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IN THIS ISSUE – “An outlier.”
Nathan Click, Newsom campaign spokesperson, when told voter approval is at a record low
- Governor’s Voter Approval Rating At All-Time Low
- Newsom to Host Mega-Fundraiser for Biden
- California Unions Mark Huge Legislative Wins; Get Ready for “Epic” 2024
- Major Reservoir Project Gets Gubernatorial Boost
- Regulators Prepare to Fix “Antiquated” Water Rights System
- Groundwater Drying Up Nationally; State Laws Vary Widely
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, 2023
Governor’s Voter Approval Rating At All-Time Low
Sacramento Bee / UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s approval rating among California voters has sunk to its lowest level on record, with nearly half disapproving of his performance, according to a new poll from the Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies.
The survey, in collaboration with the Los Angeles Times, seems to indicate that while Newsom focuses on raising his national profile and launching various political ventures outside of California, support within the state wanes.
According to the poll, 49% of registered voters disapprove of his performance as governor. His approval rating of 44% in the late October poll marked an 11-point drop from February when it was at 55%.
This poll was the 11th time that Berkeley IGS asked voters to assess Newsom’s governorship. It was the first time that a significantly large portion of those polled disapproved rather than approved of him.
The latest results come as Newsom has assumed a heightened role in the Democratic party nationally. In recent months, Newsom has hosted a fundraiser for President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign and worked the spin room after a Republican presidential debate in August to speak on behalf of Biden. Later this month he is scheduled to debate DeSantis, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.
Newsom also recently returned from an international trip to China and Israel where he met with leaders in both countries, signed off on new partnerships and touted California’s policies on climate and other issues.
Mark DiCamillo, director of the Berkeley IGS poll, wrote in the report that Newsom’s recent efforts to take a more active role in national politics “appear to be related to his recent declines, as voters here hold decidedly mixed views about taking on this role at a time when California is facing increasing budgetary challenges and is dealing with a host of other pressing problems.”
Newsom spokesperson Nathan Click called the survey “an outlier.” Click pointed to a September report from the Public Policy Institute of California that found 56% of likely California voters approved of the way Newsom was handling his job. An October report from Morning Consult also found that 56% of national voters approved of his job performance.
Despite indications of waning support, the Berkeley poll did provide a bright spot for the Newsom administration. Voters appear to be highly receptive to the governor’s Proposition 1, a $6.4-billion mental health bond on the March 2024 ballot.
If approved, it will be used to pay for an estimated 10,000 new treatment beds and amend the state’s existing Mental Health Services Act to direct more money to housing. Although just 15% of likely voters said they had seen or heard anything about the measure before the poll, 60% said they would back it after being informed of the major elements. The poll was conducted online in English and Spanish, Oct. 24-30 among 6,342 California registered voters. The estimated margin of error is +/- 2 points.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article281545353.html#storylink=cpy
Survey:
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/70c6x33k
Newsom to Host Mega-Fundraiser for Biden
Politico
California’s biggest politicos are set to fête President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris at a fundraiser coinciding with next week’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in San Francisco.
The reception, hosted by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, is expected to bring in north of $3 million for the president’s reelection and is being billed internally as a “super event,” according to two people familiar with the planning. They were granted anonymity to discuss internal planning.
Other hosts include Clint and Janet Reilly. Clint Reilly is a commercial real estate, hospitality and media executive who until the mid-1990s worked as a powerful political consultant and later mounted his own failed run for mayor of San Francisco.
Biden’s campaign declined to comment.
The fundraiser comes amid a spate of swing state polls that show Biden trailing Donald Trump in next year’s contest. Biden’s team has largely pushed back against calls in the party to sound the alarm, and the Bay Area gathering is designed as a show of force from a campaign that expects to raise a total $2 billion.
The event is a reunion of sorts for Harris and Newsom, longtime friends who have publicly supported each others’ careers at every turn, albeit with a hint of suspicion and even rivalry.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/07/newsom-biden-harris-san-francisco-california-00125927
California Unions Mark Huge Legislative Wins; Get Ready for “Epic” 2024
Politico’s e-newsletter
Service Employees International Union (SEIU) California Executive Director Tia Orr has much to celebrate after a resounding 2023. Now, she’s preparing for an epic 2024 tax tussle.
