Capital News & Notes
For Clients & Friends of The Gualco Group, Inc.
IN THIS ISSUE – “What? This Is Crazy!”
MONEY & POLITICS
- State Budget Battle Starts Wednesday: Restraint v. Spending
- Dem Candidates Seeking Party Endorsement
- Ballot Initiatives Already Fighting for Voter Attention
- 3rd State Legislator Resigns & Senator Takes Leave
POPULATION
- California Population Growth Nil
- Immigrants Line Up at San Diego Border Station
WATER
- Trump Administration Seeks to Turn Up Delta Pumps
- Chasing “Raw Water”…Or, Is Flouride a Mind Control Drug?
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.
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FOR THE TWO WEEKS ENDING JAN. 5, 2018, READ ALL ABOUT IT!!!
State Budget Battle Starts Wednesday – Restraint v. Spending
In November, the Legislature’s budget analyst, Mac Taylor, issued his annual “fiscal outlook” that sets the stage for the next state budget cycle.
On Wednesday, Gov. Jerry Brown will offer his own fiscal outlook as he proposes a 2018-19 budget, his last.
Chances are, Brown’s take will not vary much from Taylor’s – that in the near-term, the state’s finances look rosy, thanks to a strong economy, but the state’s longer-term situation is much cloudier.
Brown habitually warns about the inevitability of recession and the need to build reserves, and Taylor mirrors that caution in urging his bosses in the Legislature to set aside more money.
Both remember what happened a decade ago when the worst recession since the Great Depression clobbered the state and the budget’s perilous dependence on income taxes from a tiny number of high-income Californians struck home.
The state quickly saw a 20 percent decline in its general fund revenues, mostly in fewer taxes from those wealthy few, and amassed $30 billion in what Brown, upon resuming the governorship in 2011, called a “wall of debt.”
Today, the general fund budget is about 50-plus percent larger than it was then, and the state is even more dependent on those high-income Californians, thanks to a “temporary” tax increase on them that Brown proposed, that voters approved and then was extended by voters last year.
Therefore, another recession, even a moderate one, could have an even more disastrous fiscal effect. Brown cites a potential $55 billion revenue loss over three years, which would quickly consume the “rainy day fund” that he created.
That tells us that the wisest course would be to restrain spending in the next budget and squirrel away as much money as possible. And there will be some extra money available to save – or to spend.
“Under our current revenue and spending estimates, and assuming the Legislature makes no additional budget commitments, the state would end the 2018-19 fiscal year with $19.3 billion in total reserves (including $7.5 billion in discretionary reserves),” Taylor told legislators before adding, “Given all of the uncertainties faced by the state budget, we encourage the Legislature to continue its recent practice of building more reserves.”
However, the Legislature is dominated by liberal Democrats who fervently believe that more spending is a godly virtue.
A month after Taylor issued his report and a month before Brown’s budget is unveiled, Assemblyman Phil Ting, a San Francisco Democrat who chairs the Assembly Budget Committee, signaled what could be a sharp conflict with Brown over priorities.
He issued what he called a “blueprint for a responsible budget” that would spend $4.3 billion of the $7.5 billion in “discretionary reserves” that Taylor projected and bank the other $3.2 billion.
Ting, declaring that “not all Californians have benefited from our state’s renewed prosperity,” said Democrats want “smart progressive investments” such as expanding the earned income tax credit to benefit the working poor, Medi-Cal health coverage to undocumented immigrants and early childhood education.
These are the sorts of permanent entitlements that Brown has been leery of approving, because they would be virtually impossible to roll back if the state budget leaks red ink.
Brown wants to claim a legacy of fiscal prudence as he completes his fourth and last term as governor, but that would be tainted if the state once again found itself in a deep hole shortly after he departs.
https://calmatters.org/articles/commentary/commentary-will-california-spend-surplus-save/
Dem Candidates Already Seeking Party Endorsement
California’s primary election is months away, but Peter Allen has been inundated with mailers, texts and phone calls since the fall from Democrats who want to secure his support. Among the latest batch was a holiday card from Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom with a photo of the gubernatorial candidate and his wife, four children, dog and two pet rabbits.
