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IN THIS ISSUE – “He needed somebody in that spot who was of Sacramento…it was a tough two years.”

Newsom’s Chief of Staff departs

  • Assembly Leader Race Begins, Governor Shifts Staff…It’s Election Day +2
  • Independent Expenditure Groups Set State Election Spending Record
  • Tech Layoffs…Car Sales Drop…Californians See Tough Times Ahead
  • Desalination Gets a Fresh Look as Water Source
  • Only in California: Don’t Lick Sonoran Desert Toads, Park Service Warns

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 NOV. 10, 2022

(Capitol News & Notes publishes a day early in observance of Veteran’s Day tomorrow.)

 

Assembly Leader Race Begins, Governor Shifts Staff…It’s Election Day +2

Politico & CalMatters

Though several tight state legislative races still hang in the balance, the new Assembly Democratic Caucus is set to gather for the first time today in Sacramento. It’s an opportunity for lawmakers to orient themselves ahead of the start of the legislative session in December — and to potentially choose the next speaker of the Assembly, one of the most powerful positions in the Capitol.

The meeting follows months of jockeying and an intense behind-the-scenes campaign between Speaker Anthony Rendon of Lakewood, who has held the job for the past six years, and Assemblymember Robert Rivas of Salinas, who led an unsuccessful revolt against him in May. More than a dozen newly elected members — their seats not yet certified — could swing the balance with the first major vote of their Capitol careers.

Backed by the controversial donor network Govern For California, Rivas has aggressively courted the new lawmakers’ support through a political action committee operating outside the traditional Democratic Party structure, a bold step that has fueled tensions in the fractured caucus.

In other Sacramento shifts: Gov. Gavin Newsom will begin his second gubernatorial term with a new team of top advisers, marking the latest big shift in an administration that’s experienced considerable turnoverover the past few years, the Los Angeles Times reports.

DeBoo joined Newsom’s administration in January 2021 as momentum built around an effort to recall the governor. He told the Times he stepped into the position to “to help politically and to help restabilize the office.”

“He needed somebody in that spot that was of Sacramento to a certain degree and it was a tough two years,” DeBoo said.

 

Independent Expenditure Groups Set Election Spending Record

CalMatters

Independent expenditure committees — political spending groups legally required to be unaffiliated with the candidates they’re trying to support — have spent nearly $40 million since Sept. 1 trying to influence competitive legislative races across California.

That’s 25% more than what independent expenditure committees, or IEs, spent on Assembly and state Senate general election races in 2020, nearly twice as much as was spent in 2018.

While the IE spending is a relatively small share of all the political cash now sloshing around California, the mailers and ads financed by these committees — concentrated into just a handful of competitive races in the final weeks of the campaign — can play an outsized role in shaping key voters’ perceptions.

Because these committees are often given innocuous names that do not mention their funders, the average voter may not know who exactly is behind a particular ad. As a result, IEs often specialize in negative campaigning — withering and occasionally fact-bending critiques of targeted candidates. When the mudslinging is coming from an independent group, it’s less likely to tarnish the image of the favored politician, whose own campaign can focus on positive messaging.

And unlike donations made directly to a candidate, spending by these IE committees is not subject to campaign contribution limits. That allows some of the state’s biggest economic interests to pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into a single legislative race, whereas contributions to campaign-run committees are capped at $4,900 per election. Often, IEs will spend more boosting a candidate than their own campaign.

In the 10 legislative races with the most IE money this year, spending has reached nearly $30 million since June. Contributions made directly to the 20 candidates in those races is less than $19 million. Most of these races pit one Democrat against another for a spot in the Legislature, where Democrats hold two-thirds super-majorities that enable them to pass tax increases and take other actions without any Republican votes.

This outside spending is a perennial feature of California elections, but this year the stakes may be especially high for industries, labor groups and others with an interest in the legislation that comes out of Sacramento.

Thanks to a wave of incumbents hitting their term limits or announcing early retirements earlier this year, California voters are being asked to fill 31 open seats in the Assembly and the Senate, of the 100 spots in the Legislature up for grabs on Tuesday. The first orders of business for this new class of legislators are likely to include picking the next Assembly speaker and voting on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposal to tax the “windfall profits” of oil and gas producers.

“Every cycle we always say it’s an unprecedented level of spending,” said Doug Morrow, a former Democratic Assembly staffer who publishes a daily tracker of independent expenditure. “I think we are going to meet that without a doubt.”