“It is the greatest existential threat that we have before us — that we’ve seen in generations,” Orr said.
You probably know that organized labor had a huge year in California — but really, SEIU California had a huge year. The umbrella for some 700,000 unionized workers secured deals that boosted health care and fast food wages while defusing ballot fights. It pushed through a diminished but still significant referendum overhaul. It cheered alum (and Orr’s friend) Laphonza Butler reaching the U.S. Senate.
Yet Orr fears a major blow if voters pass a measure on the 2024 ballot making it harder to raise taxes — a warning echoed by cities, counties, and Democratic officials from the governor on down.
Orr described “the fight of our lives” against the California Business Roundtable measure, which requires voters to approve legislatively-passed taxes and puts a two-thirds vote threshold on more local taxes.
That, Orr said, would render state and local governments unable “to do anything to raise resources to solve some of the greatest crises of our time.”
SEIU already made its first countermove by backing a constitutional amendment to thwart the Business Roundtable by saying initiatives that raise voter thresholds — like the CBRT measure — must pass by the same, higher standard. The union has also backed an extraordinary lawsuit from Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislative leaders asking Secretary of State Shirley Weber to boot the tax measure from the ballot.
Could that multi-pronged offensive compel the Business Roundtable to back down? The organization has said it is moving forward with a measure that it believes voters will broadly support, dropping in another $450,000 soon after the Legislature sent Assembly Constitutional Amendment 13 to the ballot. Back in 2018, the Business Roundtable and soda industry allies pulled a similar measure after wringing a soda tax moratorium from the Legislature.
“We’re going to come and throw everything that we have at this,” Orr told us. She said that could create “pressure for them to get it off the ballot if they choose to do so, but we don’t put all of our eggs in that basket … We’re looking at every single area that we can and trying to stop it with every bit of pressure and power that we have.”
It helps that SEIU’s campaign cash isn’t spread so thin with the fast food referendum off the ballot.
That’s not SEIU’s only 2023 fight that will carry over into 2024. While the union notched a major win when Newsom signed a $25 healthcare wage deal, that came with a pledge to trim the bill’s enormous price tag.
“We have to be cognizant of the budget picture,” Orr said, “and ensure that the state is going to be able to afford the resources that are necessary to make this happen.”
Major Reservoir Project Gets a Gubernatorial Boost
Sacramento Bee
Gov. Gavin Newsom put the Sites Reservoir long-debated water storage project north of Sacramento on the fast track for approval, using his power under new infrastructure laws to accelerate development and reduce regulatory hurdles.
The proposed $4.5 billion Sites Reservoir on ranch lands in Glenn and Colusa counties would be California’s first major reservoir in nearly 50 years. It is designed to capture more water from the Sacramento River during wet years for use when drought hits. “We’re cutting red tape to build more faster,” Newsom said in a written statement. “These are projects that will address our state’s biggest challenges, and the Sites Reservoir is fully representative of that goal — making sure Californians have access to clean drinking water and making sure we’re more resilient against future droughts.”
Supporters of the reservoir have long promoted the project as a way to boost water storage amid increasingly unpredictable climate swings.
It can hold up to 1.5 million acre-feet of water — enough to supply 3 million households annually — for farms and cities across the state. While the project would not impact the river’s currents directly, critics warned it could remove much-needed water for fish habitat and represents a loss for other wildlife and natural landscapes along the river.
To take advantage of billions of dollars in new federal infrastructure funding, the governor pushed his infrastructure package through during the legislature over the summer. Signed by Newsom in July, it is meant to streamline permitting and limit the duration of environmental challenges in court.
Under Senate Bill 149, one of the package’s measures, courts are required to resolve legal challenges to projects under California’s Environmental Quality Act within 270 days.
The measure could prevent months or even years of delay, Newsom has said. Late last week, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and California’s Sites Project Authority released their final environmental reviews.