Allen, a 40-year-old school district employee from San Jose, is being aggressively courted because he is one of a few thousand California Democratic Party delegates who will decide whether the state party endorses candidates at its February convention in San Diego — a nod that could come with millions of dollars of support.
But this month, California Democratic Party Chairman Eric Bauman sent a letter to statewide candidates urging them not to seek the state party endorsement in February, prompting allegations that he was trying to silence dissenting voices. Bauman said his letter was simply meant to stave off disunity at the convention.
“I thought, ‘What? This is crazy,’ ” said former state party Controller Hilary Crosby. “What we’re mostly supposed to do is endorse — that’s our biggest responsibility.”
The dispute over endorsements is the latest battle between Bauman and those who backed his rival, Kimberly Ellis, in a bitter leadership contest in the spring that was decided by a handful of votes and resulted in a recount. Party delegates split into establishment and grass-roots factions, aligning themselves with Bauman and Ellis respectively, mirroring the divide among Democrats in deciding between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential primary.
Crosby, who backed Ellis, said that the endorsement campaigns, which draw sign-waving supporters at the party’s conventions, create excitement for delegates who work hard to get elected and spend a considerable amount of money to attend.
Bauman countered that Crosby and those who agree with her are bitter about Ellis’ loss.
“Hilary Crosby has only one agenda and that is to screw with me because her candidate lost and she can’t get over it,” Bauman said. “These people cannot accept the outcome of the election, so anything I do, they question, they critique.”
The dispute comes as an ongoing contentious debate about the future of the California Democratic Party is taking place. The party has long held control of every statewide office in California but has seen a growing divide between its liberal and establishment wings. The tension flared up during the contest between Bauman and Ellis.
Crosby argues that Bauman is trying to aid several candidates from his home base in Los Angeles, including U.S. Senate candidate Kevin de León, who is running against Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a fellow Democrat. De León’s support was crucial to Bauman winning the chairperson’s race in the spring.
Crosby also noted that if the state party does not endorse at its convention, the only other opportunity for it to do so will be at an executive board meeting after the primary. The executive board is a smaller body whose members include a large proportion of party insiders such as donors and labor leaders compared with the overall body of delegates.
Bauman said he is merely following the tradition of his predecessor. The letter he sent to candidates was nearly identical to those former party Chairman John Burton sent to campaigns in 2010 and 2014. But those election cycles were different from the current one, with fewer contested races and other irregularities.
The one point Bauman and Crosby agree upon is that few if any candidates will heed Bauman’s request.
Allen said that despite telling campaigns he doesn’t plan to participate in the endorsement races, most will not stop contacting him. Entreaties continue to fill his inbox, mailbox and voicemail.
“It seems like half these folks don’t get the message,” he said.
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-california-democrats-endorsements-20171231-story.html
Ballot Initiatives Already Fighting for Voter Attention
In 2018, we pretty much know who will be running for which major California offices. The biggest uncertainty is that we don’t know what initiative measures will also make it to the ballot, but it’s likely to be a potpourri of special interest gambits, ideological symbolism and serious governance proposals.
Originally created 105 years ago as a check on corrupt or inattentive legislative bodies – the Southern Pacific Railroad virtually owned the state Legislature at the time – the initiative was used sparingly until suddenly morphing into a powerful political tool and a lucrative industry for professional signature-gatherers, fundraisers and campaign consultants.
Since 1912, according to a compilation by the Secretary of State’s office, just under 2,000 initiatives have been cleared for signature gathering, but until the mid-1970s, with few exceptions, there were just a handful each year.
The number exploded to 33 in 1974; since then it’s never dropped below 16 and has been as high as 109 in 2005.
However, through 2016, just 376 of 1,952 proposed measures qualified for the ballot and voters passed scarcely a third of those – 132.
That seemingly low number doesn’t tell the whole story of how the initiative process has impacted the state.
Much of the state budget, for example, is driven by two successful initiatives, the iconic Proposition 13 property tax limit in 1978 and the Proposition 98 school finance law a decade later.
As secretary of state in 1974, Jerry Brown exploited the Watergate scandal and sponsored a ballot measure to regulate lobbyists and campaign spending as his platform for winning his first term as governor. Since returning to the governorship in 2011, Brown has sponsored two successful initiatives, one increasing taxes and another softening state criminal sentencing laws.
