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IN THIS ISSUE – “Losing Over a Million Acre Feet (of Water) in Two Weeks is Concerning”
WATER & POWER
POLITICS
- CA Dems Ban (with Exceptions) Money from Oil, Police and Struck Employers
POST-PANDEMIC CA
- Tech Exodus “Greatly Accelerated” from West Coast
- Work-from-Home Decimates Transit Ridership – New BART Stations are “Mausoleums”
Capital News & Notes (CN&N) harvests California policy, legislative and regulatory insights from dozens of media and official sources for the past week. Please feel free to forward this unique service.
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FOR THE WEEK ENDING FEB. 25, 2022
Brutal Summer of Drought Ahead; Ag Water Allocations Cut
Sacramento Bee
Farmers in California’s Central Valley are in for another brutal summer of drought. The federal government announced initial 2022 water allocations Wednesday for customers of the Central Valley Project, and the figures were dismal:
Most irrigation districts in the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys can expect to receive no deliveries from the project’s vast network of reservoirs and canals.
Despite some snowfall this week, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which runs the project, said weeks of dry weather wiped out many of the gains recorded during the rainy and snowy December.
In just the first two weeks of February, major reservoirs such as Shasta, Folsom and Oroville lost an estimated 1.2 million acre-feet of inflow. An acre-foot is 326,000 gallons.
“Losing over a million acre-feet of projected inflow in two weeks’ time is concerning,” said Ernest Conant, the bureau’s regional director. Although the allocations could change this spring, continued dry weather makes it unlikely that the thousands of farmers who rely on the Central Valley Project will get meaningful supplies. Last year most farmers received a 0% allocation as well.
The project normally provides water for about 3 million acres of farmland. A small number of cities also receive water from the federal project.
Most were given an initial allocation that’s just enough to provide “public health and safety needs.”
Cities that tap into Folsom Lake, including many communities in the Sacramento area, were given a 25% allocation. Reclamation’s stark projections were in contrast to the State Water Project, which announced a 15% allocation to its customers in January. The state project has more of an urban base; its largest customer is the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which serves 19 million residents. The vagaries of California weather have hit the federal project harder.
Conant said the December storms contributed relatively little precipitation in the upper Sacramento Valley, which feeds Shasta Lake — the largest reservoir in the federal system.
As of Wednesday water levels at Shasta were just 53% of historical average. That doesn’t mean farmers will go completely without water. Some irrigation districts will receive deliveries because of historical water rights dating to the origins of the federal project in the 1930s.
Meanwhile, many farmers have access to groundwater supplies, and they will likely run their pumps even as irrigation districts begin planning for long-term cutbacks in groundwater usage in accordance with state law.
Nonetheless, the year is likely to be difficult, and widespread fallowing of row crops is likely. Last year, farmers in the Sacramento Valley idled enough land to cut the rice crop by 20%. In the San Joaquin Valley, some farmers ripped out almond orchards — sacrificing investments worth tens of thousands of dollars — for lack of water.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/water-and-drought/article258682473.html#storylink=cpy
Drought Drives Decline in Renewable Power
California Energy Commission
Data from the California Energy Commission (CEC) shows that 59 percent of the state’s electricity came from renewable and zero-carbon sources in 2020.
The CEC estimates that in 2020, 34.5 percent of the state’s retail electricity sales were served by Renewables Portfolio Standard (RPS)-eligible sources such as solar and wind. When sources of zero-carbon energy such as large hydroelectric generation and nuclear are included, 59 percent of the state’s retail electricity sales came from non-fossil fuel sources in 2020.
In 2019, over 60 percent of the state’s electricity came from renewable and zero-carbon sources. The decrease in 2020 is due to decline in hydroelectric generation caused by severe drought, as well as pandemic-related delays to new renewable energy projects.
The data show the 2020 decrease is primarily due to a nearly 20 percent decline in large hydroelectric generation compared to 2019.
The small decrease in the amount of RPS-eligible renewables is mostly due to decreased production from small hydroelectric facilities which dropped by just over 40 percent compared to 2019. Additionally, pandemic-related delays to new clean energy projects contributed to a 50 percent drop in new in-state RPS generation.
CA Dems Ban (with Exceptions) Money from Oil, Police and Struck Employers
Sacramento Bee
After delaying a vote on the matter last fall, the Executive Board of the California Democratic Party on Sunday decided not to solicit or accept any contributions from a slate of special interests, including the fossil fuel industry, law enforcement supply industry, and any employer who is the target of a labor-sanctioned worker strike.
However, there are some caveats.
Under the newly adopted policies, the party will still consider contributions from law enforcement unions on a “case by case basis.” In 2020, the party accepted $1.2 million from those groups, including more than $500,000 from the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, or CCPOA, according to state records.
The party also prohibited contributions from fossil fuel giants like Sempra and PG&E, but left a carve-out for contributions from Southern California Edison, because it doesn’t produce gas. SCE has faced multiple lawsuits from insurance companies and victims’ families for its role in recent wildfires. Last year, it agreed to pay $2.2 billion to settle claims from the 2018 Woolsey fire after an investigation found Edison equipment sparked the blaze.
“They don’t own the gas lines, they simply sell electricity, and with that framing, they would not be on the banned contributor list,” said party Controller April Verrett in a video of the meeting shared by Progressive Caucus Chair Amar Shergill.