The environmental impact report and statements may face legal challenges and are crucial for future permitting, including securing a water right from the State Water Resources Control Board.
It is projected to cost $4.4 billion, with money from Proposition 1 — passed by voters in 2014 — covering up to $875 million and $233.7 million in federal funding from last year’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Water agencies slated to benefit from the reservoir will fund the rest, including Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. Project managers have said they hope to begin construction for Sites Reservoir in 2026 and finish in 2032.
Environmental groups have long opposed the new reservoir and objected to a shorter judicial review, saying the project will release unacceptable amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas, into the air in addition to other adverse impacts.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article281506393.html#storylink=cpy
Regulators Prepare to Fix “Antiquated” Water Rights System
AgAlert (CA Farm Bureau Federation)
Below-average precipitation and snowpack during 2020-22 and depleted surface and groundwater supplies pushed California into a drought emergency that brought curtailment orders and calls for modernizing water rights.
At the Water Education Foundation annual water summit last week in Sacramento, Eric Oppenheimer, chief deputy director of the California State Water Resources Control Board, discussed what he described as the state’s “antiquated” water rights system.
He spoke before some 150 water managers, government officials, farmers, environmentalists and others as part of the event where interests come together to collaborate on some of the state’s most challenging water issues.
Of the state’s water rights system, he said it is “kind of a strange system with riparian and pre-1914 and post-1914 (water rights), all operating under slightly different rules and requirements, and it is a challenging system to manage.”
During the last two droughts, Oppenheimer said, “the system was really pushed to the brink where we realized very quickly that the data that we were using…was not up to the task.”
He said data is key to a functioning water rights system. “There are just huge errors in our data, and some of that is a function of we haven’t been collecting data that long in a digital format,” Oppenheimer said.
Water rights discussions also focused on Senate Bill 389, by state Sen. Ben Allen, D-Santa Monica. Signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom this year, it authorizes the state water board to investigate water rights.
Alexandra Biering, California Farm Bureau senior policy advocate, said the Farm Bureau and others moved to a neutral position on the bill after important amendments were made.
“To the extent that we could put a few things in the bill that made it clear that this wasn’t a tool to be used to go after people unless there was a good reason to do so, many people became much more comfortable,” Biering said.
She noted the final bill requires the water board to be transparent by explaining why it needs water right information from diverters.
While she has heard about various proposals to modernize water rights, Biering said, “you can actually do what you need to do if you had better information using the tools that you already have.”
Agriculture and water districts, she said, support the water board’s Updating Water Rights Data for California project to improve collection and management of water rights data.
“We recognize how important high-quality data is on the demand side to be able to manage the system, especially during periods of shortage,” added Chelsea Haines, regulatory relations manager at the Association of California Water Agencies.
California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot said, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure, and as climate variability intensifies, we need to manage more nimbly whether you are an individual water rights user or the state.”
Historically, there has been a lack of trust between regulators and those who are regulated—more specifically, the state and water rights holders, he said.
“A lot of these measurements can feel really scary if you don’t actually trust how the regulators are going to use the data and the information,” he said. “I think, over time, building that trust is going to create a better system.”
As part of a discussion on groundwater, Paul Gosselin, deputy director for sustainable groundwater management at the state Department of Water Resources, reflected on the 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Manage-ment Act, or SGMA. The regulatory framework requires groundwater agencies to balance groundwater aquifers by 2040 and 2042.
“A lot of the state was starting to observe the impact of climate change,” Gosselin said of the impetus for SGMA. “(California) had increased rates of subsidence and upwards of a thousand dry wells. We reached a tipping point that something needed to be done.”
Tina Cannon Leahy, staff counsel at the state water board, said SGMA is unique because it requires interconnected surface waters to be considered.
“If you’re sinking a well next to a river and you’re basically pulling the water out of the river, not only are you impacting public trust resources potentially, but you’re also actually taking the water of senior water right holders,” Leahy said.
To help resolve legal conflicts related to groundwater, local groundwater agencies may pursue groundwater adjudication.
