For Clients & Friends of The Gualco Group, Inc.
IN THIS ISSUE – “We’re not feeling like we have a seat at the table, and we need to earn one and we need to do it quickly.”
Jim Wunderman, CEO of a leading business advocacy group, on the sudden decline in legislative influence
- Dianne Feinstein, Long-Time California Leader, Passes
- Chamber’s “Job Killer Bill List” No Longer Kiss of Death; Businesses Forming New Advocacy Effort
- Republican Legislative Staff “Significantly Underpaid,” Study Finds
- State Superintendent of Public Instruction Enters Governor’s Race
- Drinking Water for All Californians Remains a Work in Progress
- State Water Board Begins Bay-Delta Plan Update – After 6,000 Pages & 30 Years
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 SEPT. 29, 2023
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Long-Time California Leader, Passes
Sacramento Bee
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who made history as a champion for gun control and was California’s longest-serving U.S. senator, died Friday, sources told the Associated Press. She was 90.
The San Francisco Democrat was into thrust into the national spotlight in 1978, when she became the city’s mayor after incumbent George Moscone and Councilman Harvey Milk were assassinated.
Her resolute stewardship of the stunned city vaulted her into the national political conversation, and made her a serious contender for the 1984 vice presidential nomination.
Eight years later, Californians elected her to the U.S. Senate, where she would serve for 31 years, longer than Sen. Hiram Johnson, a Republican who held his seat from 1917 to 1945.
Feinstein broke many gender barriers: First woman to serve as a U.S. senator from California (Sen. Barbara Boxer was sworn in two months later), first woman to chair the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Senate Rules Committee, and first woman to be top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee.
She also became known as a fierce advocate for gun control legislation. Feinstein authored the 1994 assault weapons ban, and after it expired in 2004 continued to push for its revival.
Feinstein also got notice when she chaired the Intelligence Committee from 2009 to 2015. She guided a lengthy review of the Central Intelligence Agency’s controversial enhanced interrogation program, which resulted in findings that led to legislation barring the use of torture.
The final years of her career, when she struggled with failing health, were marked by controversy over her decision to remain in office. Her condition triggered a broader national discussion about age and power, and whether elected officials should be subject to age limits.
Dianne Goldman was born in San Francisco. She attended Stanford University, first as a premedical student and then majoring in political science and history. She graduated in 1955.
Feinstein married Jack Berman, a San Francisco judge, in 1956. Their daughter Katherine would become presiding judge of the San Francisco County Superior Court. She divorced Berman in 1959 and married neurosurgeon Dr. Bertram Feinstein. He died in 1978, and two years later she married investor Richard Blum, who passed away in 2022.
Dianne Feinstein became active in prison issues early in her political career, serving on the California Women’s Board of Terms and Parole in the 1960s and chairing San Francisco’s Advisory Committee for Adult Detention later in the decade.
Her career as an elected official began when she won a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1969. She became the board’s chair, and succeeded Moscone as mayor in 1978 after he and Supervisor Harvey Milk were assassinated at City Hall by former supervisor Dan White.
Feinstein ran for governor in 1990 against then-Sen. Pete Wilson and lost by about 3 percentage points. Two years later, she ran for the Senate seat Wilson vacated, defeating Gray Davis, a Democrat who would win the governorship six years later. Feinstein was elected in 1992, joined the Judiciary Committee, and had an immediate impact.
With a Democrat in the White House and controlling both chambers of Congress, President Bill Clinton in 1993 and 1994 was eager to win approval of strong gun control legislation. The nation had been rocked by several incidents, including the massacre at Stockton’s Cleveland Elementary School in 1989 where a gunman killed five people and wounded 34.
Feinstein would author the assault weapons ban, which stayed in effect for 10 years. Efforts to revive it have been unsuccessful.
Feinstein led the highly secret intelligence panel from 2009 to 2015, when serious questions were being raised about American interrogation techniques during the Iraq War and against suspected terrorists.
The committee’s report on the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” was a 6,700 page explanation–with 38,000 footnotes– of why the agency’s tactics were not useful. Among its findings were that the CIA “provided extensive inaccurate information about the operation of the program and its effectiveness to policymakers and the public.”
Feinstein has been criticized through the years by many liberals, as she’s considered more in line with the party’s establishment.
When Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., mobilized party liberals and challenged President Jimmy Carter in 1980, Feinstein backed Carter. She initially supported Hillary Clinton for president in 2008 over Barack Obama, and once it became clear Obama would be the nominee, Feinstein hosted the two candidates in her Washington living room. The two candidates talked about how to keep the party unified.
In 2020, Feinstein was an early Biden supporter, even though California Senate colleague Kamala Harris was considering a bid. Feinstein explained at the time “I’m a big fan of Sen. Harris, and I work with her. But she’s brand-new here, so it takes a little bit of time to get to know somebody.” Harris became a senator in January 2017.
Since she first sought statewide office, Feinstein was seen as more moderate. Those were years when state voters were electing Wilson and, later, Republican Arnold Schwarzegger.
She won re-election in 1994 with 46.7% in a multi-candidate field and got 55% in 2000. Feinstein has long been considered a consistently loyal Democrat, and in 2021, Americans for Democratic Action, which rates loyalty to liberal causes, gave her a 100% rating.
Still, critics in recent years have wanted more aggressive action on some of their favorite initiatives, such as single-payer health insurance. In 2018, the state Democratic Party denied Feinstein its endorsement, giving a majority of its votes to then-state Sen. Kevin de Leon, known in the state legislature for his aggressive championing of climate change, helping undocumented immigrants, and more.
Feinstein defeated de Leon in the general election with 54%.
In recent years, Feinstein’s ability to do her job has been questioned. After the judiciary committee’s highly contentious, partisan hearing on Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett in 2020, a hearing that Democrats routinely derided as a Republican effort to ram the nomination through the Senate before the election, Feinstein called the sessions “one of the best set of hearings that I’ve participated in.” She thanked Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and gave him a hug.
Many Democrats were outraged at Feinstein’s behavior and questioned whether she was qualified to continue as the committee’s top Democrat. Feinstein would have chaired the committee the following year, but stepped aside.
The drama was less intense in 2022 when Feinstein became next in line to become Senate president pro tempore. The largest ceremonial position traditionally goes to the longest-serving majority party senator.
But it’s got one crucial feature that appeared to be problematic: The job makes the senator third in the line of presidential succession. Feinstein said she was not interested in the job, and it went to Sen. Patty Murray, D-Washington.
Feinstein made a final return to the Senate on May 10, after being absent for three months recovering from shingles and other ailments. She used a wheelchair, said little, was constantly surrounded by her staff and clearly lacked the vigor and obvious savvy of her earlier years. She issued a statement explaining she’d be pursuing a “lighter schedule.”
https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/article279912774.html#storylink=cpy
Chamber’s “Job Killer Bill List” No Longer Kiss of Death; Businesses Forming New Advocacy Effort
CalMatters commentary from Dan Walters
For 26 years, a legislative bill labeled by the California Chamber of Commerce as a “job killer” very likely faced a death sentence.
The chamber, the state’s most influential business organization, inaugurated its annual practice of putting that label on legislation in 1997.
Through 2022 it had targeted 824 measures, most of them sponsored by labor unions, environmental groups and other allies of the Legislature’s dominant Democrats. Typically, the bills raised taxes, imposed new regulations or increased employee benefits.
However, just 157 landed on the desks of five governors, three Democrats and two Republicans, and only 59 were signed. That translates into a 93% kill ratio for the business lobby.
Sponsors of the rejected legislation seethed but never could overcome the dreaded “job killer” epithet, even after Gavin Newsom became the most left-leaning governor in state history. In the first four years of his governorship, just eight of the 94 bills targeted by the chamber reached his desk and he signed five.
All of that, however, is history, and this year the groups that sponsor bills with the “job killer” label seem to be improving their records.
Only 17 bills were on this year’s final list, one of the smallest numbers ever, and while eight of them died in the Legislature – mostly without votes – and two were altered enough to have the label removed, seven were sent to Newsom and he’ll probably sign most of them.
In fact, Newsom has already signed one that he sponsored, which creates an office to monitor gasoline prices and fine refiners if they make profits deemed to be excessive.
The remaining six are all union-sponsored measures that either improve worker benefits or increase job security. Two big labor-management clashes over wages in the fast food and health care sectors were taken off the list after compromises were reached.
