Are Californians Ready to Drink ‘From Toilet to Tap’?

May 18, 2015 By James Poulos 7 Comments
Photo Credit: The International Rice Research Institute

Photo Credit: The International Rice Research Institute

Looking for an edge in coping with California’s drought, officials around the state have embarked on a public relations campaign for recycled drinking water.

Proponents of the new push hoped to capitalize on the bad publicity hitting the bottled water industry, where several suppliers have come under scrutiny for drawing their water from California. This month, “Starbucks announced that it would begin a process to move the bottling operations for its Ethos water brand to Pennsylvania,” NBC News reported. Nestle, meanwhile, refused to stop sourcing its water from public lands in the Golden State, although its pumping permit expired decades ago, and activists have petitioned the California Water Resources Control Board to halt the practice.

“The attention on Nestlé’s permit bumped it to the front of the pile for renewal review. The process will take at least 18 months, Heil said. Meanwhile, Nestlé can continue to operate in the forest as long as the company continues to pay the annual fee of $524 on the expired permit and operate under its provisions.”

Feeling the heat, Nestle Waters North America’s Tim Brown took to the San Bernardino Sun to vouch that California bottling operations should not be considered water-wasting culprits. “Our latest conservation measures include a waste-water recovery project expected to save annually 25 million gallons of water,” he wrote. “We supported the recent water bond to improve infrastructure and protect and restore watersheds and ecosystems and we believe that California’s new groundwater management legislation is a step in the right direction.”

Public skepticism

Yet, “despite the extensive science that goes into cleansing recycled water down to its molecular construction, in a recent study, 13 percent of adults said they would point-blank refuse to try it,” according to The Week. “Similar efforts in the past to jumpstart the recycled water trend in the state have failed.”

California’s long history with recycled water projects has lent credence to those who expect the pattern to continue. “Enticing people to drink recycled water […] requires getting past what experts call the ‘yuck’ factor,” as the New York Times observed. “Efforts in the 1990s to develop water reuse in San Diego and Los Angeles were beaten back by activists who denounced what they called, devastatingly, ‘toilet to tap.’ Los Angeles built a $55 million purification plant in the 1990s, but never used it to produce drinking water; the water goes to irrigation instead.”

Orange County officials, however, have brightened hopes for the recycled water movement. As Southern California Public Radiosuggested, the O.C.’s successful recycling program has underscored why “calling it ‘toilet to tap’ isn’t fair.”

“The recycled sewage water makes quite a journey on its path to purification before it comes out of faucets at home. About 2.4 million Orange County residents get their water from a massive underground aquifer, which, since 2008, has been steadily recharged with billions of gallons of purified wastewater.”

According to SCPR, Orange County Water District officials overcame the yuck factor “with a massive public relations campaign that involved more than 2,000 community presentations.”

In Santa Clara County, where recycled water has been steadily employed for non-drinking uses, San Jose’s public figures have kicked off a similar effort. San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo, Santa Clara Mayor Jamie Matthews, and others held a recent press conference around their own consumption of recycled water, the Contra Costa Times reported. “‘Delicious,’ said Liccardo, as cameras clicked. ‘Good stuff!’ said Matthews, as video rolled.”

Nudging state law

At the statewide level, fans of recycled water had a bit more news to cheer as well. In Sacramento, the author of a string of recycled water-use bills stretching across the several years, Assemblyman Mike Gatto, D-Glendale, recently secured committee support for Assembly Bill 1463, another proposal pushing the approach to conservation. “Gatto’s legislation to help reduce the barriers for onsite-water recycling and allow more Californians to participate in safe and sustainable recycled-water practices was approved by the Assembly’s Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee on a 15-0 vote,” according to California Newswire.

Originally published by CalWatchdog.com

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E-Cigs Under Fire From CA Dept. of Public Health

March 27, 2015 By James Poulos 1 Comment

With public opinion in flux and anti-tobacco activists on edge, the California Department of Public Health has rolled out “Wake Up,” a slick new ad campaign to discourage the use of e-cigarettes, or “vapes.” Recently, CDPH pronounced e-cigs a threat to public health.

In a statement explaining the campaign, CDPH described two new TV ads emphasizing “the e-cigarette industry’s use of candy flavored ‘e-juice’” and “exposing the fact that big tobacco companies are in the e-cigarette business.”

The move bolstered momentum for broad crackdowns on vapes, which have been targeted by policymakers and activists who see them as just as bad as tobacco cigarettes — if not worse.