“It gives certainty on the water rights side for the groundwater sustainability agency when they’re going to do demand management or allocations,” Leahy said.
Ann Hayden, vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund’s climate resilient water systems program, talked about trading groundwater credits and the state’s Multibenefit Land Repurposing Program.
“As it relates to trading of groundwater credits, there’s starting to be a little bit more energy and action around that as a management tool,” Hayden said. “Trading can play an important role in providing increased flexibility when there’s scarce water supplies.”
For trading groundwater credits, Hayden suggested the state provide clear guidance that has protections for ecosystems and communities.
In discussing the Colorado River, JB Hamby, chair of the Colorado River Board of California, chronicled the complicated water rights system for the river, which supplies water to 40 million people in seven U.S. states and Mexico.
With the operating criteria for the river expiring in 2026, Hamby said, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation wants consensus on sustainable management of the river for the next 20 years.
“There’s going to be a need for dramatic reduction certainly solving that structural deficit that we’ve been living with for the last 20 years that’s emptied our reservoirs,” Hamby said. “IID (Imperial Irrigation District) is certainly one piece of that puzzle, but it’s a much larger mosaic, and all users are going to have to step up to ensure sustainability moving forward.”
Dam removal was discussed during the summit with a presentation by Brian Johnson, president of the Klamath River Renewal Corporation, which was formed to oversee removal of four dams on the Klamath River, considered the nation’s largest dam removal project.
During the summit, speakers including Anecita Agustinez, tribal policy advisor of the state Department of Water Resources, discussed the human right to water.
“As managers,” Agustinez said, “we will continue to be challenged to ensure that the principles of the human right to safe, clean drinking water is available to all citizens.”
Groundwater Drying Up Nationally; State Laws Vary Widely
NY Times
America’s Stewardship of one of its most precious resources, groundwater, relies on a patchwork of state and local rules so lax and outdated that in many places oversight is all but nonexistent, a New York Times analysis has found.
The majority of states don’t know how many wells they have, the analysis revealed. Many have incomplete records of older wells, including some that pump large volumes of water, and many states don’t register the millions of household wells that dot the country.
Even states that do try to count wells or regulate groundwater use often have other problems: Some carve out exemptions for powerful industries like agriculture, one of the nation’s biggest users of groundwater.
And every state relies to some extent on well owners self-reporting their water use, the Times analysis found. That policy raises the risk of under-reporting or deception by users big and small.
Regulations in some states, including Oklahoma, are guided by a principle of letting users extract groundwater at rates that exceed an aquifer’s ability to recharge. Some hydrologists call it groundwater “mining.”
“I hate to say this, but essentially we don’t care if everything goes dry,” said Christopher Neel, a division chief at the Oklahoma Water Resources Board, although he added that this mindset is starting to change as groundwater becomes scarcer.
Oklahoma does limit pumping in certain areas and is studying how much water remains in its aquifers, information that lawmakers could use to set limits on pumping. Nevertheless, in parts of the state the expansive Ogallala Aquifer, which irrigates farms across the middle of the country, is dozens of feet lower than it was in the 1950s.
For generations, groundwater regulations around the country were routinely based on legal principles or economic forces that prioritized the needs of the moment, like farming and ranching in the West, or urban expansion in Eastern states. At the time, states often had little or no idea how much water aquifers held or how they might interact with lakes and rivers.
There is no shortage of rules. In fact, states have created such a tangle of regulations that it can be difficult to understand how much water is being extracted from aquifers, complicating the efforts to protect them. Yet groundwater is more important than ever as climate change intensifies heat, drought and erratic rainfall, making rivers and streams less reliable as water sources.
The Times asked officials in all 50 states detailed questions about how they track and regulate groundwater use — the drilling of wells, the pumping of water and the punishment of overusers.
It is part of an investigative project revealing a nationwide groundwater crisis that is draining and damaging valuable aquifers.
The depletion threatens not only the tap water that supplies just over one-third of America’s drinking water, but also some of the most productive farmland in the world, which has become increasingly reliant on groundwater.
