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IN THIS ISSUE – “Mother Nature is giving us a chance to catch our breath,”
Water district official when increased supplies were announced
- Record Rains Raise Water Supplies to 27 Million Californians
- City Offers Free Water; Recycling Half Its Annual Consumption
- State Budget Battle Begins: Transit Advocates Oppose Cuts
- Suspend Gas Tax, Store More Water – State Senate Republicans’ Priorities; Leading GOP Contender Eyes Statewide Possibilities
- Golden State Population Growth Slowest Ever
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 client service.
FOR THE WEEK ENDING JAN. 27, 2023
Record Rains Raise Water Supplies to 27 Million Californians
Sacramento Bee
California’s torrential storms from late December through early January will allow the State Water Project to deliver nearly 1.3 million acre-feet of water throughout the state this year – six times as much as projected before the storms, state water officials said. Entrenched in a third consecutive year of severe drought conditions, the California Department of Water Resources on Dec. 1 announced it would be able to deliver only 5% of water supply requested for 2023.
The State Water Project stores and delivers water to 29 water agencies that serve 27 million Californians. But now, the state says the project can deliver 30% this year. That works out to 1.27 million acre-feet of water, about 413 billion gallons.
“The allocation increase is the direct result of extreme weather in late December and nine atmospheric rivers in early January that helped fill reservoirs and dramatically increase the Sierra Nevada snowpack,” the California Department of Water Resources wrote in a Thursday news release.
A series of nine atmospheric river storms struck California between late December and the first half of January. The storms produced dangerous flooding, killing at least 22 people, and brought extreme winds causing extensive damage and cutting power to hundreds of thousands.
But the downpours and heavy mountain snow also replenished withered reservoirs and boosted California’s snowpack levels past double their historic averages for this time of year.
The allocation increase is “largely derived from improvements to reservoir supplies,” Karla Nemeth, director of the Department of Water Resources, said during a virtual news conference Thursday afternoon.
California’s two largest reservoirs included in the State Water Project, Lake Oroville and the San Luis Reservoir, gained a combined 1.62 million acre-feet of water during the recent storms, state water officials said in Thursday’s news release, which is “roughly enough to provide water to 5.6 million households for a year.”
Nemeth called the 30% allocation “fairly conservative,” saying it takes into account the possibility of drier-than-normal conditions in the coming weeks and months. “We are cautiously optimistic with this 30%.”
Nemeth said the state is not yet taking snowpack calculations into consideration in State Water Project allocations, but will begin to do so following California’s next snow survey, which is scheduled for Wednesday and will represent the state’s first monthly snowpack report since the bulk of the winter storms. Lake Oroville as of Thursday morning stood at 110% of its average water level for the date, state water officials reported.
Snowpack across the Sierra Nevada range as of Thursday was 216% of normal, according to the Department of Water Resources.
“These storms made clear the importance of our efforts to modernize our existing water infrastructure for an era of intensified drought and flood,” Nemeth said in a prepared statement. “Given these dramatic swings, these storm flows are badly needed to refill groundwater basins and support recycled water plants.”
Initial State Water Project are set each year on Dec. 1, then updated monthly through May or June. The state in December 2021 set an initial allocation of 0%, which ultimately increased to 5% for the year.
A 30% allocation represents about half of the historic average for the project, said Ted Craddock, deputy director of the State Water Project. The state last allocated 30% in 2019.
“We are not out of drought in California, but this certainly makes a significant dent,” Nemeth said Thursday, noting that the state in recent years has experienced “weather whiplash” between extreme dry and extreme wet conditions.
For the Las Virgenes Water District, which serves about 75,000 people in northern Los Angeles County and gets all of its water from the state aqueduct, the new allocation recasts what was a very grim outlook on water supplies for 2023.