In 1990, Pete Wilson rode a legislative term limit measure into the governorship and four years later championed another, cutting benefits to undocumented immigrants, to win a second term.
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s governorship went into the dumps when he tried, and failed, to win voter approval for an array of governmental reform measures in 2005.
The leading candidate for governor next year, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, elevated his image by sponsoring measures to crack down on gun ownership and legalize marijuana in 2016.
Both Republican candidates for governor are sponsoring 2018 measures, John Cox’s to increase the size of the Legislature and change how it is elected, and Travis Allen’s to repeal California’s recent increase in fuel taxes.
On another level, interest groups often propose ballot measures not so much to get them passed, but to bring pressure on politicians to act, such as a workers’ compensation overhaul threatened by employers in 2004 that Schwarzenegger used to bulldoze reform through the Legislature.
On an even deeper level, initiatives are sometimes used as weapons in private disputes. A major health care union, SEIU-UHW, has frequently filed initiatives, such as one to curb hospital executive salaries, to impact labor negotiations. Currently, the union has proposed several local and state initiatives in the same vein, such as one aimed at dialysis clinics.
The latter is one of 37 potential 2018 initiatives that have been cleared for signature gathering, and several others are in the works, including one to remove Proposition 13’s property tax limits on commercial property.
How many and which ones make it to the November ballot are as uncertain
3rd State Legislator Resigns & Senator Takes Leave
A third California lawmaker resigned in the past month from the state Legislature. Democratic Assemblyman Sebastian Ridley-Thomas announced he will step down this week for health reasons.
Ridley-Thomas, 30, says he’s had five surgeries this year—the most recent last week—for an unspecified health issue. In a statement, the third-term lawmaker says he can’t keep up with the travel, long hours and stress of the job while recovering.
“When I resume public life, I intend to remain active in civic affairs, where my passion lies,” Ridley-Thomas said.
His resignation follows that of two other Democratic Assemblymen, Matt Dababneh and Raul Bocanegra, who stepped down after allegations of sexual misconduct.
That leaves Democrats two votes shy of the two-thirds majority it enjoyed at the start of this session, at least until the state holds special elections for the seats. Gov. Jerry Brown has called a special election for Bocanegra’s seat in June.
Earlier in the year, Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez, also a Southern California Democrat, vacated his seat, after his election to Congress. His replacement, Wendy Carrillo, was sworn-in on Dec. 16, after winning a special election for that district.
http://www.capradio.org/107706
While insisting that no one has suggested he engaged in “inappropriate bodily contact,” California state Sen. Tony Mendoza agreed to temporarily step down with pay Wednesday night amid pressure from lawmakers over sexual harassment allegations against the Artesia Democrat.
“I will take my leave now until the end of the month, unless the investigation concludes sooner, which I hope it will,” Mendoza said.
Mendoza announced his decision to step down until Feb. 1 during the Senate floor session in light of allegations reported in The Bee that he made unwanted advances toward three female subordinates working in his Capitol and district offices over the last decade.
After a nearly four-month recess, the legislators returned to a Capitol steeped in controversy since the “Me Too” movement spread to state politics in October, forcing two Assembly members to resign. Mendoza previously refused to comply with a request in December from Senate Leader Kevin de Leòn to step down on his own as a law firm probes the allegations.
http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article192870849.html#storylink=cpy
California Population Growth Nil
California’s population grew by 301,000 people between July 1, 2016 and July 1, 2017 to total 39.6 million, according to official population estimates released by the Department of Finance. This represents a growth rate of 0.77 percent.
Net migration added 80,000 persons to California. Net migration is the total number of legal and unauthorized immigrants and movers to California from other U.S. states, less the number of Californians who moved to another state or abroad.
California has 58 counties ranging in size from Alpine County, with just over 1,100 residents to Los Angeles County with over 10 million residents. Since the national census on April 1, 2010, the state has gained 2.4 million persons. There have been 3.6 million births, 1.8 million deaths for a natural increase of 1.8 million, and 1.1 million net foreign immigrants.