While farmers face severe risks from groundwater depletion, many warn that too much regulation would harm their livelihoods and the nation’s food supply.
“Farming would not exist as we know it in California without the use of groundwater,” said Chris Scheuring, a water attorney at the California Farm Bureau and a family farmer himself.
Groundwater has helped much of the American West to become “marvelously productive,” he said, despite the region being a dry landscape where farmers can’t rely on rainfall and surface water alone. “And you know, farming is all of us.”
Nationwide, the jumble of regulations that The Times identified has fed an industry of lawyers and consultants who help big users follow the rules, and also, sometimes, to take advantage of them.
“People are shopping around for where they can exploit groundwater,” said Reba Epler, a lawyer who works on water rights cases in Wyoming and New Mexico.
Some players in the industry are global giants, like the consulting firm Arup, which helps data centers sift through layers of rules to make sure they have enough water for cooling their computer systems.
Others operate regionally, for example Water365 in Wisconsin, which works with municipalities in the Great Lakes region. California’s State Water Resources Control Board provides a list of some 85 firms that help clients who have questions about water rights there.
Historically, Congress has left the policing of wells and aquifers to individual states for myriad reasons, including that groundwater has been so poorly understood. As late as the early 1900s, court rulings cited the “secret, occult and concealed” movement of groundwater to argue that administering rules on its use would be an exercise in “hopeless uncertainty.”
Today, in places with some of the weakest oversight, irrigation is on the rise. In the parts of the lower Mississippi River region, where states including Missouri, Arkansas and Louisiana have wide tracts of land with few or no restrictions on pumping groundwater, irrigation for water-intensive crops such as cotton, corn and soybeans soared in recent years as farmers sought higher yields amid worsening drought linked to climate change.
The vast majority of irrigation in this region comes from groundwater.
An official Missouri website, in fact, boasts that the state “has some of the loosest water laws in the country.” The state allows well owners, under most circumstances, to pump as much as they like without oversight.
“We’re just blessed” with water resources, said Andrew Sheeley, a spokesman for the Missouri Department of Natural Resources.
Missouri has two major rivers, and it sits atop the immense Ozark Aquifer, which is more than 1,000 feet deep in places. But more than 85 percent of the state is experiencing drought, and wells that monitor conditions in the Ozark Aquifer show declines and historic lows in a handful of places.
Last month, at a state committee meeting to address the drought, speakers invoked the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and the back-to-back droughts leading up to it, and raised concerns about increased fire threats. “This is probably one of the most important things that we’re going to be dealing with for the people in Missouri for a while,” Gov. Mike Parson told the committee.
Among the states that do set limits on pumping, some make exceptions for prominent industries, emergency use or everyday activities like lawn care. States including Kentucky and Vermont generally exempt agricultural irrigation, one of the top users of groundwater nationwide. In Oregon, firefighting gets a pass, and most of the time so do small lawns and personal gardens.
In Texas, people who own land also own the water under it, which means farmers over the depleting Ogallala Aquifer can claim a tax deduction for irrigation. In effect, the practice rewards high water use in water-stressed areas. (The tax code considers it a “cost depletion” because the water “would be lost to the taxpayer and immediately succeeding generations.”)
Dave Owen, a professor at UC Law San Francisco, said that, “If you know water is a shared resource, and nobody is restraining anybody else from pumping, you have a powerful incentive to get yours while you can.” He described groundwater regulation in the United States as “Swiss cheese.”
In September, following publication of the Times’s earlier findings on aquifer depletion nationwide, Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, a Democrat who leads the Energy and Natural Resource Committee’s Water and Power Subcommittee, held a hearing on what he called the country’s drinking water crisis. “It’s hard to figure out who’s actually in charge of water policy,” he said during the hearing. “We’ve got to get practical data on the scope of the problem.”
States vary widely in the data that they collect and share.
When officials in Maine were asked if the state keeps a list of water wells, Ryan Gordon, a hydrogeologist at the Maine Geological Survey, responded, “The total is unknown, and we don’t even have a good estimate.”