“Mother Nature is giving us a chance to catch our breath,” said Mike McNutt, a Las Virgenes spokesman.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/water-and-drought/article271701807.html#storylink=cpy
City Offers Free Water; Recycling Half Its Annual Consumption
Grist
Healdsburg benefits from an invaluable resource that keeps gardens, trees, and vineyards irrigated: free, non-potable water produced by its wastewater-reclamation facility.
The plant recycles 350 million gallons of effluent drained and flushed in the city every year, according to city officials, or slightly more than half its annual water consumption.
The reused H20 is used in irrigation, construction, and other applications that require lower levels of treatment than drinking water.
This eases pressure on regional reservoirs and wells while enlisting a wide pool of users in promoting an ethos of conservation, all the while helping manage the amount of treated wastewater discharged into the Russian River.
MORE:
https://grist.org/solutions/healdsburg-california-wastewater-recycling-drought/
State Budget Battle Begins: Transit Advocates Oppose Cuts
CalMatters commentary by Dan Walters
California utopians, including those holding public office, envision a state that by 2045 will have achieved zero net emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
The largest source of those emissions is transportation – the cars, trucks, buses, airplanes and railroad engines that carry Californians, the goods they need to live and the inputs and outputs of the state’s $3.4 trillion economy.
To that end, the California Air Resources Control Board has issued seemingly countless decrees, including one that would ban the sale of autos with gas- or diesel-powered engines by 2035.
Public transit is central to the state’s hopes of reducing transportation emissions. Officials want more Californians to park their cars – or not buy them in the first place – and use buses and light and heavy rail systems for commutes and other personal trips.
Despite those hopes, transit ridership is going the other way, and transit system operators and advocates are using terms such as “fiscal cliff” and “death spiral” as farebox revenues decline and there is greater demand for taxpayer money to shore up their operations.
Transit usage cratered when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the state three years ago and millions of workers either lost their jobs or shifted to working at home. Ridership picked up a bit when pandemic closures eased and employment finally returned to pre-pandemic levels. However, the California Transit Association says that as of the third quarter of 2022, overall ridership was averaging just two-thirds of what it had been prior to the pandemic.
“Some agencies have returned to pre-pandemic ridership levels and above, while others continue to struggle with ridership counts that are one-third of previous totals,” the organization says in a new “strategic plan” it unveiled in December.
The plan “comes at a moment when our industry faces serious existential threats – slow ridership recovery, a fiscal cliff, and a widening workforce gap,” Karen King, who chairs the organization’s executive committee, said.
The plan makes obtaining more financial support, particularly from the state, its highest priority, citing not only declines in ridership and operational revenue, but the state’s mandate that it get rid of its hydrocarbon-fueled buses and replace them with battery-powered vehicles. The cost of zero-emission buses and the infrastructure to operate them is tabbed at more than $11.6 billion.
Three weeks after the plan was released, Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed a new budget for the 2023-24 fiscal year with spending reductions to close what he said was a $22.5 billion deficit, thanks to a projected decline in revenues.
Transit officials and their supporters didn’t like the budget’s treatment of transit, particularly a $2 billion reduction in transit infrastructure. The industry’s top legislative advocate, Scott Wiener, a Democratic state senator from San Francisco, pledged to seek restoration of the funds and more money to cover transit’s revenue declines.
Wiener said, “We must not let our public transportation systems go over the impending fiscal cliff and enter a death spiral – where budget shortfalls lead to service cuts that lead to ridership drops that lead to further budget shortfalls and service cuts. The state must serve as a financial back-stop against this fiscal cliff to ensure our transit systems survive.”
The transit dilemma typifies the conflicts and tradeoffs that permeate the state’s hopes for achieving carbon neutrality 22 years hence. As a recent CalMatters analysis of the state’s ambitious but tortured plans to rid itself of hydrocarbon-fueled cars underscores, it’s one thing to declare such a goal on paper, but it’s quite another to make it reality when the precise steps needed are complicated, time-consuming and expensive.