No surprise, the biggest sources of outside spending in legislative races so far are oil and gas companies and electric utilities. Together, those groups have spent more than $7.6 million, roughly one-fifth of the total. Most of that spending has been unleashed since Newsom announced his oil tax plan; the oil industry’s flagship IE committee dropped nearly $5 million into seven legislative races on Oct. 10 alone.

Other big spenders include:

  • DaVita and Fresenius, the dialysis companies combating Proposition 29, a third union-backed proposition to regulate their clinics, and who havefended off similar attempts in the Legislature. Davita has spent $2.3 million directly, and since July the two companies together have contributed another $1.4 million to separate committees that have spent $5.4 million in state legislative races.
  • The Service Employees International Union, one of the largest union umbrella groups in the state, has contributed $2.8 million to independent expenditure groups through its local chapters and its statewide council. The largest of those, Nurses and Educators California, which also received a small fraction of its funding from unionized school workers, has spent more than $1.5 million on legislative races.
  • Realtors, both through the state association and individually, have channeled more than $2.6 million through nine IE committees.
  • A committee supporting Robert Rivas’bid to become the next Assembly speaker has sprinkled more than $550,000 into 15 open Assembly seats. That doesn’t put the PAC in the top 20 list of big independent spenders this year, but it is drawing a lot of attention. With all the committee’s funding from sitting lawmakers who might otherwise route those funds through the state Democratic Party, it’s seen by many as a direct financial provocation to Speaker Anthony Rendon.

That lack of transparency has its benefits for funders, said Dan Schnur, a political analyst who teaches at USC and who used to lead the California Fair Political Practices Commission, the state’s campaign finance regulator.

“The average voter isn’t going to spend a great deal of time digging into the identity of these large-scale funders, and so an innocent sounding name of an independent committee is a very effective shield,” he said.

But if voters don’t know who funds the IEs, the candidates do. “The candidate is going to care a lot more about who funds these efforts than the average voter. So they’re going to know and they’re going to remember.”

From a candidate’s perspective, a flood of friendly spending from outside groups has its obvious benefits. But it can also come with its costs.

In the state’s most expensive legislative race, Democrat Angelique Ashby has been the beneficiary of nearly $2 million in spending by oil and gas companies and utilities. That includes spending by the oil and gas industry’s flagship independent expenditure committee, the Coalition To Restore California’s Middle Class, to support Ashby and oppose Dave Jones, her  Democratic opponent for the state Senate seat representing Sacramento. But it also includes energy industry money routed through other committees.

That gusher of money has helped elevate Ashby while bashing Jones. But the IE spending has also opened Ashby up to the criticism — made regularly by Jones and his allies, including in multiple mailers funded by a labor-backed IE committee — that she is the candidate of “Big Oil.”

Also supporting Ashby, with more than $1.1 million in spending, is another IE — Fighting for Our Future Committee, funded by the Realtors, the California Building Industry Association and California Apartment Association — that has sent mailers calling Jones a career politician who wants to “take away Medicare” because of his support of single-payer health care while state insurance commissioner.

MORE:

https://calmatters.org/politics/election-2022/2022/11/california-campaign-finance-industry-legislature/

 

Tech Layoffs…Car Sales Drop…Californians See Tough Times Ahead

CalMatters

More than 11,000 employees of Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, are losing their jobs after CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Wednesday the Silicon Valley-based tech giant is slashing its workforce by 13% — the latest round of mass layoffs to rattle the California economy. Salesforce, San Francisco’s largest private employer, laid off hundreds of salespeople on Monday.

Meanwhile, new car and truck sales in California fell by more than 16% in the first three quarters of the year compared to the same period in 2021, the California New Car Dealers Association reported Tuesday. And California’s persistent drought is withering tomatoes, pushing inflation-impacted grocery prices even higher.

 

Given all this, it’s perhaps unsurprising that a whopping 69% of Californians predict bad times for the state economy in the next year — a key finding of a Public Policy Institute of California poll released late Wednesday night. Other takeaways:

  • 67% of Californianssay children growing up in the Golden State today will be worse off than their parents, and 71% say the gap between rich and poor is growing.
  • 57%say they or a household member drove less due to the cost of gas, while 1 in 3 cut back on meals or food and 1 in 5 put off seeing the doctor.
  • 43% worry every day or almost every dayabout the cost of gas and other transportation, and 28% fret about the cost of housing.

When it comes to policy solutions, 73% of Californians say the government should ease permit requirements and build more housing so lower- and middle-income people can buy a home. And 61% say they support increasing government funding so more people can afford electric or hybrid vehicles — but apparently not through the mechanism of Prop. 30.