Inland counties had the highest population growth rates. Urban coastal counties gained population at a slower pace. Smaller counties in more remote areas of California either lost population or grew very little.
Highlights of the July 1, 2017 county population report include:
- The state’s nine largest counties are Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, Santa Clara, Alameda, Sacramento, and Contra Costa. Each has over one million residents. These nine counties represent 70 percent of California’s population.
- Placer, Stanislaus, Merced, San Joaquin, and Riverside counties had the largest percentage increases in population, each growing by 1.28 percent or more. Merced was the new county in the top five of counties with strong population growth. Population change ranged from the highest growth rate of 1.56 percent in Placer to the lowest growth rate of -0.78 percent in Alpine.
- Although natural increase was a significant source of growth in the state, 13 counties experienced natural decrease (more deaths than births during the year) – Alpine, Amador, Calaveras, Inyo, Lake, Mariposa, Nevada, Plumas, Shasta, Sierra, Siskiyou, Trinity, and Tuolumne. Among those counties, Inyo was newly added to the list of the natural decrease counties. El Dorado and Modoc were back in the list of counties with positive natural increase this year.
The birth rate declined to 12.3 births per 1,000 population from 13.8 births per 1,000 population in 2010. Birth rates continued to decline and reached the fourth lowest level since the beginning of our data in 1905.
http://www.dof.ca.gov/Forecasting/Demographics/Estimates/documents/pressrelease_Jul17.pdf
Immigrants Line Up At San Diego Border Station
So many people fleeing persecution in their home countries have asked for help in San Ysidro in recent weeks that federal officials have not been able to process all of them, leaving some stranded and running out of money while they wait in Tijuana.
U.S. border officials are trying to work through the backlog, but they can go only as fast as migrants can be processed and moved from temporary holding cells to immigration detention.
An official with U.S. Customs and Border Protection said the agency remains committed to meeting the care and safety needs of people in custody, and is working actively with partners, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, to resolve the backup.
“There are potentially a number of reasons causing the San Diego area ports of entry to reach capacity; we do not have a definitive reason to offer at this time,” the official added.
Because of the backlog, close to 100 migrants lined up last week in the plaza outside the walkway that leads to PedWest, the pedestrian border crossing that opened earlier this year, Tijuana media outlets reported. Migrants slept in line, afraid of losing their places and having to wait longer for CBP to process them.
Then, Mexican officials told them they couldn’t stay in the plaza.
On Monday of last week, about 25 migrants were jailed overnight for waiting in the plaza outside the port, according to several Eritrean migrants.
In the days since, some found refuge in Tijuana’s migrant shelters, particularly the Casa del Migrante. Each morning, they return to the port to ask if there is room in CBP’s processing area. When they’re turned away, they walk over to a nearby plaza and wait until shelters open for the night.
“We can’t give up. We don’t have option,” said Mesfin Tesfaldet, a 33-year-old man from Eritrea seeking asylum in the U.S., who has been waiting to be processed for at least a week.
He was again shooed out of El Chaparral plaza on Friday along with about a dozen others from Eritrea and Cameroon.
When someone arrives at a port without documents for entry, CBP officials interview that person, take photographs and fingerprints and check law enforcement databases for records. If that person reports being afraid to go back to his or her home country, CBP is required by law to transfer that migrant to other federal agencies for a potential asylum case.
Most of the asylum process happens once the person has been transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement — or ICE — custody, and back-ups in that transfer system can leave CBP with limited space in its temporary holding cells at the border. Large groups of migrants arriving at once can also clog the system.
In the fall of 2016, San Diego’s ports were overwhelmed by thousands of Haitian migrants. In partnership with Mexican officials, CBP established a ticketing system that scheduled appointments for migrants to be processed. As of November, the most recent data available from CBP, arrivals hadn’t reached the levels of the wave of arriving Haitians.
In October 2016, more than 6,000 people came to San Diego’s ports of entry asking to come in despite not having documents permitting entry to the U.S. That number included asylum seekers — CBP does not distinguish between those seeking asylum and other “inadmissibles” in its data collection. (In addition to asylum seekers, inadmissibles are those looking for better economic opportunities or anyone else who has asked to enter the U.S. at a port without the proper documents.)