Playing politics

Political considerations have played into CDPH’s adverse judgment against vapes. New data recently showed that, last year, the use of e-cigs outpaced the use of tobacco cigarettes among teenagers and young adults.

Defenders of the freedom to vape argued this is good news. Vaping companies have claimed e-cigs help smokers abandon far more dangerous tobacco products, especially those, like traditional cigarettes, that emit high numbers of carcinogens.

But for prohibitionists, e-cigs presented a special hazard because of their accessibility and appeal to children. As the Los Angeles Daily News detailed, those drawbacks appeared to be the product of unregulated marketing, a more pleasurable use experience and apparent carelessness among adult consumers with children:

“Most startling to health officials was the spike in calls to California Poison Control centers related to exposures to accidental e-cigarette poisonings, including drinking the liquid inside. There were seven calls in 2012 to poison control. In 2014, those calls jumped to 243. More than 60 percent of all those e-cigarette related calls involved children 5 years and under.”

As NBC News reported, “bottles and cartridges that contain the liquid for e-cigs have been known to leak and tend not to be equipped with child-resistant caps, creating a potential source of poisoning through ingestion or just through skin contact.”

Although legislation and regulation could be tailored narrowly to focus on the threat of poisoning, public health officials issued a broad warning that comports with the prevailing view among prohibitionists.

Dr. Ron Chapman, State Health Officer and director of the California Department of Public Health, said that “many people do not know that they pose many of the same health risks as traditional cigarettes and other tobacco products.” In January, hecalled for a “bold public education campaign” to roll back e-cig gains in market share. Anti-smoking advocates working in the policy arena have been all but unanimous in treating e-cigs like an integral part of the same problem as tobacco products.

Safety over freedom

Despite the unfolding research concerning the differences between e-cig effects and those of tobacco cigarettes, prohibitionists in the political arena have used heightened rhetoric of their own to advance vape bans.

Earlier this year, state Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, underscored how far many officials have been willing to go in departing from the scientific record. In January, he introduced Senate Bill 140, a bill that would ban e-cigs at hospitals, restaurants, schools and workplaces.

“No tobacco product should be exempt from California’s smoke-free laws simply because it’s sold in a modern or trendy disguise,” he warned. Yet, as Reason’s Jacob Sullum observed, e-cigs neither emit smoke nor burn tobacco. Instead, they heat a device which allows the user to exhale a vapor.

SB140 will go into committee hearings this spring, behind a full-steam-ahead approach to cracking down on vapes. As CalWatchdog.com reported previously, the so-called “precautionary principle” — better safe than sorry — has inspired a spate of municipal regulations that treat e-cigs the same way as tobacco cigarettes, despite widespread ignorance and uncertainty as to how the products differ.

Originally published by CalWatchdog.com

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Hermosa Beach Torpedoes Oil Opportunity

March 7, 2015 By James Poulos 6 Comments

Drill, baby, drill?

In Hermosa Beach on Tuesday, voters instead replied: No, baby, no.

On the wave of a big turnout, 79 percent of city voters rejected Measure O for “oil.”  According to Ballotpedia, the measure would have authorized 34 new wells through “an oil drilling and production project agreement between the city and E&B Natural Resources Management Corporation, providing for an exemption to the city’s ban on oil and gas drilling.”

Though the politics of drilling turned the city vote into fodder for a familiar national controversy, the outcome hinged on a decades-old saga affecting the beach community. At the same time, clear ideological lines were blurred by the complicated scheme of subsidies promised to Hermosa Beach and its public schools.

A historic vote

Especially in recent years, the word “historic” has been used to describe outcomes or events that count toward some bigger sense of progress or social change. Although anti-drilling advocates made clear they viewed the Hermosa Beach vote that way, voters cast their ballots against the backdrop of a more traditional kind of history.

For years, long-running peculiarities defined their municipality’s hesitant approach to oil. As the LA Weekly recounted, Hermosa Beach has puzzled through the costs and benefits of drilling for generations.

A 1932 vote wiped out any oil and gas exploitation within city limits. Residents only loosened the ban in 1984, green lighting two initiatives that allowed drilling at two locations. One such permit went to Macpherson Oil.

By 1992, the City Council had signed off on a so-called slant drilling plan; Macpherson would access offshore oil by angling its bits and pipes from an onshore facility.

Three years after the slant drilling plan was approved, voters pulled the rug out from under Macpherson by reimposing their 1932-era ban on all drilling. Three years after that, in 1998, the City Council reversed itself completely and opted to scuttle Macpherson’s whole setup.

Perhaps predictably, Macpherson took the city to court. Perhaps even more predictably, the case never made it to trial.