 

Desalination Gets a Fresh Look as Water Source

LA Times

For decades, environmentalists have decried ocean desalination as an ecological disaster, while cost-savvy water managers have thumbed their noses at desal’s lofty price tag.

But as the American Southwest barrels into a new era of extreme heat, drought and aridification, officials and conservationists are giving new consideration to the process of converting saltwater into drinking water, and the role it may play in California’s future.

Although desalination requires significant energy, California’s current extended drought has revived interest in the technology. Experts are already experimenting with new concepts such as mobile desalination units and floating buoys, and at least four major plants will soon be operational along the state’s coastline.

David Feldman, director of Water UCI at UC Irvine, said desalination could eventually provide “somewhere between 10% and half” of California’s potable water — with one caveat.

“Before we can even estimate what percentage of California’s potable water would come from desal, we’re going to have to consider whether or not water agencies feel confident that they have exhausted other less expensive and less energy-intensive options,” said Feldman, who is also a professor of urban planning and public policy at the university.

“In certain communities, desal may be your best option. On the other hand, it may be your second or third best option in terms of affordability, in terms of overall cost, in terms of public acceptability with respect to aesthetics and land use,” he said.

Indeed, desalination is not without downsides. In addition to high energy costs, the process can harm marine life, which can get trapped in pump systems that draw ocean water.

And then there is the brine — the salty, sludgy byproduct of desalination that typically gets released back into the ocean at the end of the process. A global survey of desalination in 2019 found that plants produce about 5 billion cubic feet of salty brine every day — 50% more than previous estimates.

High concentrations of brine can reduce oxygen and increase toxicity in marine environments. That’s caused some to worry about what what decades — or even centuries — of desalination could do to the ocean.

“Ocean water is going to be collected daily and dumped daily. What does that look like for future generations?” said Lydia Ponce, an activist with the Society of Native Nations. Ponce was a vocal opponent of a proposed desalination plant near Doheny State Beach in Orange County, which the California Coastal Commission recently approved.

 

Experts are working to solve many of desalination’s challenges, however. The Doheny plant, for example, will draw seawater through slanted intake wells that run beneath the sea floor. Since they avoid contact with open water, officials say the wells will nearly eliminate the chances of marine life being sucked into intake pipes.

The facility also plans to commingle its brine with South Coast Water District wastewater pipes, diluting it before expelling about two miles out to sea. Though the harm from brine is not completely eliminated, the Coastal Commission said the method was environmentally preferred, and officials say it might serve as a model for future operations.

But desalination in California remains a lightning rod for controversy, and the Doheny plant raised significant opposition. Among the project’s opponents was Conner Everts, co-chair of the Desal Response Group, who said he thinks desalination has no place in California’s water supply.

“The ocean is more fragile than it used to be with climate change,” Everts said “It’s not the ‘endless reservoir’ as they call it — it’s a fragile ocean and the plants are industrializing but not resolving our problems. They’re creating another set of problems.”

Everts said it makes no sense for water agencies to be considering desalination when Gov. Gavin Newsom has yet to mandate the kind of sweeping statewide water restrictions his predecessor, Jerry Brown, did during the previous drought.

“All of those things are immediate, and that’s what we should be investing in — not these kind of pipeline fantasies of these water supply boondoggles,” he said.

Beyond the environmental impacts, economics have also discouraged widespread use of desalination.

Not only does it take significant capital investment, but desalination also requires an enormous amount of energy to push saltwater through filtering membranes at a very high velocity, said David Mitchell, a water economist with the group M.Cubed and an adjunct fellow with the Public Policy Institute of California.

“That’s sort of the Achilles’ heel of desal — its operating cost is very high because of its energy requirement,” Mitchell said.

 

But the price gap between desalination and other supplies is shrinking — particularly because the cost of traditional sources has been rising due to tightening supplies, increased treatment requirements, high pumping costs and other factors, he said.

The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, a wholesaler for 26 regional agencies, sells treated water at roughly $1,200 per acre-foot, Mitchell said. (An acre-foot is approximately 326,000 gallons.) The median cost of producing desalinated water is “in the neighborhood of $2,000 an acre-foot,” he said.

Though the higher cost might be worthwhile during dry periods, it becomes less so in wet years when other supplies are more ample, however.

“If you’re looking at a large desal investment and then you’re going to operate it, say, one out of three years, that makes it a very expensive proposition,” Mitchell said. “It’s sort of like buying insurance — you’re buying a pretty expensive insurance policy.”