In November 2017, the number of people deemed inadmissible was 2,824, more than double the low of 1,313 reached in March of this year.
Under current policy, asylum seekers are detained by ICE until they get results from credible fear interviews, which determine the likelihood that they will win their cases in immigration court.
If asylum seekers don’t pass the interviews, they are sent back to their home countries. If they do pass, many stay in detention for the remainder of their cases, which can take a year or more to finish. Some are released from detention on parole or by paying bond while they wait for their turns to tell their stories to immigration judges.
Asylum seekers, like refugees, must prove that they’ve been persecuted or fear persecution because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group.
Tesfaldet said he fled Eritrea to Sudan after he was jailed for his political views. In Sudan, he said, he couldn’t go to a refugee camp because the two governments were working together to send Eritreans back to their home country.
He hid for several years before finding a way to fly to Brazil. From there, he followed a grueling and potentially fatal migrant trail up to Tijuana.
“It was hard. It’s very bad, that jungle. Many people is dying, especially in the river,” Tesfaldet said. “We sacrificed ourselves already. We don’t expect to have a problem when we get here.”
http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/immigration/sd-me-asylum-backlog-20171226-story.html
Trump Administration Seeks to Turn Up Delta Pumps
The Trump administration is taking steps to pump more water through the fragile Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to the southern half of the state despite fresh documentation of the estuary’s declining fish populations.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation announced Friday it is looking to ramp up pumping operations to bring more water long term to the agricultural districts that belong to the federal government’s Central Valley Project. In a written statement, the bureau said it will “evaluate alternatives that maximize water deliveries.”
In its statement, the bureau pointed to state and federal “regulatory actions” that have “significantly reduced the water available for delivery south of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.” Erin Curtis, a bureau spokeswoman, said the agency will spend the next year conducting environmental reviews and “start a dialogue with all of the stakeholders,” including state and federal environmental agencies.
Environmentalists were quick to object to the bureau’s plan, saying it violates a federal law that requires the agency to give equal weight to fish and wildlife when it operates the Central Valley Project. As it is, the CVP and California’s State Water Project “are jeopardizing the continued existence and recovery” of fish species protected by the Endangered Species Act, a group of environmentalists wrote to the Bureau of Reclamation recently.
“I don’t know that they’re going to find a lot of extra water without doing violence,” said Jay Lund, director of UC Davis’ Center for Watershed Sciences.
Lund said the announcement is noteworthy because it’s the Trump administration’s first concrete statement on California water policy. But he said it’s likely that the bureau’s plan will meet resistance from California officials. The State Water Resources Control Board, which is dominated by Gov. Jerry Brown’s appointees, oversees water rights in the Delta and is already holding hearings on state proposals to reduce pumping in order to improve the estuary’s water quality. Experts say powerful state laws give the water board authority to block pumping increases.
“The state has…a great deal of ability to protect what it sees as the environmental interests,” Lund said.
Officials with the state water board weren’t immediately available for comment.
The federal effort is in line with a promise made by Donald Trump as he campaigned for the presidency in Fresno, where he belittled efforts to “protect a certain kind of 3-inch fish” – a reference to the nearly extinct Delta smelt.
Pumping operations in the Delta, the nexus of California’s complicated north-to-south delivery system, are often interrupted to protect endangered salmon and smelt, allowing water to flow out to the ocean.
The bureau’s announcement came just days after a new report showing the Delta smelt population is at new lows. A fall survey of Delta waters by California Department of Fish and Wildlife scientists turned up a total of two smelt, the lowest in the survey’s 50-year history.
Many valley farmers have long argued that the government’s operations in the Delta favor fish over agriculture, and some have had little sympathy for the plight of the smelt. Those farmers celebrated the Trump administration’s announcement.
“GOOD RIDDANCE! ‘PEOPLE OVER FISH’” prominent valley farmer Mark Borba said in a Facebook post.
The smelt survey results were particularly noteworthy because last winter was the wettest on record in Northern California, which should have yielded higher smelt numbers. The last time Northern California experienced an abundance of rain and snow, in 2011, the fall survey turned up 343 smelt.
Now California is facing the prospect of a dry winter, which could create more environmental stress on the Delta. Last month marked the fourth driest December in Sacramento’s recorded history, according to the National Weather Service, although some precipitation is expected as early as Wednesday.