A settlement blessed Macpherson’s sale of its Hermosa Beach stake to another firm, E&B Natural Resources, which secured, as part of the deal, an allowance to seek voter approval for its own take on the Macpherson plan.

Late last year, the Hermosa Beach City Council finally gave its approval to the wording of E&B’s ballot initiative — vowing to stay neutral and merely provide voters information in the run-up to this week’s referendum.

Shock waves

At once, friends and foes of offshore American drilling interpreted the long-gestating Hermosa Beach vote as a bellwether. Advocates on both sides sprung into action accordingly.

Up and down the L.A. coast, anti-drilling activists used the vote to warn that, if Hermosa Beach approved E&B’s plan, drilling would proliferate. The Santa Monica City Council could offer only token opposition, but did.

Manhattan Beach, the nearby Del Rey Neighborhood Council and the Surfrider Foundation followed suit. Heal the Bay, the National Resources Defense Council and others brought Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into town to decry the measure.

In an effort to woo voters, meanwhile, E&B worked to ensure that it helped subsidize popular local priorities. As the New York Times observed, the quirks of the agreement that teed up the vote put E&B in the strange position of punishing Hermosa Beach if residents voted against it. Opting against drilling triggered a payout of $17.5 million in damages to E&B, “the equivalent of about half the annual general fund budget in this city of almost 20,000 people.”

Currying favor, E&B touted the $600 million-odd windfall in royalties it said Hermosa Beach would enjoy if the deal went through.

Oil markets

But the exigencies of the oil markets, and the shifting sands of its increasingly complicated agreements, made the potential payout more uncertain. A cost-benefit analysis commissioned from Kosmont Companies by the City Council assumed oil would hover around $95 a barrel. But the plunging oil prices of recent months forced Kosmont to revise its analysis in a supplemental report designed to better sync estimates with market prices and future projections.

Reported EasyReaderNews.com:

“The school district would receive $1.8 million at $95 per barrel and $1.4 million at $40/per under the terms of the lease agreement, Kosmont said. The education foundation would receive $16.5 million at $95 per barrel and $7.1 million at $40 per barrel under the terms of the development agreement, Kosmont said.

“Should voters not lift the oil ban, Kosmont said, the city would need to repay E&B the $17.5 million loan. The city has $6 million set aside to meet this obligation. The balance, Kosmont said, would cost $825,000 to finance over 30 years. The city’s current annual budget is $34 million.”

Amid the flurry of numbers, Hermosa Beach residents found themselves increasingly divided, even bickering over the vote. The anxiety of drilling may now be over, but the costly payout now adds to the burden of taxpayers.

Originally published by CalWatchdog.com

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Foie Gras Battle Continues

February 10, 2015 By James Poulos 4 Comments

Just two days before the deadline, California Attorney General Kamala Harris’ office filed notice the state would challenge U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson’s January ruling that federal law preempts the state’s ban on serving foie gras.

The phrase in French means “fatted liver” and comes from a goose or duck that is force fed to produce the delicacy. The case is named after the main plaintiff, based in Canada, the Association des Eleveurs de Canards et d’Oies du Quebec vs. Harris.

Harris’ office declined to comment on the filing. But advocates of maintaining the ban were quick to weigh in, beginning with Paul Shapiro, the Humane Society’s vice president of farm animal protection. According to Reuters, heclaimed, “California has the right to prevent the commerce in such a cruel and inhumane product.”

That’s anything but certain. As the Los Angeles Times reported, the plaintiffs who challenged the foie gras ban expressed certainty that constitutional law was on their side. They said:

“We’re very confident that the district court’s judgment will be upheld on appeal. The decision was based on the simple fact that, in the field of meat and poultry, federal law is supreme. California does not have the right to ban wholesome, USDA-approved poultry products, whether it’s foie gras or fried chicken. We look forward to having our victory affirmed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.”

The Ninth Circuit, however, took up the issue before. In 2013, it turned back an injunction by out-of-state farmers to put the California ban on hold until the matter could go through the courts.

That raises the possibility that the ban will be upheld again, triggering an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Facing federal law

As CalWatchdog.com previously reported, Wilson ruled the ban ran afoul of federal poultry regulations — specifically, the Poultry Products Inspection Act, or PPIA. He wrote:

“This issue boils down to one question: whether a sales ban on products containing a constituent that was produced in a particular manner is an ‘ingredient requirement’ under the PPIA. California cannot regulate foie gras products’ ingredients by creatively phrasing its law in terms of the manner in which those ingredients were produced.”