Suspend Gas Tax, Store More Water – State Senate Republicans’ Priorities; Leading GOP Contender Eyes Statewide Possibilities
Sacramento Bee
A gas tax suspension, better water storage and tougher crime policies are among California Republicans’ top priorities heading into the state budget cycle.
And a Democratic supermajority willing to work with GOP legislators is also near the top of the list.
California Senate Republicans on Tuesday laid out their financial suggestions following Gov. Gavin Newsom’s budget rollout earlier in this month.
The governor presented a $297 billion budget that includes a $22.5 billion deficit. The Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates the gap is closer to $24 billion and could grow if national economic conditions produce a recession.
In a letter to Newsom, Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, D-Lakewood and Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, Senate Minority Leader Brian Jones, R-Santee, and other Republican lawmakers presented their economic agenda, including:
- Suspending the state’s gas tax and backfilling the lost revenue with money from other areas, such as the funding for California’s much-maligned high-speed rail project.
- Expanding California’s water storage system, which GOP lawmakers have been pushingin the wake of historic storms and flooding around the state.
- Tougher penalties for those convicted of drug crimes and theft, as well as fewer prison closures.
- More mental health resources for communities to address homelessness.
When asked how Republicans plan to address gun violence following this month’s mass shootings, Jones put the onus on Democrats to work with their GOP colleagues.
“It’s too long been ‘the Democrat way or the highway,’” Jones said at a news conference. “They have not made a commitment to work with us in a bipartisan manner to come up with solutions for these issues…”
Republican Lanhee Chen lost his 2022 race for state controller, but it’s likely that California voters haven’t seen the last of him.
Chen, who lectured at Stanford University and served as 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s policy director, released a campaign memo Wednesday with some promising data points.
For instance, he was not only California’s top Republican voter getter (nearly 4.8 million) but led all statewide GOP candidates in the country.
That includes Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (4.6 million votes) and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (4.4 million votes).
The Chen campaign also pointed out that he not only won purple San Luis Obispo County (the first Republican statewide candidate to do so since 2014), but had strong margins of support in Orange, Fresno, Riverside and San Bernardino counties as well. He also was competitive in hotly contested congressional and state legislative districts.
Could Chen be the cure for what ails the California Republican Party? He seems to think so.
“The bottom line is that Republicans can be competitive across California, but it requires the right candidate, with the right message and a significant resource advantage,” according to a statement from his campaign.
As a candidate, Chen was quick to promote his fiscally conservative bonafides, but generally shied away from culture war issues. He maintained that he supports a person’s right to get an abortion, though he had reservations about Proposition 1, the ballot measure to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution.
Chen’s campaign pledged that it work with California GOP Chair Jessica Millan Patterson to find more electorally viable candidates to run statewide and in key parts of California, such as Los Angeles County.
But will he run again?
Chen isn’t saying, for now. But his email blast offers a clue.
“Lanhee will remain an active voice in the conversation about the future of our state and will keep you updated on opportunities to work together,” it said.
Golden State Population Growth Slowest Ever
Public Policy Institute of California
Since 2000, California has experienced its slowest rates of growth ever recorded.
From 2010 to 2020, California’s population grew by 5.8% (or 2.4 million), according to decennial census counts. This was slower than the rate of growth in the rest of the nation (6.8%), leading to the loss of a seat in the US House of Representatives for the first time in California’s history.
- These recent rates are dramatically lower than the growth throughout the 20th century. From 1900 to 1950, California’s population rose from under 2 million to 10 million. It more than tripled in the last half of the century, reaching 34 million by 2000, and its growth rate was much higher than that of the rest of the United States.
- After peaking in January 2020 at 39.6 million, California lost 600,000 people as of July 2022. Most of the loss occurred during the first year of the pandemic. A rise in residents moving to other states, an increase in deaths and sharp declines in international immigration account for the losses.
- MORE, Fact Sheet: