IN THIS ISSUE – “Part of California Look Different”
THE BODIES POLITIC
- Newsom, Cox Campaigns Focus on Others & Other Issues
NATURAL RESOURCES
- “Parts of California Will Look Different”: Historic Groundwater Law Rolling Out
- San Diego Ocean Waters Set Record High Temp
- Wildfire Smoke Threatens 2018 Vintage Wine Grapes
- Ag Pesticide Restrictions Tightening
Capital News & Notes (CN&N) harvests California legislative and regulatory insights from dozens of media and official sources for the past week, tailored to your business and advocacy interests. Please feel free to forward.
Stay current daily! For our focused updates via Twitter: @jrgualco / @robertjgore / @gualcogroup
FOR THE WEEK ENDING AUG. 10, 2018
READ ALL ABOUT IT!!
Newsom, Cox Campaigns Focus on Others & Other Issues
Gavin Newsom and John Cox are preparing for a general election battle to decide who will be the state’s next governor, but much of what they plan to focus on has little to do with how either candidate would lead the state.
Instead, both men are engaged in proxy campaigns for other candidates and causes.
Front-runner Newsom will spend significant time trying to help Democrats flip seven California congressional seats that are crucial to the party’s efforts to retake the House, a win that would provide a counterweight to President Trump and his policies. Republican Cox will campaign for a ballot measure to repeal an increase in the state’s gas tax, hoping the effort lights a populist fire among California voters that draws in Democrats and independents.
In an environment where voters are not particularly tuned in to the governor’s race, working on behalf of other campaigns is a smart move, some political strategists said.
“Neither one of them is in a position to motivate their party’s base, so they both turned to something else to do it for them,” said Dan Schnur, a veteran political analyst who teaches at USC. “There is nothing for California Democrats as motivating as Donald Trump, and there’s nothing as motivating for California Republicans as the repeal of the gas tax. Both candidates have figured out it’s a lot easier to surf a wave than it is to create a new one.”
Newsom said he will launch a fall bus tour of the seven congressional districts that voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election and are represented by Republicans in Congress. His campaign plans to rally supporters in those districts to volunteer for Democratic hopefuls, as well as legislative candidates who can help the party reclaim a two-thirds majority in the state Senate.
Newsom, the state’s lieutenant governor and a former mayor of San Francisco, is tapping an email list comprising several hundreds of thousands of supporters to help his preferred candidates.
He sent fundraising appeals for Democrats Katie Hill, who is running in the 25th Congressional District against Rep. Steve Knight (R-Palmdale), and Josh Harder, who is running in the 10th District against Rep. Jeff Denham (R-Turlock). Last week, Newsom challenged his supporters to donate $25,000 in less than seven hours to support the seven congressional candidates and his campaign.
“Switching things up … because 2018 is about so much more than just our race. We have to take back the House in November, and the road to the House goes through California,” Newsom wrote in an email.
“This is how we take control of our future and stop Trump’s bigoted agenda: We elect strong progressives up and down the CA ballot.”
Because he is not facing another Democrat in a costly general election fight, Newsom said, he’s able to help other candidates.
“We have the opportunity to unify our party, and unification is not just organization, it’s not just human resources. It’s also capital … making sure we are fundraising aggressively,” he told reporters at a recent news conference in Los Angeles. “And that’s one specific, tangible way that I can be helpful.”
Cox has been a major booster of Proposition 6 on the November ballot, which would repeal a $52-billion transportation law enacted last year that increased taxes on gas and diesel sales, and created a new annual vehicle registration fee to finance road and highway repairs.
As chairman of the repeal effort, Cox has spent $250,000 of his own money to back the campaign — and might contribute more. He frequently discusses the tax on the campaign trail, arguing that Sacramento Democrats are out of touch, fail to live within their means and harm hardworking Californians with their policies.
Californians have “had enough,” he said in a June interview, noting that he heard a Democrat call into a radio program earlier in the day to voice frustration over paying $4.10 a gallon for gas, a price he blamed on the new tax. “The affordability, which includes the gas tax, is going to be a major issue.”
The candidates’ strategies have ancillary benefits.
Republicans believe the gas tax has the potential to incite voter outrage among Californians of all political stripes, as the tripling of the state vehicle license fee did in 2003. The move paved the way for the recall of Democratic Gov. Gray Davis and the election of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. At one point on the campaign trail, the Republican dropped a wrecking ball on a car symbolizing the fee.
