On the public record

I loved everything about this article, on a Solano woman who objects to her new water bill.  I loved that she’s only received one water bill in her life, because of an agreement made in 1899 by the original landowner.  I love her shameless sense of privilege, and that she objects to “water bills … higher than their monthly (home) loan payments.”  Water bills?   Lady, you’ve only received one water bill in your life.  I love that the only reason the city was looking through their century-old agreements was that they didn’t want to borrow from their “bankrupt general fund.”  Good choice, guys.  Finally, I love that she blew through her free allotment of water (75,000 gallons, or 205 gpd for a year) in four months (625 gpd).

Every time I read this final quote, I smile again.

Kelly said she is by nature a water conservationist, even before news that she would be charged for her water. She lives alone, does not use a dishwasher, has mostly drought resistant trees and does not do many loads of laundry. On the other hand, she had a leak in two outdoor water spigots for months, houses four horses for others and has a flower garden surrounding her home.

“I don’t know what more I can do,” Kelly said.

***

This is a plausible but extremely cynical take on corporate agriculture monopolizing water and selling it for large profits back to (mostly) public entities like cities and states.  I suppose it could be true, if one is willing to credit extremely large corporations with lots of competence and sleaziness.  I got to tell you, Cannon.  So long as these guys are your neighbors and come under the umbrella of westside farmers, you are never going to be able to create a different image for big ag.  You’re going to have to differentiate people who own and farm their own holdings from the likes of Sandridge if you don’t want to get caught up in populist anger towards the slick dealers.

I did have a couple objections to the piece.  Levine describes the Dudley Ridge/Sandridge/Mojave Water Agency sale at length, saying that it is an example of shocking profit.  It would be if MWA paid $5000 per acre-foot of water, like everyone says it does everywhere.  I’ve seen those units in a bunch of different news articles, and was shocked about it when I read exactly that in the original reporting in the Hanford Sentinel.  But when I called that reporter, he said it was $5000 per acre-foot of waterRIGHT, which includes all the future flows of water in that right.  In which case, depending on how reliable you think that water right is, in a few years it’ll be a reasonable price for water.  I can see how that would be a good purchase for a groundwater management agency like Mojave, which doesn’t mind getting intermittent water flows because it is trying to recharge an aquifer.  I’ve read enough articles saying how high the price is that now I don’t know which is accurate, but my guess is that they’re perpetuating the uncertain units from the original article.  I suppose someone could call the MWA to find out. 

I enjoy Levine’s outrage, and especially appreciate that he seems to have updated Reisnerian cliches instead of mindlessly repeating “Rice in the desert!!!”.  But I thought his closing paragraph was also slightly off.

Now, three decades later California’s legislature is trying to hammer out exactly the same [Peripheral Canal], which is as much about opening up more farm land as it is about securing more paper water to fuel suburban sprawl in the desert.

I can’t imagine that anyone is contemplating opening new farm land. I think this is a rearguard action to hold onto what they’ve got or to minimize the contraction of ag farmland, and make someone else bear the costs. His theme about securing paper water to increase development is interesting; I simply don’t know that side of things well enough to know if his argument that it shifts the risk that the water doesn’t show up onto the state is accurate. I’d call attention to two things. If the water isn’t actually wet, no amount of risk-shifting can make it appear in a dry year. Someone else may eventually be liable, but it is the city at the end of the pipe that will find themselves without physical water and forced to buy the next more expensive source. Right now, there are cities going broke trying to do that.

The other point is that verifying that water is real will eventually land on whomever approves building permits, which is mostly County Boards of Supervisors. What are they supposed to actually DO? What can they trust more than some agreement with a legal entity which swears it can pump water in a dry year and send it to the proposed development? They can’t go look at the water, although I suppose they could take a field trip and stare at a wellhead. If that isn’t good enough, what is their next option to make sure that people living in new houses get water in droughts? Start cold calling farmers? Reserve canal and pump capacity for the next uncertain drought, so they can be sure the water is wheeled? Big districts have a fair amount of staff and know-how, but verifying that future water is real is genuinely difficult. I can understand how a supervisor who wants to approve a subdivision anyway (because it needs the property tax revenue because of that asshole Howard Jarvis) would take a water bank certificate at face value.