The ban arose in 2004, after then-State Sen. John Burton, D-San Francisco, introduced Senate Bill 1520. The bill prohibited foie gras from being produced or sold in California, thereby ruling out imports of the fattened-liver delicacy. Wilson’s decision approved the importation and sale of foie gras, but did nothing to alter California’s prohibition on production.

The perils of prohibition

However the legal case against the ban may fare in higher court, observers have taken note of the practical effect of foie gras prohibition. Much like America’s experiment with alcohol Prohibition, 1920-33, banning foie gras appeared to increase Californians’ appetite for what was banned.

As Josh Barro detailed at the New York Times, demand for foie gras rose precipitously both immediately before and after the ban:

“‘We saw an up in volume two years ago when the ban went into effect,’ said Ariane Daguin, chief executive of the specialty food supplier D’Artagnan, which sells to both restaurants and consumers. ‘People wanted to see what the brouhaha was about. Now what is happening is all the chefs who are our friends and have been buying other things from us want to put foie gras back on the menu.’”

What’s more, as Robin Abcarian reported in the Los Angeles Times, fattened liver “never truly disappeared from menus.” Chef Ken Frank, a big foie gras proponent, told Abcarian he “skirted the ban by giving customers foie gras, randomly delivered, he said, with a note explaining the gift was a protest.”

Although he insisted he “went to great lengths not to violate the letter of the law,” Frank himself has been dragged into court by the Animal Legal Defense Fund, which brought suit against him and his restaurant in March 2013.

Originally published on CalWatchdog.com

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Assisted Suicide Back From The Dead

January 30, 2015 By James Poulos 2 Comments

Physician-assisted suicide has returned to California’s political agenda. After years off the table, the issue gained new life in the wake of Brittany Maynard’s high-profile decision to end her life.

Maynard, 29, an assisted-suicide activist living in Oregon, advertised her impending death as a dignified response to the “aggressive” form of terminal brain cancer that left her with a few painful months of natural life. Maynard moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to Oregon to avail herself of the state’s 1997 law authorizing a narrowly tailored right to die at the hands of doctors.

Now legislators in Sacramento have borrowed the language of that law to draft a version that would protect assisted suicide throughout California.

Careful wording

Despite the vogue for so-called “death with dignity” bills, which are now in the works in 14 states nationwide, opposition to legal suicide is strong enough that California legislators opted to stick with the narrow terms laid down in the Oregon statute.

The bill, SB128, stipulates a long list of conditions that must be met for a person’s request to terminate their life to be fulfilled. For instance, only mentally competent adults given six months or less to live, and equipped with an in-state driver’s license and voter registration, may make the request of their attending physician.

The numerous legal hurdles are part of an effort to ensure the bill is not successfully portrayed as greasing a slippery slope toward fuller suicide rights. In 1992, California voters sank the Aid-In-Dying Act, reversing an apparent trend of support for the measure.

And as U-T San Diego reported, similar bills “were defeated last year in New Hampshire, Connecticut and Massachusetts by a coalition of disability rights groups, medical associations, hospital workers and right-to-life groups.”

Those groups included the Catholic Church, which was instrumental in preventing assisted suicide in California and is expected, like other organizations, to mobilize against the current wave of bills.

Critics also point out the experience in the Netherlands, which had 6,000 cases in 2014 out of a population of 17 million, is that limits on euthanasia can be expanded. London’s Daily Mail quoted Dr. Peter Saunders, “What we are seeing in the Netherlands is ‘incremental extension,’ the steady intentional escalation of numbers with a gradual widening of the categories of patients to be included.”

Political posturing

The delicate wording of SB128 nevertheless struck a clear contrast with the political imagery and posturing surrounding the bill’s introduction. Maynard’s husband and mother made the case for the bill at an uncharacteristically raw news conference where nine California legislators announced the legislation.

“She recognized that to stay in California would mean she potentially would face a horrific death,” her husband, Dan Diaz, told reporters. “Brittany was a Californian. We lived in this state and she would have preferred to pass away peacefully in this state.”

State Sen. Lois Wolk, D-Davis, who co-sponsored the bill with state Sen. Bill Monning, D-Carmel, echoed Diaz. “The fact that Brittany Maynard was a Californian suffering from an incurable, irreversible illness who then had to leave the state to ease her suffering was simply appalling, simply unacceptable,” she said.

Likely complications

Although Wolk, Monning and their allies have successfully capitalized on Maynard’s plans to make assisted suicide a fresh issue, they face opposition from political figures who can make or break SB128. Although in 1976, Gov. Jerry Brown approved a legal right for terminally ill patients to end so-called life-sustaining treatment, it’s unclear whether he’s willing to go as far as Wolk and Monning wish. He has yet to make public comment on the matter.