At the same time, Brown’s plan to overhaul the Delta’s plumbing – the Delta tunnels project, formally known as California WaterFix – is in limbo because of funding problems. Brown’s administration says the tunnels, by altering how water flows through the Delta, would allow the pumps to operate more reliably while offering greater protection for the fish.
The federal bureau’s plan to rev up water deliveries stems in part from a water law signed by former President Barack Obama just before leaving office. The law directs pump operators to “maximize water supplies for the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project,” although the law is unclear on how much water is supposed to be sent south and it says environmental protections must be respected.
The bureau’s proposal also is a response to an effort begun in August 2016 by the National Marine Fisheries Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which oversee protections for Delta fish, to re-examine decade-old rules that govern pumping operations. When that effort was begun, the Obama administration was still in office and it was widely assumed that the two agencies would strengthen protections for the fish, possibly at the expense of water deliveries.
Chasing “Raw Water”…Or, Is Flouride a Mind Control Drug?
SAN FRANCISCO — At Rainbow Grocery, a cooperative in this city’s Mission District, one brand of water is so popular that it’s often out of stock. But one recent evening, there was a glittering rack of it: glass orbs containing 2.5 gallons of what is billed as “raw water” — unfiltered, untreated, unsterilized spring water, $36.99 each and $14.99 per refill, bottled and marketed by a small company called Live Water.
“It has a vaguely mild sweetness, a nice smooth mouth feel, nothing that overwhelms the flavor profile,” said Kevin Freeman, a shift manager at the store. “Bottled water’s controversial. We’ve curtailed our water selection. But this is totally outside that whole realm.”
Here on the West Coast and in other pockets around the country, many people are looking to get off the water grid.
Start-ups like Live Water in Oregon and Tourmaline Spring in Maine have emerged in the last few years to deliver untreated water on demand. An Arizona company, Zero Mass Water, which installs systems allowing people to collect water directly from the atmosphere around their homes, began taking orders in November from across the United States. It has raised $24 million in venture capital.
And Liquid Eden, a water store that opened in San Diego three years ago, offers a variety of options, including fluoride-free, chlorine-free and a “mineral electrolyte alkaline” drinking water that goes for $2.50 a gallon.
Trisha Kuhlmey, the owner, said the shop sells about 900 gallons of water a day, and sales have doubled every year as the “water consciousness movement” grows.
What adherents share is a wariness of tap water, particularly the fluoride added to it and the lead pipes that some of it passes through. They contend that the wrong kind of filtration removes beneficial minerals. Even traditional bottled spring water is treated with ultraviolet light or ozone gas and passed through filters to remove algae. That, they say, kills healthful bacteria — “probiotics” in raw-water parlance.
The quest for pure water is hardly new; people have been drinking from natural springs and collecting rainwater from time immemorial. The crusade against adding fluoride to public water began in the 1950s among Americans who saw danger in the protective measures that had been adopted over decades to protect the populace from disease and contamination.
But the off-grid water movement has become more than the fringe phenomenon it once was, with sophisticated marketing, cultural cachet, millions of dollars in funding and influential supporters from Silicon Valley.
One recent morning in the hills of Berkeley, Calif., Cody Friesen, the founder and chief executive of Zero Mass Water, was inspecting water collection panels he had installed for his investor Skip Battle, a longtime tech leader who now sits on the boards of LinkedIn, Netflix and OpenTable.
The system — called Source, which retails for $4,500, including installation — draws moisture from the air (the way rice does in a saltshaker) and filters it, producing about 10 liters of water a day and storing about 60 liters. The goal, Mr. Friesen said, is to make water “that’s ultra high quality and secure, totally disconnected from all infrastructure.”
“Just take a breath of air,” said Mr. Friesen, a professor of materials science at Arizona State University. “Take a deep breath. No matter how wealthy or poor you are, you can take a breath and own that air that you breathe. And yet water — the government brings it to you.”
Mr. Battle’s system runs on power from its own small solar panel. It feeds into a tap set up in his stone garden, where he goes to drink. He said he’s been making all his meals and drinks with it.