Anyway, Levine appears to be a raging mad populist who tracks shit down, names names, makes explicit arguments and writes well. I’m not convinced by him, but I’m glad he’s on the scene.

***
This article on how the Board of Food and Ag wants someone to accelerate water transfers has a lot going on behind scenes. There’s a whole lot of trying to be discreet while applying pressure going on.

The California State Board of Food and Agriculture has devoted much of its time this year to grilling state officials on why red tape seemed to stifle the state’s ability to promptly approve water transfers through its 2009 drought water bank.

The state’s ability? Dude, there are only two agencies that could approve water transfers, DWR and the State Board, and DWR runs the drought water bank. Whomever could they mean?

I’ve sat in the back when the California agricultural board was gathered and was incredibly impressed with their ability to stay on-message. Secretary Kawamura is charming and folksy, but he doesn’t let a sentence go by without the phrase “regulatory drought” in it. I can’t imagine that happens by accident, but it all looks natural. This is how the big dogs get to be big dogs.

Ag board member Adan Ortega has spent several weeks examining water management as chair of the water subcommittee. At an October meeting in Fresno, he introduced a resolution urging state and federal agencies to communicate more effectively, both among themselves and with farmers.

Hee. A whole summer of work on the problem and he suggests agencies communicate better? I am sure communication could be improved, but it isn’t that difficult a problem. Food and Ag is, like, two blocks away (LOVE that they’ve planted a winter garden in all their sidewalk borders). I am very sure that their staff could meet weekly with DWR water transfer staff if someone went to the trouble to arrange it.

But more than that, Mr. Ortega doesn’t get at the things that limited the bank this year. Rice prices were high; rice growers weren’t offering to sell water. With pumping restricted, there was no guarantee that purchased water could be moved south, so buyers weren’t all that tempted. The water bank program itself can’t make environmental documentation proving that transferring water out won’t hurt the originating environment happen fast enough. (Also, aren’t they being sued to require that the climate change and ghg effects of pumping that water be included in those impact statements, just like they must be in every EIR/EIS? Takes time to figure those out for each transfer.) You might think that each water transfer shouldn’t have to do that, or that the drought water bank program should do an EIR/EIS that covers individual transfers. Sure, but it isn’t written yet, so each transfer has to have one. Besides, it has been years since the last drought. Since then the landscape has entirely changed (collapse of CalFED, Wanger decisions) and an old EIR/EIS wouldn’t be valid any more. What if the drought water bank program writes a new EIR/EIS and the climate is wet for several years? By the next time it is needed, it might be useless because of changes we can’t predict now.

It turns out these things are complicated. But I’m sure that improved communication between two unnamed agencies and Food and Ag and the public will help.

(Australia has figured out a way to approve water transfers very quickly. They set instream flow requirements that must be met, and if there is anything left over, farmers get a proportional share of it, which they can readily trade. I bet that if we were absolutely certain that instream flow requirements were being met off the top from the very beginning, it would take two unnamed agencies a lot less time to approve water transfers.)

 This is where the economists tell me that the way to do it is price. You could do this whole thing using demand curves and raising the cost of water up to where people use 20% less, dust off your hands and go home.

Here are my objections, and then my further thoughts:

1. That sucks for people. They don’t like paying that much more for water.

I myself am fairly unsympathetic to that; I’m not particularly interested in supporting lifestyles dependent on cheap water. Besides, we’re all paying for the un-internalized costs of water in the form of giant-ass bond measures. But, here’s the thing. People FLIP OUT. They moan and whine and turn over boards of directors when water prices go up. They drag out the 218 process indefinitely. Raising water rates isn’t an easy administrative solution. It is a big political hassle at the district level.

2. The standard objections to market-based allocations are true and relevant for water.

People don’t start with equal amounts of money, so they don’t get to express their preferences for water use evenly. That’s fine for luxury goods, but feels pretty unjust when you’re talking about water to satiate thirst, and daily conveniences, like washing things and landscaping.

Exclusion is inhumane, and for that matter, can’t be enforced. People will find a way to get what they desperately need.