What’s more, SB128 faces big hurdles even before it can land on Brown’s desk. As Time reported, “Wolk expects the bill will make it out of committee and reach the Senate floor, but will have a tough time passing both houses of the Legislature.”

She told the magazine she expects a “heavy lift” in trying to secure passage over the objections of tradition-minded Democrats as well as Republicans.

As critics in the medical profession have observed, legally protected rights to suicide bring legal duties. In Oregon, for instance, the state-sponsored medical plan offered to cover suicide-inducing drugs instead of more costly cancer treatments.

Originally published at CalWatchdog

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Sacramento Aims To Police The Police

January 15, 2015 By James Poulos 3 Comments

After a politically punishing year for law enforcement departments from Los Angeles to New York, California legislators are riding the wave of controversy, drafting a spate of bills that would use the power of state government to assert more control over how police officers do their jobs.

The move exploits an unusual situation that has developed in Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration. When it comes to criminal justice, Brown’s attention is largely consumed with “realignment” — his effort to satisfy a series of court orders on prison crowding by shifting inmates, costs and responsibilities from the state’s prisons to county jails.

But Attorney General Kamala Harris sees police conduct as central; in her inauguration address, she drew special attention to what she called a statewide “crisis of confidence” in law enforcement, driven by a “string of injustice” running through urban and minority communities.

There have been bumps in the road even for Harris, however. “While Harris’ office recently launched a plan to investigate and improve bias and use-of-force training for law enforcement, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights has criticized her for pushing back against demands for an independent prosecutor to handle cases of police brutality,” ThinkProgress observed. Politically unable to fully rebuke or embrace Brown’s realignment plan, Harris has also struggled to steer clear of the controversy that surrounds it.

But with Harris now a formidable 2016 contender for the U.S. Senate seat to be vacated by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., state legislators face a moment of opportunity, support and attention historically rare for would-be police reformers.

A unified front

With plenty of ideas to go around, Sacramento Democrats are able to push for their own particular proposals, while maintaining a cohesive approach to policy. Assembly Bill 86, drafted by Assemblyman Kevin McCarty, D-Sacramento, takes advantage of Harris’ influence and sympathy. As NBC San Diego reported, the bill “would create a law enforcement panel, likely within the state Attorney General’s office, to study each case of a California police officer fatally shooting someone and write reviews or issue recommendations.”

Other legislators have focused on related pieces of legislation. According to U-T San Diego, Assemblyman Freddie Rodriguez, D-Pomona, is at work on two key bills.

The first, an early draft of AB69, would mandate police body cameras throughout the state. (Steve Soboroff, president of the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners, has taken an early lead implementing the technology.)

The second, AB71, would expand federal data collection on California crimes. Currently, U-T reports, the Justice Department gathers self-reported data from law enforcement on “civilian deaths in police custody, including race.” AB71 “would expand that data collection to include non-fatal shootings and injuries sustained by police officers.”

At the same time, Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, is advancing AB66, designed to create a unified set of standard practices for body camera use in California police departments. Body cams are already in use in Weber’s district. So far, the city has already introduced 300 cameras into central and southeastern San Diego.

Up for grabs

For Republicans, the political landscape surrounding policing offers risks and opportunities. In California, the GOP’s overarching position could well be up for grabs.

Nationally, Republicans have begun to adopt a more clement attitude, thanks in part to striking figures that show crime at significant lows. As Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, told The New York Times, “There are a lot of ideas — prison reform, policing, sentencing — being discussed now that wouldn’t be if we hadn’t had this drop in the crime statistics.”

The Senate’s leading unorthodox Republicans, such as Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Rand Paul, R-Ky., carry considerable favor among California’s libertarians and libertarian-leaning Republicans. Paul is considered a contender for the GOP nomination for president in 2016.

In the absence of a strong stance from within the state, Lee and Paul’s support for prison reform could supply California Republicans with adequate political cover to advance some proposals of their own.

This article was originally published on CalWatchdog.com

 

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CA Lobbyists Celebrate Successful 2014

December 21, 2014 By James Poulos 4 Comments

It’s got a bad reputation, even in some parts of Washington, D.C. But lobbying is a way of life in California, where the practice shows no signs of letting up.

In a string of news events and reports, the many faces of lobbying have resurfaced as the political year winds down.

And Silicon Valley, forging its way deeper into politics, has pushed lobbying to the fore with its efforts to advance special objectives at the state and federal levels.