Mr. Battle poured himself a glass. “The water from the tap just doesn’t taste quite as refreshing,” he said. “Now is that because I saw it come off the roof, and anything from the roof feels special? Maybe.”
The most prominent proponent of raw water is Doug Evans, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. After his juicing company, Juicero, collapsed in September, he went on a 10-day cleanse, drinking nothing but Live Water. “I haven’t tasted tap water in a long time,” he said.
Before he could order raw water on demand, Mr. Evans went “spring hunting” with friends. This has become more challenging lately: The closest spring around San Francisco has recently been cut off by landslides, so reaching it means crossing private property, which he does under cover of night.
“You have to be agile and tactile, and be available to experiment,” he said. “Literally, you have to carry bottles of water through the dark.”
At Burning Man, the summer festival in the Nevada desert that attracts the digerati and others, Mr. Evans and his R.V. mate brought 50 gallons of spring water they had collected. “I’m extreme about health, I know, but I’m not alone with this,” Mr. Evans said. “There are a lot of people doing this with me. You never know who you’ll run into at the spring.”
The founder of Live Water, Mukhande Singh, started selling spring water from Opal Springs in Culver, Ore., three years ago, but it was a small local operation until this year. Marketing materials show Mr. Singh (né Christopher Sanborn) sitting naked and cross-legged on a hot spring, his long brown hair flowing over his chest.
Pure water can be obtained by using a reverse osmosis filter, the gold standard of home water treatment, but for Mr. Singh, the goal is not pristine water, per se. “You’re going to get 99 percent of the bad stuff out,” he said. “But now you have dead water.”
He said “real water” should expire after a few months. His does. “It stays most fresh within one lunar cycle of delivery,” he said. “If it sits around too long, it’ll turn green. People don’t even realize that because all their water’s dead, so they never see it turn green.”
Mr. Singh believes that public water has been poisoned. “Tap water? You’re drinking toilet water with birth control drugs in them,” he said. “Chloramine, and on top of that they’re putting in fluoride. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but it’s a mind-control drug that has no benefit to our dental health.” (There is no scientific evidence that fluoride is a mind-control drug, but plenty to show that it aids dental health.)
Talk like Mr. Singh’s disturbs Dr. Donald Hensrud, the director of the Healthy Living Program at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. What the raw-water partisans see as dangers, he says, are important safety measures.
Without water treatment, there’s acute and then chronic risks,” Dr. Hensrud said, including E. coli bacteria, viruses, parasites and carcinogenic compounds that can be present in untreated water. “There’s evidence all over the world of this, and the reason we don’t have those conditions is because of our very efficient water treatment.”
Dr. Hensrud said he has noticed more interest in alternative water sources; a patient recently asked questions about a raw water he had been drinking. “There are people, just like with immunizations, that don’t accept the status quo,” Dr. Hensrud said.
The rules for selling bottled water are imposed by states and the Food and Drug Administration, which does not specify how water be treated but sets acceptable amounts of chemicals and bacteria at a low level. State and federal inspectors make unannounced visits to bottling plants to test for harmful contaminants.
Seth Pruzansky, the chief executive of Tourmaline Spring (whose website touts its “sacred living” water), got an exemption from the State of Maine in 2009 to sell his water untreated. “The natural food industry has been in the dark ages when it comes to water,” he said. “Now there is a renaissance.”
The movement against tap water, like the movement against vaccines, has brought together unlikely allies from the far left and the far right. Conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones, founder of the right-wing website Infowars, have long argued that fluoride was added to water to make people more docile. Similar claims can be heard in the largely liberal enclaves where Live Water is seeing interest spike.
“Fluoride? It’s a deathly toxic chemical,” said Vanessa Kuemmerle of Emeryville, Calif., who does landscape design for large tech companies. She said she was an early adopter of raw water, and has noticed many of her clients following suit.
“They’re health-conscious people that understand the bigger picture of what’s going on,” she said. “Everyone’s looking for an edge: nootropics, Bulletproof coffee, better water.”
The health benefits she reported include better skin and the need to drink less water. “My skin’s plumper,” she said. “And I feel like I’m getting better nutrition from the food I eat.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/29/dining/raw-water-unfiltered.html