3. Here’s the heart of my objection. I think that raising prices (or using a market to set prices, which is not exactly the same) is a very powerful technique that goes to strongly toward the end of an economically efficient use of water. No one has yet convinced me that I want an economically efficient use of water. Actually, no one tries to make the case. The assumption that the economically efficient outcome is self-evidently better (because it is economically EFFICIENT!) is so overpowering that no one tells me what it will look like and whether it will match my values. I suspect it will not, so I’m real leary of very powerful mechanisms that will create that outcome. I think there are positive externalities to some (but certainly not all) inefficiencies, so I don’t want them erased. I’m thinking of inadvertant habitat on farms, of public goods like parks and urban forests, of farming communities that stay populated because they aren’t on the industrialization treadmill.

Next economists tell me that with the gains from economically efficient water uses, we can afford to support those things I value. Maybe we could, but that doesn’t mean we will. So I am skeptical about the whole business, and not yet ready to support water markets.

This is a horrible tease.  “Lessons From Oil Industry May Help Address Groundwater Crisis”, it says, and my eyes dilated and my breath quickened.  Does the oil industry have something to teach us about extending yields by sustainable extraction methods?  Did they find a distribution regime that, surprisingly, satisfied all the users?  What can the oil industry teach us?!!  Fucking nothing.  There are no lessons in that piece.  It tells us what we all already know about groundwater (that it is being mined faster than replenished), alluded to something called “unitization“, and doesn’t tell us what it is.  Besides that, there’s nothing in that article that water people don’t already talk about.  I don’t appreciate being lead on.

***

Wait, wait, WHAT?  This review of the new tv series V says:

It quickly emerged that the space lizards, handsome in their human disguises, wanted to take our water and then use it to wash us tasty earthlings down.

Why don’t I remember that?! The lizards wanted to take our water?!! I just barely remember the original series. In fact, all I remember is a face coming off. How did they want to take the water? Which water? What about area-of-origin rights?

***

Seriously, this is so whiny that I’m embarrassed they’re representing me.  It is such a blatant cry for Other People’s Money.  There are multiple causes for the Delta’s collapse.  One of them is plausibly ammonias from Sacramento’s wastewater.  We will probably have to fix several of the causes at the same time.  Given that one of the causes is our shit, and that everyone in the state is under expensive burdens just like ours, seems like Sacramento should suck it up and pay to clean our discharged wastewater.

***

Felt seesawing emotions about this op-ed.  Rebecca Solnit!  She’s great!  But then she says “cotton, rice, alfalfa”, and I thought ‘oh no.  You too, Ms. Solnit?’  Her main point veered off, so I didn’t have to lose faith in her entirely.  Because I think she is so very awesome, I will arbitrarily ask even more of her.  I would very much like it if people who want us to stop using water in some particular way would acknowledge the rest of what they mean.  Growers aren’t irrigating cotton, rice and alfalfa for their masturbatory pleasure.  They are doing it because those crops achieve something.  Rice is bought and eaten by humans.  Alfalfa grown with subsidized water leads to artificially cheap milk and meat, and people are now accustomed to those prices.  The follow-through for “stop irrigating alfalfa” is pay more for (and eat less) beef and dairy.  Which, you know, I’m all for.  I guess I’m mostly objecting to the implication that one could remove those practices without seeing ripple effects.

***

From Carl Pope’s piece in the Huffington Post:

Instead of recognizing that  we first need to use every drop of water that falls near us and only then rely on long-distance transport and surface storage, the governor’s proposal continues excessive reliance on outmoded water-storage solutions, lowers the emphasis on protection provided by existing law for the health of California’s waterways, does almost nothing to enhance local self-reliance on water supplies, and fails to guarantee commonsense reforms of water policy.  [my emphasis]

I dunno, dude. The bond measure includes a billion dollars for Integrated Regional Water Management (which is DWR’s program emphasizing local supplies). Were you hoping for more than a billion dollars?

His next paragraph was interesting:

We’re still going to try to force a huge portion of the state’s water supply through the unstable and fragile bottleneck of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, where a single engineering flaw, natural disaster, or malicious attack could bring the entire state to its knees for years.

Does he have a different route in mind?  I am so curious.  Upstream of Sacramento somewhere?  Connected to the restored San Joaquin River?  This is visionary new thinking!!  Where, besides through the Delta, would one move Shasta and Oroville water to south of the Delta?  An eastern route, pumped over the Sierras and connecting to the LA Aquaduct?