And in 1978, rising property taxes led voters to approve Proposition 13, the property-tax limiting measure that is a third rail in California politics.
“I really think that Proposition 6 could be the Proposition 13 of this decade,” said former state GOP Chairman Ron Nehring, pointing to the recall of state Sen. Josh Newman (D-Fullerton) this year over his vote for the gas tax increase. “Democrats have overreached, they can’t dial it back, and now you’re seeing a real tangible result of that. It’s a perfect crossover issue [and] it’s a winning issue for us.”
Nehring said Cox’s decision to focus on repeal of the gas tax increase was smart because of its potential to attract Democratic and independent voters, but he acknowledged that Cox faces a tough battle running for statewide office in California as a Republican.
There is more support for repeal than for Cox, according to USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times polling this year. The repeal was supported by 51% of registered voters in a May poll, while Cox was backed by 28% in a June survey.
Bob Shrum, a former Democratic political operative who is the director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC, said the numbers show the difficulty for any Republican to get elected statewide in California, particularly one with Cox’s views on abortion and other issues that are not shared by many of the state’s voters.
“After 2016, I won’t say anybody is unelectable, but the fact of the matter is it is very hard to come up with a plausible case that Cox can win this election,” Shrum said. “He is so out of step with Californians on social issues, on immigration. And he’d like to run on the gas tax, but the problem with that is voters can repeal the gas tax on its own, they don’t have to vote for him to do it.”
For Newsom, his focus on congressional races allows him to avoid unforced errors in the governor’s race, where he has overwhelming leads in the polls, and to build chits for a potential future run for higher office, said Darry Sragow, a veteran Democratic consultant.
“He can earn a lot of credits and put them in the bank for later,” Sragow said. “He can foster a national presence without looking overly ambitious. It’s all upside, a lot of opportunity to do good deeds, win friends, influence people and stay out of trouble.”
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-newsom-cox-governors-race-20180809-story.html
“Parts of California Will Look Different”: Historic Groundwater Law Rolling Out
California’s new groundwater management law is not a sports car. It moves more like a wagon train. The rules do not require critically overdrafted aquifers to achieve “sustainability” until 2040. But 22 years from now, once they finally get there, lives will be transformed.
The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), adopted in 2014, will change more than groundwater. The requirement to end overdraft will also transform land use, a massive side effect yet to be widely recognized.
Parts of California will literally look different once the law takes full effect. It could put some farmers out of business. It could change how others farm.
In some areas, farms will have to be fallowed to reduce groundwater demand. That idled farmland will have lots of important new uses. Some could become wildlife habitat or groundwater recharge basins. Others could be useful for solar energy development and other semi-industrial uses. Undoubtedly, some will become housing subdivisions.
City and county government leaders are starting to realize there’s a lot at stake. The landscape itself will change as groundwater extraction changes. Without careful planning, property tax revenues that fund a wide variety of essential government services could be compromised.
“I don’t believe it is a groundwater law. I believe it’s a land use law,” said Lorelei Oviatt, director of planning and natural resources in Kern County, the southernmost county in California’s fertile San Joaquin Valley. “In my mind, SGMA has actually opened up doors for new technology – new ways of looking at how we use our land.”
Kern County was the most productive farming county in the state last year in the nation’s most productive farming region. The total value of its agricultural production was $7.2 billion in 2017. Lots of that success was built on groundwater overdraft – which must soon end.
But Kern County isn’t alone. Many other California counties are in the same situation. All but three of the 14 groundwater basins in the San Joaquin Valley are ranked as critically overdrafted. Ten others, mostly along the Central Coast, are also critically overdrafted. Several dozen more throughout the state are ranked as high or medium priority, which also face deadlines to bring their aquifers into balance, meaning extraction and replenishment are equalized.
Many other aquifers in the state are already in balance, and now their managers must figure out how to keep them that way – which means land use will become an issue for all aquifers in the state, said Ellen Hanak, director of the Water Policy Center at the Public Policy Institute of California.
“Everybody everywhere who is implementing SGMA is going to be thinking about how to protect areas that are good for recharge,” said Hanak. “People didn’t think about that in the past, and now they’re going to have to.”