According to figures tallied by the Sacramento Bee, California lobbying firms were off to a great start in the first half of the year, posting big numbers. Over that time, they pulled in $92.6 million, 7 percent better than last year’s January-to-June cycle; plus interest groups shelled out some $141.5 million on lobbying, exceeding last year’s outlay.

Responsible for the uptick were squabbles over legislation involving online poker, health warnings on soft drinks and — a big new entrant — ridesharing services like Uber and Lyft.

Alone, Uber’s employment of lobbying became a major story in the second half of the year. To spearhead lobbying operations, Uber hired former Obama campaign strategist David Plouffe, a man with an insuperable Rolodex for a company seeking favorable outcomes from Democratic-controlled states.

According to the Washington Post, over the past two years Uber “hired private lobbyists in at least 50 U.S. cities and states, employing multiple firms in some places. … The records show that the company has hired at least 161 individuals to lobby on its behalf, on top of its own rapidly expanding policy office.”

That meant major outlays between summer and winter. In Sacramento, the Post noted, Uber paid “$475,000 from July to November to lobby California lawmakers.”

Silicon Valley struggles

Although Uber and its peer tech companies are sometimes portrayed as unstoppable goliaths, their headway in political circles has come at a cost, and not always with results as transformative as their disruption-friendly CEOs would wish. Uber itself has faced a fresh wave of bad publicity in recent months, with the company facing an outright ban on some Uber services in France and other European countries.

What’s more, even broadly shared political interests among Silicon Valley’s leading firms have encountered opposition, with lobbying unable to deliver results. Companies have pushed hard, as the Peninsula Press observed, to increase the number of so-called H-1B visas, which would trigger an influx of highly-skilled immigrants well trained in tech.

The Press quoted Emily Lam, the vice president of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, a public policy trade organization that counts many of tech’s biggest companies among its members:

“We’ve been lobbying for this for over 10 years, and it’s not happened, so there is a lot of frustration. The tide is turning where this isn’t going to be the place where people want to be because it’s so difficult to get a visa, and we want to have the best and brightest here.”

Through the revolving door

One group that has found success in lobbying is former California members of Congress from both parties who have taken up lobbying, a new McClatchy report has highlighted.

Some retired representatives even see their work as a continuation of their time in Congress. Former Rep. John Doolittle, R-Calif., was tapped to curry legislative favor for the Water Resources Development Act, which was sponsored by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. The act improved rivers and harbors and increased water conservation.

Flush with experience and close contacts with the representatives and senators closest to the issue, Doolittle got a bill through both houses of Congress within three years.

“In this hyperpartisan era, it was quite frankly a major accomplishment,” he told McClatchy. “It was a very satisfying continuation of my public service.”

This article was originally published by CalWatchdog.com

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Obama poised to accelerate CA’s rolling amnesty

November 20, 2014 By James Poulos 7 Comments

Many Americans across the country have expressed uncertainty or alarm about president Obama’s executive action on immigration, which he will announce today.

However, in California, where millions of illegal immigrants live, a semi-formal version of state-level amnesty has been gathering steam for years. Despite dogged opposition by Republican and Tea Party activists, Sacramento’s slow-motion legalization of the undocumented has paved the way for the White House’s planned moves to receive a much smoother reception than in other state capitols.

Still, the exact details of Obama’s intended actions remain murky, and even among libertarian-leaning immigration doves, his assertion of sweeping executive powers has hit against fierce criticism. Indeed, as the Washington Post noted, the president himself previously disavowed the constitutionality of what he may now have resolved to do — insisting he was “not a king” and could not “just suspend deportations through executive order.” Californians have not been immune to the sense of ambiguity surrounding Obama’s shifting immigration policy.

Apprehension and expectations

In an interview with the San Jose Mercury News, one illegal immigrant described his discomfort in emblematic terms. Ernesto Perez — a 44-year-old father of four who has spent 19 years residing illegally in the United States — told the paper, “Obama is the only hope we have right now. Because three of my kids live with me, I’m always afraid that I will be separated from them. They need me. We need each other.”

Perez’ long undocumented stay underscored just how lax California has been in prosecuting illegal immigration, and for how long. His personal uncertainty, however, confirmed what millions of legal and illegal residents have known about president Obama for years: his willingness to deport. Critics from the left, such as Bill Moyers, have slammed Obama for breaking records with over 2 million deportations during his time in office.

That’s why illegal immigrants in California have depended so much on the Golden State’s incremental approach to legalization. Through a battery of state laws and regulations, Sacramento has given undocumented residents several protective paths toward the kind of status that makes it harder to deport.