***

Dan Bacher’sAn anonymous tweeter’s slams against environmental groups that support the water bill are annoying.  According to his twitter feed, he likes his environmental groups “homegrown, representative of community, not Big AG”.  You know, the groups he is slamming have a long history of advocacy against agricultural water waste and subsidies.  The other term for “homegrown” and representative of community” is NIMBYism, and that has its own pernicious aspects.  Slighting someone else’s environmentalism because they don’t have the same vision of the Delta (or California as a whole) is an asshole move.

(Apologies to Mr. Bacher, who I’m told is likely not the tweeter behind StopPeripheralCanal.  I don’t know why I thought he was.)

I’ve tried three times to write this up nicely. I remembered Hilzoy’s saintly patience. I thought about vinegar and honey. I want to be part of a constructive dialogue on water policy with bright people who listen with respect. But apparently I’m going to be the flamethrowing part of the constructive dialog, because this op-ed brings up all my old frustrations about economists.  That piece shouldn’t be as bad as it is.  The dude seems like he does a ton of bright, interesting research.  I’d love to listen to him discuss his own research.  I’m sure I would learn a lot.   But he does not know what is going on in Californian water today.  The guy make two mistakes that are instant give-aways.

Dr. Carson writes both:

water rationing should never be any part of an intelligent water policy.

and

San Diego needs an increasing block rate structure with more blocks and higher prices for those using the most water.

The only way someone could write both those things is that he or she took a surface level read of newspaper stories and didn’t do more. I know this because every single agency that instituted a rationing program this year did it by instituting an increasing block rate schedule (or threatening fines, which is about the same). That rate structure is what the newspapers called rationing this year.

Los Angeles:
The rationing would be achieved by adopting “shortage-year rates” to encourage conservation by altering the billing method used by the DWP.

Santa Cruz:
But barring a deluge of rain between now and March, the 90,000 people who depend on the district could be forced to cut water use by more than one-third, or pay steep fines.

Folsom:
In Folsom, first-time violators get a warning. A second violation within one month could result in the customer getting their water shut off. A third violation within six months brings fines.

South Bay:
Now water retailers and the county’s 15 cities and towns must translate this vote into specific actions, like watering the lawn only on specific days, or increasing water rates if customers use more than a set amount. The district is asking municipalities to pass ordinances containing these types of measures.

I can understand that if you see the word “rationing”, you think it means rationing like in the former Soviet Union where you can only buy two loaves of bread. But if you know what happens in the real world of California water, you know that never happens. Districts NEVER physically restrict the amount of water someone can buy*. If they go to “rationing”, it works by making the next chunk of water more expensive (by rate structure or by fines). Which is what Dr. Carson recommends!

That’s the first way I know that the economist isn’t knowledgable about what is actually happening in California water this year. The second way is that he says the three magic words:

low-value agriculture growing like alfalfa, cotton and rice in places like the San Joaquin and Imperial Valleys

Whenever you see those exact three things, “alfalfa, cotton and rice”, you can stop listening to that person. That person got his or her opinion from Reisner and hasn’t kept up since. If you read Reisner, you know what that person will say. I can tell you straight up that his prediction, that San Diego or MWD will buy water from those sources, WILL NOT HAPPEN soon.

Why? Long time readers here already know.

MWD will not buy water from fallowed cotton because there is almost no cotton left in California. The decline has been going on for several years now.  People who are willing to opine in the paper should already know this.

San Diego will not buy water from fallowed rice because rice is getting good prices these days. It isn’t a low-value crop right now and rice farmers don’t want to sell. Even if rice farmers would sell, neither the state nor the feds have spare capacity to move non-project water across the Delta these days, and buyers aren’t tempted to buy water that might not get delivered.

Alfalfa’s another story, and here Dr. Carson might be right. Last year alfalfa prices were high, because the drought hit pastures so hard that dairies and beef cattle had to buy supplemental feed. This year they thinned their herds, so demand for alfalfa may go down. There are close to a million acres of alfalfa in California; some of that might be retired to sell water to MWD and San Diego.

But I’d be very surprised if the guy who made a blanket statement about “low value crops” did any of that thinking. So far as I can tell, his thinking on water policy stops at the boundaries of economic theory and some old Reisner**. That’s fine. But it isn’t helpful in a debate where informed people already know conventional economic theory and old Reisner.  I’ve seen it before, that economists think that knowing economics deeply makes them qualified to speak on other subjects.  But it turns out that other subjects are complex and surface level knowledge of the subject plus deep knowledge of economics doesn’t offer anything new.  It frustrates the people who are looking for useful suggestions for improving water management in the real world.

