It's the wild west out there. It feels like no one is protecting the health, safety, and welfare of Californians.
Governor Newsom's administration is holding "listening sessions" about how to improve California water management. How about starting by simply enforcing our laws?
If the governor suddenly started enforcing the speed limit, you can imagine the outcry from speeders. But there would be a cultural shift. Not to mention a safer, more organized transportation system. People would get used to it. Obeying the law would get easier, especially when people see the decline in accidents and deaths. Take away driver's licenses from dangerous drivers and beef up public transit.
California's water and environmental laws are enforced just about as effectively as the speed limit. So which laws should we start enforcing?
California is mining its aquifers as destructively as coal miners are removing mountaintops in coal country--but SGMA may not stop this destruction for another 20 years. Setting up a cap-and-trade system of groundwater rights in each basin seems like the logical approach for achieving SGMA compliance (for wells that have similar effects on the aquifer), however the worst impacts will continue to get worse for another twenty years. Kids not yet born will be adults by then. We are sacrificing a generation's worth of sustainable groundwater management.
For starters, how about using public nuisance law to shut down all non-domestic wells in the San Joaquin Valley Corcoran Clay in areas where there is ground subsidence or where domestic wells have gone dry. Instead of planning temporary fixes to canals and infrastructure that will cost millions of dollars, hire a few law enforcement agents and lawyers and shut down the biggest wells in these well-documented areas of groundwater overdraft. It would be cheaper and more beneficial in the long run. Where money is being thrown at saving farmers from themselves (e.g. Friant-Kern Canal), don't fund any subsidence fixes until the subsidence stops. Fixing a still-subsiding canal is a waste of public funds, and poor public policy.
Mark Arax's new book (The Dreamt Land) discusses many aspects of the unsustainable water use in the San Joaquin Valley, among them the increased flood risk due to subsiding levees. To be clear, remote investors are buying land, drilling wells, pumping unsustainable amounts of groundwater that causes damage to surrounding property, and reaping incredible wealth from the use of that water. This pillaging of public resources must be stopped immediately.
It shouldn't be hard to convince judges to issue a few injunctions to protect public resources, infrastructure, and domestic wells. This approach was successful in Mono County in 1984, when the Assistant DA sent Sheriff's Deputies to guard a valve to prevent Los Angeles from turning off Rush Creek. Such actions are necessary when there is blatant disregard for the law. Unreasonable use of water is illegal.
People need protection from themselves. There are plenty of other areas where the governor can use his police power to protect the public health, safety, and welfare. Air quality, water quality, poorly-sited development...
After we protect people from each other, enforcing the Public Trust Doctrine and Fish and Game Codes would come next on my list. Instead of spending long hours in negotiated settlements and voluntary agreements that sound good and may feel good but don't change anything, just physically go fix the biggest problems by releasing water into rivers. Where water users hold the government hostage for cash, just buy them out. And stop irrigating saline and poorly-drained land. Along Central Valley rivers, in many places water isn't allowed to flow down rivers because of farms that were built too close to the rivers. If a river can't be a river, that means a land use is in the wrong place, and does not mean the government needs to pay someone money, or "mitigate impacts" of water flowing down a river. Developing too close to a river was a bad decision. Sometimes businesses fail due to poor decisions. This should not be the river's problem.
People own property at-risk, and they don't need to be coddled by the government when they make bad decisions.
The governor also wants to build a tunnel to move fresh water under the Delta from the Sacramento River to the export pumps. If the same people are in charge of the project that were in charge of BDCP/CalWaterFix, we are going to end up with the same bad project. Put the Department of Fish and Wildlife in charge of the project. And give them enough funding and political backup to do their job. Hampering an agency's independence and ability to provide unbiased information just causes delays and confusion and inefficiency. Everyone benefits from reliable information and certainty. Stop putting off the inevitable and make the tough decisions now, and stop avoiding leading the way to a sustainable future because of fear of the cost or political pushback.
My favorite question among those listed in the governor's press release: "Which state policies or laws no longer fit California’s water reality or public values?"
Don't get me started. There are so many problems with the way we've looked the other way or held our noses and allowed bad precedents to continue.
How about bringing back the largest fresh water lake west of the Mississippi, lost to private greed? How about not making the Salton Sea suffer because of private deals shunting public water to further develop already overdeveloped San Diego? How about restoring more than single digit percentages of riparian habitat, wetlands, and native grassland? How about stopping the paving of the Mojave Desert with solar panels and new development? How about stopping growth--or at least setting a limit? It is impossible to grow forever, and we wouldn't want to, since already conditions are so bad, almost any additional growth has negative impacts on society. Why not stop our rapid growth rate as soon as possible, while California is still a place people want to live? Stop the madness before we put more people in the way of inevitable disasters.
Of course, the water rights system is probably the worst offender (of being out of step with water reality and public values), yet is a sacred cow no one is willing to touch.
Water rights were divvyed up back when instream flows were an afterthought. So the water rights system is based on essentially illegal assumptions--that you can have little or no water in a stream. "Respecting water rights" becomes code for "don't change anything or interfere with our excessive extraction of public goods". The City of San Francisco is one of the worst offenders, because releasing instream flows in the Tuolumne River mostly comes out of their junior water right. Instead of letting senior right holders get all the water and cutting off the juniors, how about making California's water rights system equitable? Cut back each water right holder by an equal percentage instead of cutting off the juniors first. If we did this, many of the lawsuits against and complaints about allowing water to flow down our rivers would disappear.
Even better, coordinate multi-benefit efforts to remove poorly-planned and poorly-sited development, moving that development out of hazard areas (at or below sea level, floodplains, landslide areas, wetlands, saline ground, earthquake hazard zones, high risk fire zones). And for God's sake, stop allowing cities and counties to approve new development in these areas--it is just criminal when you consider the lives that will be lost in future disasters due to the lack of leadership in saying "no" to development now.
If we had just enforced our laws, and stopped going down bad paths as soon as it was clear that poor decisions had been made, we wouldn't be in this mess. Previous city, county, and state governments have failed us. Let's not avoid the hard decisions now. It isn't easy, but it is up to us to fix things. We must fix things--the alternative is more of the same, and that is unacceptable.
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