With taxpayer money, access has been opened to educational loans for college, legal representation in juvenile court proceedings, driver’s licenses and the practice of law without a Social Security number. The California Supreme Court ruled in January that Sergio Garcia, an illegal immigrant who duly passed the California Bar Examination, could not be prohibited by the state from practicing law; Gov. Jerry Brown authorized Garcia’s license soon thereafter.

A push from activists

California activists dedicated to full legalization have used the state’s legal landscape as a justification for pressing president Obama for sweeping changes. In a typical statement making the rounds, California Immigrant Policy Center director Reshma Shamasunder urged Obama “to move on executive action and end unjust deportations that have caused the separation of families, as quickly as possible. Given the stalling we’ve seen in Congress for so many years, we hope he is bold in his action and covers as many people as possible.”

As KQED reported, California’s rules helped swell the immigrant population to its current level, with about half of the children in state claiming an immigrant parent and one in four residents claiming foreign birth. Although legal immigrants have not pushed in a collective way for swift and full amnesty, Latino voters have consistently shown support for some kind of expanded “path toward citizenship,” as policymakers in both major political parties often put it.

For their part, Republicans have warned of consequences if Obama opts against enforcing the immigration laws on the books. Michael Steel, the spokesman for Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-OH, adopted the colorful language characteristic of today’s media relations officials, “If ‘Emperor Obama’ ignores the American people and announces an amnesty plan that he himself has said over and over again exceeds his Constitutional authority, he will cement his legacy of lawlessness and ruin the chances for congressional action on this issue — and many others.”

Rhetoric or reality? With the president’s announcement on amnesty coming tomorrow, the fireworks will begin in earnest. The new, Republican-dominated Senate is seated in January, added to continued GOP control of the House.

Obama is leaving office in two years due to term limits. So in the new year, jockeying to be his replacement will intensify in both the Republican and Democratic parties, with his amnesty possibly the top issue out of the starting gate.

This piece was originally published at CalWatchdog.com

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Voters affirm CA fracking

November 8, 2014 By James Poulos Leave a Comment

 

 

Monterey ShaleAfter a lot of spending and acrimony, little has changed from California’s high-profile ballot measures to ban hydraulic fracturing, which injects a mix of substances into shale rock to free up oil for extraction.

In two counties with little to no oil drilling — San Benito and Mendocino — anti-fracking measures prevailed. San Benito’s Measure J passed with almost 57 percent of the vote. Mendocino’s Measure S prevailed with 67 percent voting in favor.

In Santa Barbara county, however, where drilling has been well established for over a century, fracking was protected. There, Measure P was defeated by 63 to 37 percent.

Santa Barbara, host to the oil industry since the late 19th century, had the most at stake. In 1969, the county suffered a dramatic offshore oil well disaster that triggered environmental legislation and galvanized the environmentalist movement. Although oil production held on, the industry had to invest substantial sums to fend off the fracking ban.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Chevron (headquartered in San Ramon) ponied up $2.6 million to sink the three measures, with Aera Energy adding $2.1 million and Occidental Petroleum another $2 million.

Supporters of the ban raised only a fraction of that.

Political geography

Geography dictated the focus of the fracking debate. The three counties lie on and around the Monterey Shale formation, which winds and twists its way through much of California. The Chronicle reported that “the federal government this year slashed its estimate of the amount of oil that can be squeezed from the shale using current technology,” although “drillers continue probing the formation, saying it could one day yield an economic bonanza for the state.”

As David Quast, California director of the pro-fracking organization Energy in Depth, indicated to Platts, “The U.S. Geological Survey in 1995 estimated that the Bakken Shale in North Dakota contained just 151 million barrels of recoverable oil, only to significantly boost that projection in 2008 to 3-4 billion barrels, and then again doubling it last year.”

Yet, as Platts reported, the U.S. Energy Information Administration announced in May that the Monterey Shale formation was very unlikely to yield a bonanza. Its estimate of “technically recoverable resources” plunged by 96 percent, “from 13.7 billion barrels in a 2012 study to 600 million barrels in a study” released in June.

California at a crossroads

With the split decision by voters in Santa Barbara, San Benito and Mendocino, the legal landscape surrounding fracking has become even more fractured. In Sacramento, as The Huffington Post reported, the state Senate “narrowly voted against a statewide fracking moratorium earlier this year,” while “Santa Cruz County and the city of Los Angeles already have similar bans in place.”