As a result, groundwater managers, for the first time, will be paying attention to where new housing is built, and there may be more resistance to sprawl-type suburban development.
The best groundwater recharge areas have certain soil types that are good at absorbing water. These areas have already been mapped by, among others, the California Soil Resource Lab at the University of California, Davis.
Protecting recharge zones from urbanization will become a new focus of growth management, but it can’t be the only focus. In areas like the San Joaquin Valley, there is not a lot of surface water available for recharge because most of it is diverted from Northern California and already in high demand.
That leaves storm runoff as the main recharge option, and many areas of the San Joaquin Valley are well suited to that: The valley was a giant floodplain, after all, before it was developed for farming.
But storm runoff is not available in all years. In addition, as the PPICnotes in a recent report, most available storm runoff occurs in the north part of the San Joaquin Valley, while the best recharge lands are in the south. Hence, new infrastructure will be needed to channel flood flows to basins where it can be recharged.
“At best, you can probably meet up to a quarter of the deficit with additional recharge,” Hanak said. “That means you’ve still got a big gap to fill. So there’s a growing recognition that this is going to mean some land coming out of production in the valley.”
She estimates 10–12 percent of farmland in the San Joaquin Valley will have to be fallowed as a conservation measure to reduce demand on groundwater. That doesn’t sound like a lot. But it amounts to about 600,000 acres – roughly equal to seven cities the size of Fresno.
How all that land gets reused is a huge issue for the region.
A lot of good farmland is also suitable for groundwater recharge, and the two are not incompatible. University of California research found that 3.6 million acres of crops in the state may be suitable for recharge. At the right time and in the right quantities, shallow flooding works on crops as diverse as alfalfa, wine grapes and almonds.
Kara Heckert, state director of the American Farmland Trust, said it is important to make sure the most productive farmland is spared from fallowing. The nonprofit recently published a report that found 323,000 acres of farmland in the San Joaquin Valley could be lost to development by 2050 as suburban sprawl creeps out from cities like Lodi, Manteca, Hanford and Bakersfield. About half of that acreage is considered high-value farmland.
The message is that cities, counties, farmers and groundwater sustainability agencies (GSAs) need to work together in new ways.
“Land quality across the San Joaquin Valley should be a consideration used by [GSAs] when they are determining groundwater allocations within their districts,” said Heckert. “Ensuring the best agricultural land continues to receive adequate groundwater supply will help maintain California’s agricultural production and natural heritage.”
Hanak said governments could offer a variety of incentives to derive the most benefit from farmland retirement. Grants and tax breaks, for instance, could encourage fallowing in certain areas to create new wildlife refuge areas or to expand existing refuges.
Less productive farmland near utility corridors could be rezoned for alternative energy development. This would encourage crop fallowing to cut groundwater use while also boosting property taxes collected on these lands.
If farmland is simply fallowed and left bare, Oviatt said, local property taxes will suffer.
San Diego Ocean Waters Set Record High Temp
San Diego’s ocean waters are warmer than usual. Last week, researchers recorded the warmest sea surface temperature in more than a century. Each day, researchers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at University of California San Diego collect data by hand from the Ellen Browning Scripps Memorial Pier. On Friday, the water reached 78.8degrees Fahrenheit — the highest since record keeping began there in 1916. The previous record, 78.6 degrees, had been set just two days earlier. We spoke with Clarissa Anderson, a biological oceanographer, to explain the significance of the temperatures.
Her answers have been slightly edited and condensed for clarity:
Wildfire Smoke Threatens 2018 Vintage Wine Grapes
Drift smoke from the Ferguson Fire has some Tuolumne County vintners and agriculturalists concerned about the commercial viability of the early fall grape harvest, but one forestry official with the University of California noted that the native wilderness of the Mother Lode has a developed adaptability to smoky conditions.
Susie Kocher, forestry and natural resources advisor with the University of California Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources Central Sierra Cooperative Extension, said that “smoke taint” of commercial agriculture was always a concern during fire season.
“It’s grapes we worry about the most,” she said. “In the past there have been bad years when there was a lot of smoke where grapes were on the vine and wineries had to produce the smoky wine because of that effect.”
https://www.uniondemocrat.com/localnews/6425094-151/will-smoke-taint-summer-harvests-in-the-mother
Ag Pesticide Restrictions Tightening
California farmers could face more restrictions on how they combat crop-eating insects after a state report concluded that one class of pesticide poses a significant risk to bees that pollinate almonds and other crops.