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Assembly Republicans, unhappy with the water-reform package authored by the Senate Leader Darrell Steinberg, introduced their own water plan that they said would curb the authority over groundwater monitoring contained in the Senate plan.

After introducing the legislation, the three Republican Assemblymembers stepped outside to take sledgehammers to the dashboards of their cars. “I don’t ever want to read that fuel gauge again,” said one. “It makes me so angry when the needle gets lower.” A second Republican assemblymember chose not to take a hammer to his fuel gauge, but instead covered up the warning light with black electrician’s tape. He told reporters, “If I can’t see the warning light go on, the tank will never get empty.” The last assemblymember confirmed that his wife and teenagers all used the car, and not one of them wanted to know how much gas remained in the tank. “Maybe one of us puts gas in the car, maybe not. Maybe someone drives the car a lot, maybe not. But we don’t talk about it, and we certainly don’t want some government regulator forcing us to “monitor” how much gas is in the tank”.

I had occasion to watch some area-of-origin advocates last week and came away unimpressed.  Area-of-origin is code for Northern California, and it really means ‘DON’T TAKE OUR WATER’.  It is named for the doctrine that the regions where water originates shouldn’t be harmed by projects moving (excess) water away.  I have some sympathy for that; the Owens Valley lakebed shows what can happen to the area of origin in the absence of any protections.  But the advocates I saw last week are arguing against water conservation for themselves on the basis that they have plenty.  It made me want to reach for some harsh adjectives.

Twenty by Twentytwenty is the Governor’s policy on water conservation that is likely to be turned into legislation sometime soon.  So far as I know, the goal is arbitrary, picked primarily for the sound of it.  Reduce urban per capita water use by 20 percent by the year 2020.  But it isn’t a bad goal, neither trivial nor overambitious, so why not go with a catchy phrase.  The big problem is that not all cities in the state use the same amount of water.  Some have been conserving for years; reducing their per capita water use by 20% would mean changing their lifestyle or cutting something they value (they use, roughly, 110ish gallons per household per day).  Others are still shamefully profligate and drinking quality water runs down their gutters (more like 380 gallons per person per day).  The civil servants tasked with 20 x twenty20 wrote a draft report suggesting that the regions who use more because they are wastrels (my phrasing) should conserve more than regions who have been tightening down on water for decades (mostly southern California and the central coast).

The prospect of Twenty by 20XX becoming law has got people like Placer County Water Agency campaigning against it.  My jaw dropped to hear people say, out loud, in public, that they don’t want to conserve if it only goes to help other people, that they think they should always have the privilege to waste their water.  I am embarrassed for them.  However, if they are already willing to sound like narcissistic five-year-olds in public, they must have already rationalized and accepted the arguments that they have plenty, and that should exempt them from having to do anything for people downstream, who are presumably different and not-them.  I wonder where they stood on the question of the Bay Area and Smog Check II.

Back in the turn of the century, people living in the Bay Area had weaker Smog Check requirements than the rest of the state.  The wind blew fresh off the ocean each night; because their air basin was always clean, they didn’t have to do smog checks as frequently or maintain their cars as much as everywhere else in California.  This was nice for them.  Turns out, though, that their pollutants were blowing eastward and getting pinned against the mountains.  You know, like in Placer County.  Ozones from the Bay Area were weakening pine trees, raising the fire danger in the area-of-origin mountain counties.  The legislature stepped in, holding people in the Bay Area to the same Smog Check standards as the rest of the state, even though people in the Bay Area breathe clean air.

Look, Mountain Counties.  People in San Francisco have to take their cars to get smogged twice as often for your sake.  For the same amount of trouble, you could adjust your fucking sprinklers and switch out your toilets.  For the cost of their additional car maintainance, you could buy a low water using washing machine.  You wouldn’t want to go backward, would you?  To all those smoggy days in the foothills?  The law was an improvement, right?  Twenty x XXtwenty will be too, overall. 

Folks, we are in an system, connected by pipes and law and flows of water, air and energy.  We are too far intertwined to pull up the drawbridges around your region, even if you do have the water rights to fill the moat.  Please, come out and play with the rest of the state.

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