushed them, and they wouldn’t have lived anyway, since the push-up dam completely dewaters the downstream reach until the water reaches high enough to start coming over the gravel hump.

A push-up dam is such an outrageous violation that a local guy should know better than to mention it to the press. That’s the kind of thing that makes me wish for very strict, very personal application of the ESA in the Scott and Shasta river valleys. The valley-wide incidental take permits were too good for the ranchers up there. I’m glad a court invalidated the concept. Now I’d like to see some real enforcement up there, keeping tractors out of rivers.