Party Chair Rusty Hicks called the vote an “important step forward” for Democrats in California, but the moves were decried by party activists as performative and milquetoast. Shergill said it may be time for progressives to reconsider their involvement in a party that doesn’t listen to its members.
“Anyone that says Edison is not a fossil fuel company is either ignorant or purposefully telling mistruths, ‘‘ he said.
Also among the prohibited contributions: tobacco, gun, for-profit prisons, for-profit colleges, for-profit health insurance and the payday loan industry.
Under the agreement passed Sunday, the party will review the list of prohibited contributions every two years.
Tech Exodus “Greatly Accelerated” from West Coast
Bloomberg
When West Coast tech firms are hiring, they’re increasingly posting jobs in Texas, Virginia and Georgia.
More than four in ten listings for higher educated white-collar occupations at technology companies based in California, Oregon and Washington are outside of the region, according to an analysis by the Conference Board.
While East Coast cities like Boston have long been tech hubs, the findings point to a pandemic-era shift inland. Denver and Nashville, Tennessee, have seen some of the biggest increases in job postings.
The trend, which began before the Covid-19 crisis, has greatly accelerated since as companies went fully or partially remote — and many workers fled California. Tech firms are also expanding — Amazon.com Inc. in Arlington, Virginia, and Google in Manhattan, for instance — and seeking local talent.
The percentage of job postings outside of the West Coast, 43%, has jumped from about 30% at the beginning of 2019, according to research from the Conference Board.
Faced with a tight labor market, companies across the country have bid up wages and offered increased flexibility to attract and retain workers.
In places where the cost of living is cheaper, West Coast tech firms are able to pay more than the local market — but still less than in California, according to Agron Nicaj, the Conference Board economist who conducted the analysis.
Austin captures almost 4% of the listings analyzed by the Conference Board. And while transplants have made the city one of the fastest growing metro areas in the country, the influx of high-paid tech workers have also sent home prices soaring.
Another winner is Virginia, which caught up with New York during the pandemic.
Georgia and North Carolina are also attracting tech companies, with Atlanta and Durham getting a larger share of the pie of the listings.
https://www.bloomberg.com/technology
Work-from-Home Decimates Transit Ridership – New BART Stations are “Hushed Mausoleums”
San Jose Mercury
Shiny new BART stations in the South Bay are now hushed mausoleums representing a bygone era of workday commuters. Weeds sprout in commuter lots that are largely abandoned. VTA light rail trains serve desolate office parks. And at rush hour Caltrain’s double-decker coach screeches to a halt with windows of empty seats.
These are symbols of a pandemic-era ridership crisis. Despite widespread vaccinations, the Bay Area is among the slowest metro regions in the nation to get passengers back aboard buses and trains. Kept afloat by $3.9 billion in federal relief funds that are certain to evaporate, a system that thrived off commuters faces an uncertain future and may never again see the crowds of riders it was built to serve.
Among the sleepiest transit corridors are BART’s Dublin and Pleasanton stations in the East Bay with over 80% ridership losses.
In Sunnyvale, the Valley Transportation Authority’s Moffett Park Station sees about 22 people a weekday, a 95% loss from pre-pandemic numbers.
Meanwhile, Caltrain’s once-mighty commuter rail into downtown San Francisco has dwindled from 20,000 riders each day to 1,400 passengers – a 93% loss.
For BART, the ridership downturn is most severe in its newest stations in the South Bay: Milpitas and Berryessa, which both opened in the summer of 2020, and Warm Springs in Fremont all have over 85% fewer riders than they saw or were projected to have before the pandemic.
This over $3 billion stretch of rail – hailed as finally bringing BART to San Jose after decades of toil – is the least-used three-station BART segment. It’s a dismal accolade for a rail system that is already in last place for ridership recovery among ten of its peers, including in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C., but is barreling ahead with a planned $6.9 billion extension through downtown San Jose.
Kathy Tolentino, a manager at the nearby Edge Apartments, said her complex, which opened in October, is quickly filling with tenants but they are not using the station next door. The only thing keeping many of her residents in the Bay Area while they work from home are contracts with tech employers that require them to stay, she said. “A lot of my residents would live in Texas if they could.”
“Work from home is really killing transit ridership,” said Jay Tyree, a service planning manager at VTA. While the VTA hopes that more housing and retail developments around the Orange Line can coax more riders, in the short term he said there isn’t much the agency can do. “The thing about light rail is once you put the tracks in the ground, it’s fixed.”
San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo, who also sits on the VTA board, is calling for a drastic change to the system. He says VTA should replace the light rail with a fleet of electric buses to more easily adapt to changing travel patterns – a years-long transition that would likely carry a hefty price tag. Currently, the VTA is investing over $450 million to extend the Orange Line from Alum Rock Station to the Eastridge Transit Center in East San Jose.
“It’s not a poor system. It’s a colossally bad system,” said Liccardo. “And we’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars to expand it as we speak.”
Spacious parking but no cars
In a windswept VTA commuter lot in South San Jose, four-foot weeds have had time to sprout from cracks in the asphalt and go through an entire life cycle. They’re now crunchy and dried out, standing as withered testaments to a parking lot with no cars.