Still, Mitchell said he thinks desalination has a place in California’s water portfolio,and noted that it has already proved viable in Australia and Israel, which gets nearly 90% of its drinking water from a handful of desalination plants near the Mediterranean and Red seas.

“Some communities could do the math and figure out desal makes sense financially for them,” he said. “Whether that translates into a desal facility is a whole other question as to whether or not they can obtain the necessary regulatory approvals, permits and community buy-in.”

Some experts are already exploring new ways to overcome those hurdles. Santa Barbara-based SeaWell and its subsidiary, Ocean Portal Water Co., are working with Vandenberg Space Force Base to test the concept of floating desalination buoys. When launched, a single ocean buoy will be able to produce just short of a million gallons of drinking water a day, according to Ocean Portal President Peter Stricker.

 

While coastal plants require energy to pull ocean water into their facilities for treatment, the large, lighthouse-shaped buoys will have the advantage of producing desalinated water directly in the ocean, so only the finished product would need to be piped to shore, Stricker said. They will also use one-millimeter wire filtration screens and low-velocity intake to prevent “sucking in excessive amounts of marine life,” and the brine will be discharged high in the water column so that it mixes with the current as it sinks.

Some environmental groups in the area weren’t yet sold on the concept.

“Even when you use a one-millimeter [screen], which is the smallest, you still take in plankton,” said Charming Evelyn, chair of the water committee for the Sierra Club’s Angeles Chapter. “So you are still destroying marine life and larvae. And in terms of the brine, brine is just toxic, so honestly, I don’t care how you dispose of it. Science has shown that brine is an issue.”

Stricker said boosting coastal supplies could have the added benefit of freeing up more deliveries for areas farther inland, which are often too far and at too high an elevation to feasibly receive desalinated ocean water.

Although interior parts of California are too distant from the coast to make use of desalinated seawater, the technology is being used there to treat contaminated water from rivers and aquifers.

Yoram Cohen, a desalination expert and professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at UCLA, is running a pilot program of small-scale, remotely run desalination units in the Salinas Valley, where groundwater is often contaminated with salt and other chemicals.

“You use the same technology of desalination, which is basically reverse-osmosis membranes, and that takes out the salt but it also takes out the nitrates [and] other contaminants that may be in the water as well, such as pesticides,” Cohen said. “You purify and you desalt at the same time.”

Cohen explained that inland salinity can be the result of agricultural runoff or simply just topography: As snowmelt, rainwater and other water sources evaporate, they leave behind salt, especially in valley areas without good drainage.

 

The desalination units fit in small sheds and can treat up to 4,000 gallons a day — enough for a very small rural community that may not have the funds or resources needed to connect to a larger municipal system. The process does create some residual contaminants, but it’s less than that of desalted seawater and can be disposed of in septic tanks. Cohen said it’s a promising solution not only for remote areas, but pretty much anywhere in the state.

“What we’re looking for is a technology to increase our water portfolio — whether it’s for removing salt, whether it’s for taking water that we can just purify and then use,” he said.

California also hosts about 20 brackish water plants which can desalinate slightly salty water from rivers, aqueducts and other sources. The city of Antioch, for example, broke ground on a brackish water desalination plant last year. Officials say the facility will be helpful at times when San Joaquin River supplies become more saline due to climate change, sea level rise and projects in the river delta. When completed, the plant will provide about 30% of Antioch’s annual supply, according to the city.

That speaks to the other main driver of desalination in California: need. The state is facing its fourth year of drought, and climate change is upending patterns of rainfall and snowpack that once provided reliable water for the state. Officials slashed State Water Project allocations for California water agencies to just 5% this year, while federal officials have said painful cuts are imminent from the Colorado River, long a linchpin of the entire region’s supply.

Feldman, of UC Irvine, agreed, saying it’s important for the state to maintain a diversified water portfolio that includes reuse, rainwater harvesting and conservation so as not to put all of its “eggs in one basket.”

“Rather than try to identify a panacea, we should ask ourselves a series of questions,” he said. “What makes most sense technologically, economically, risk-wise and public acceptability-wise for our needs?”

 

 

 

 

 

Only in California: Don’t Lick Sonoran Desert Toads, Park Service Warns

SF Chronicle

The National Park Service has warned Californians to not lick the Sonoran Desert toad, which lives in parts of Imperial and Riverside Counties, and is known for secreting a psychedelic chemical but has toxins that could make people severely sick, The San Francisco Chronicle reports.