The conclusion, published this week by the state Department of Pesticide Regulation, means growers of top crops such as nuts, wine grapes, citrus and berries will have to alter how they combat crop-destroying pests to strike a balance between losing crops and losing the bees that pollinate them.
“While it’s too soon to be specific, it is likely that we will be developing restrictions in the future that will require growers to modify when and where the pesticides are used,” said Charlotte Fadipe, spokeswoman for the California Department of Pesticide Regulation.
An outright ban on the pesticide class known as neonicotinoids, or neonics, is unlikely and unrealistic, Fadipe added. The agency already has a moratorium on any expansion of their use.
Large swaths of the state’s $45-billion agriculture industry depend on bee colonies brought in to pollinate crops. Almonds alone use about 1.8 million colonies, which can cost up to $190 apiece per season to rent, according to government and industry estimates.
Bee populations have been declining steadily for more than a decade, a trend blamed on the combined effects of pesticide exposure, predatory mites and the management practices of pollination service companies.
In the first three months of this year, nearly 78,000 colonies vanished from the nation’s commercial beekeeping stock — a phenomenon known as colony collapse, according to a newly released survey by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That was a 15% increase in such collapses from the same period last year, according to the USDA.
Activists who have pushed for a ban on the pesticides said the report backs their case. “The more we learn about the toxicity of neonics, the more apparent it is that pretty much any plant with nectar or pollen sprayed with these poisons is unsafe for bees,” said Nathan Donley, a senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity.
The European Union banned some neonicotinoids on flowering plants in 2013, and earlier this year further restricted their use to greenhouses. Bayer Crop Science, which markets several pesticides based on neonicotinoids, has blasted the move as unfounded by science.
Bayer stood by its guidelines on how to apply the chemicals, which it said give growers an important tool to increase yields and feed a growing global population.
“What we can say unequivocally is that hundreds of studies have shown repeatedly that these important tools are safe and effective when used according to label,” the company said.
Renee Pinel, president and chief executive of the Western Plant Health Assn., an agro-chemical industry advocacy group, said the California report relied on “worst case scenarios and not real world or label application rates” commonly found on fields.
“California farmers are committed to following the law, and follow product labels stringently,” Pinel said.
State pesticide regulators said their “worst case” scenario was derived from what pesticide users and industry studies reported, and the agency used a risk calculation that was “realistic but protective.”
That analysis showed there was a significant risk to bees from chemical residue in pollen and nectar of tree nuts, citrus, berries, cotton and certain flowering vegetables such as cucumbers, squash and tomatoes.
California growers have more than doubled their use of neonicotinoids from 2007 to 2016, even as they decreased their reliance on organophosphate and carbamate pesticides that are considered more hazardous to human health, according to the report. About 195 tons of neonicotinoids were used on California fields in 2016, compared with 1,000 tons of organophosphates and carbamates, according to state pesticide regulators.
Scientists and some government regulators have progressively raised alarms about potential harm to bees from neonicotinoids, which are absorbed and distributed to all parts of a plant or tree, winding up in nectar and pollen in the blossoms where bees forage.
Managing bee exposure to those blooms during times when pesticides are applied can be complicated. Much of the state’s citrus industry, which uses neonicotinoids to combat the the Asian citrus psyllid, doesn’t depend on bees for pollination, but pollination service companies sometimes place their hives in locations that allow bees to also forage in citrus trees.
Some vegetables treated with the chemicals, such as leafy greens, are picked before they flower, and are considered “low risk” to bees.
Contaminated pollen and nectar also present different exposure scenarios. Because nectar is widely shared in hives, contamination can have a cascading effect. Tomato blossoms produce pollen but no nectar, while cotton, one of the most heavily sprayed crops, produces nectar that is highly attractive to bees.
State regulations are crafted to address different crop types, while citrus and almond growers have adopted bee protection plans or converted to self-pollinating varieties.
It will take about two years for the state to develop regulations based on the report. Even so, that is ahead of efforts by the federal Environmental Protection Agency, which has slowed its review of pesticides under President Trump.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-bees-pesticides-20180801-story.html#