Through the United States Geological Survey, the federal government does collect well-monitoring data around the country. But overall, the lack of coordination among states on data and regulations has contributed to conflicts breaking out across state lines where laws or activities clash at the border.
Mississippi sued its neighbor Tennessee claiming that the more than 160 drinking-water wells supplying Memphis were pumping so much that they were siphoning the flow of groundwater away from Mississippi, in some places causing the earth to sink. The yearslong fight went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, where Mississippi lost.
The court said states sharing a water resource need to respect each other’s interests. “When Tennessee pumps groundwater, it is pumping water located within its own territory,” the 2021 ruling said. “That some of the water was previously located in Mississippi is of no moment.”
“People connect with water at a visceral level in such a way that, if you mess with their water, the guns will come out,” said Gabriel Eckstein, a law professor at Texas A&M University who is studying differences in groundwater regulation from state to state.
One probleme The Times’s research identified is that state water authorities are often small operations relative to their sprawling responsibilities and the growing danger of aquifer damage.
Last year state regulators in Minnesota, who have complained of being short-staffed, found out about unauthorized wells only after dozens of people reported their faucets had run dry.
The reason: The city of Blaine was operating wells without permits and pumping so much that they interfered with household taps a few miles away.
The city had to reimburse residents for costs tied to the episode.
In Wyoming, which has issued tens of thousands of well permits, fewer than two dozen state employees are assigned to handle permitting issues for the ranchers, oil producers, mining companies and irrigators who use them. In the southeastern part of the state, the Ogallala Aquifer is diminishing.
Staff reinforcements can be called in from the State Engineer’s Office and from other agencies if needed, said Jeremy Manley, assistant administrator of the groundwater division in the engineer’s office.
And regulators have the power to fine anyone who abuses groundwater rules. However, he said, officials tend to use a softer approach by first seeking compliance.
That method has led to abuses in places such as Laramie County, where several feedlots have operated unauthorized wells that pump significant volumes of water. “If you want to do it illegally, the state doesn’t have enough people to do anything about it,” said Cody Smith, who owns a well installation service and is a member of a water-use advisory committee for the state engineer’s office.
Most states do have financial penalties in place, the Times analysis found. A well operating outside its permitted use in Colorado could be subject to fines of $500 per day. In Maryland, groundwater abusers can be fined $5,000 a day. But many fines are essentially meaningless for big farms or factories.
Some also divide oversight among several agencies, making it difficult to glean comprehensive information about groundwater use. In Illinois, for example, three separate state agencies oversee different kinds of wells and groundwater uses.
“There are layers and layers of rules and regulations,” said Sharon Megdal, director of the Water Resources Research Center at the University of Arizona. She said only 13 states had statutes setting up formal communication among agencies. Illinois is among them.
There are models for regional cooperation. The Great Lakes Compact, created in 2008, is an agreement between eight states that regulates groundwater and surface water withdrawals across the Great Lakes basin.
It’s an example of governance guided by the water itself, rather than by artificial boundaries on a map, said Elizabeth Cisar, who is director of the environment program at the Joyce Foundation, which provides grants on drinking water in the Great Lakes region. “Hydrology should drive the rules and regulations,” she said, “not state borders.”
A few states have also toughened their oversight.
Last year Arizona expanded bans on new irrigation to more of the state, and this year put new limits on the construction of homes that rely on groundwater in the Phoenix area. In Kansas, where in some areas aquifer levels have dipped 40 feet in a decade, the governor has signed into law measures designed to ensure local regulators take action in parts of the state where groundwater use is highest.
In Minnesota, state lawmakers this year increased fines for violators who pump more water than their permits allow. Still, farmers in Minnesota, who count among some of the biggest water users, are allowed to self-report their use.
A handful of states, including Washington, have tested a system of taking remote readings from wells rather than having users report their own withdrawals. But the program applied to only some wells. For many of the others, as in most states, users take their own readings and report them.
“To some extent, we are relying on the water user to not be committing fraud,” Dr. Gordon, the hydrogeologist in Maine, said.