Meanwhile, Gov. Jerry Brown rankled environmentalists last year by supporting legislation that “would allow fracking to continue while lawmakers implemented a specific set of regulations and experts studied its potentially hazardous effects.”

In a further twist, California’s weather has clashed with changing consumer tastes to add a layer of complexity to the fracking debate. Since fracking requires the use of substantial amounts of water, the Golden State’s current drought has intensified the trade-offs associated with its use.

But energy exploration and development have not turned out to be the only culprit in the competition for scarce resources. The burgeoning market for almond milk has pushed the market for California-grown, water-intensive almonds so high the nuts now generate $4 billion a year in revenue, according to the Guardian. Monterey County, where water is also scarce, grows 44 percent of the world’s lettuce.

Kern County, meanwhile, has faced direct competition between Californians’ energy needs and dietary tastes. California’s oil-producing regions have been struggling to make do with current water supplies.

While half of America’s carrot crop and 40 percent of its pistachio crop come from Kern, the Guardian observed, the county’s oil fields are the sixth largest in the United States.

Water vs. oil: It’s an old California battle that will continue.

This article was originally published on CalWatchdog.com

 

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Pension spiking results in crumbling CA roads

November 2, 2014 By James Poulos 3 Comments

From roads to bridges and well beyond, California’s neglected infrastructure won’t receive relief this election cycle.

For years, the state has lavished money on other projects — especially public pensions. Despite a flurry of bad press surrounding the crushing burdens those pensions place on cities and municipalities, the trend is set to continue.

When voters go to the polls next week, they’ll face a dizzying array of proposed tax increases. All told, Californians must contend with 140 different ballot proposals, largely because of pension-imposed budgetary pressure.

Competing priorities

Pensions have climbed steadily upward while infrastructure has crumbled away, according to findings published in the Sacramento Bee. “Six-figure pensions for mid-level public servants have brought the state to the point where one out of every nine state and local tax dollars goes to pay for pensions,” wrote Mark Blucher. In 1994, he noted, the figure reached just one in 16 tax dollars. “Tax increases now do not increase government services, but simply service government pensions.”

The Golden State’s infrastructure needs have become critical. To repair its local roads, California must make up a budgetary shortfall of $1 billion annually — amounting to $78.3 billion in total, according to the new California Statewide Local Streets and Roads Needs Assessment Report.

And although some 40 percent of state bridges need repair, as the American Society of Civil Engineers estimated, about one-fourth of California’s pensions are still unfunded, Blucher observed. To reverse the tide of funds ebbing away from infrastructure, he suggested, cities faced with bankruptcy and debt restructuring would need the authority to renegotiate contracts with public employee unions.

Setbacks in Stockton

The quest for that kind of authority, which reformers have urged for years, has been stopped short in the days before November’s election. Recently, creditors affected by the city of Stockton’s bankruptcy challenged the so-called “California rule” that has long protected public union contracts from renegotiation in times of fiscal trouble.

Franklin Resources refused to take a haircut that yielded pennies on the dollar while Stockton’s public pensions remained completely protected. Initially, the bankruptcy judge hearing the case, Christopher Klein, seemed to side in principle with Franklin. He ruled that the California Public Employees Retirement System was not constitutionally immune from the kind of cuts imposed by cities entering into bankruptcy.

But Klein reserved himself on the right to rule in favor of a deal in which CalPERS was spared anyway. In fact, that is precisely what Klein did in his final holding. Deciding that “workers would be the real victims” if CalPERS were not shielded from liability, yesterday Klein authorized Stockton to simply reduce public workers’ pay, affecting pensions only indirectly.

Although Franklin has vowed to consider its next steps, policymakers have already concluded that the lid has not been blown off of the legal prejudice in favor of public pensions.

No end in sight

With the Stockton case tipping in CalPERS’ direction, pension reform in California has been thrown into doubt.

New reports recently revealed that ever-increasing sums of money have flowed from Sacramento into the fund’s coffers. Last year alone, according to the Los Angeles Times, CalPERS received more than $8 billion in government cash, quadrupling its haul over the course of the past 10 years.

CalPERS, the Times reported, voted in August to adopt 99 new types of pension bonuses.  Meanwhile, its gap between current resources and pension promises has hit an estimated $100 million.

Gov. Jerry Brown, whose administration tried and failed this summer to prevent pension spiking by the fund, has ordered another round of investigations into whether the perks are “legal and appropriate,” according to the Times.

Meanwhile, as anyone who recently has driven on California’s once world-class roads has found out, the asphalt keeps crumbling.

This article was originally published at CalWatchdog.com

 

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