The most controversial remaining measure, and the one most in danger of being vetoed, is Senate Bill 799, which would allow striking workers to obtain unemployment insurance benefits.
SB 799 is the California Labor Federation’s top priority, and it and the chamber-led business community have mounted high-octane lobbying campaigns for and against Newsom’s signature.
The bill grew out of this year’s widespread labor union demands for more money and job security, backed up by strikes, including those of movie production writers and actors.
Proponents say it would level the field in labor relations while employers say it would force them to underwrite strikes and put a new burden on the state Unemployment Insurance fund, which already has multibillion-dollar deficit.
Newsom hasn’t said what he will do about SB 799 but has voiced some skepticism, telling a recent Politico forum, “I think one has to be cautious about that before you enter the conversation about expanding its utilization.”
While labor unrest fueled relative successful union efforts this year, another factor was Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher’s segue from a state Assembly seat into the top position in the California Labor Federation.
Fletcher was one of the few legislators to score wins on bills labeled as “job killers” and brought that messianic drive to her new job as the state’s top union official.
Union successes in the Legislature this year have sparked some self-examination in business circles.
Jim Wunderman, CEO of the Bay Area Council, a prominent business group, complained in an interview with Politico that “we’re not feeling like we have a seat at the table, and we need to earn one and we need to do it quickly.”
Wunderman’s group has formed an alliance with the Los Angeles County Business Federation, called the New California Coalition, to ramp up lobbying efforts.
https://calmatters.org/commentary/2023/09/dreaded-job-killer-lost-bite/
Republican Legislative Staff “Significantly Underpaid,” Study Finds
Politico
Republicans are a superminority in California’s deep-blue Legislature — and their second-tier status is reflected in how Capitol staff are paid in the Golden State.
Assembly staff who work for Republicans earn about 18 percent less than their Democratic counterparts in Sacramento, according to an analysis of salary data by Politico.
Democratic lawmakers also have nearly twice the number of staff, on average, than their Republican colleagues: 11 employees compared to 6. From last December through this May, Democrats also spent more per employee than Republicans.
The disparity is structural — Republicans, as the minority party, don’t get the financial benefits like committee chairships that come with Capitol leadership. It reflects their diminished stature in a state where Democrats have long had an ironclad grip on every office and branch of state government.
The GOP isn’t anticipating a return to power in the Capitol anytime soon. But some hope a staff unionization push could ease some of the pain of being constantly stuck on the margins.
“Republican staff are significantly underpaid,” said Andrew Mendoza, legislative director to Assemblymember Tom Lackey, a GOP member whose district includes an expanse of the Mojave Desert. “It is unsustainable and many of us make a lot of personal sacrifices for our jobs.”
The wage gap helped drive a handful of Republican lawmakers to support a bill now on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk that would enable Capitol staff to unionize, something Mendoza supports even as Republican leaders worry it could disrupt the business of the state government.
The median monthly pay for employees of Democratic assemblymembers is about $7,300 compared to $6,020 for Republicans, according to publicly available salary data on 937 employees through the end of May 2023. The data analyzed only included salaried employees working for a specific member’s office or the Democratic or Republican caucuses.
Democratic staff earn a median salary of about $87,620, compared to $72,220 for those working for GOP members. The wage data doesn’t show the party affiliation of the individual employees, only the party for whom they work — and the overall pattern is clear.
“It’s political,” said Minority Leader James Gallagher of the pay disparity. “It’s kind of been the case for a long time now that Republican members in the minority don’t have the same staffing.”
Each assemblymember receives a base allocation of $340,000 per session year, which begins on Dec. 1. They can spend it on staff salaries as well as other on operating expenses such as postage, travel, and office supplies.
But funds to cover staff salaries can also come from committee budgets — which Democrats control as the majority party. Call it the spoils of war.
Republicans don’t hold any committee chairships or leadership appointments that come with extra funding to hire extra staff.
Each assemblymember has control over how much they spend on salaries — so Republicans could in theory raise the pay of staff, argues Nick Miller, a spokesperson for Speaker Robert Rivas.
“If Republicans pay their staffers less, as your findings have determined, you’ll have to ask them why,” Miller said in a written response to findings.
Every office works within a pay range for each employee classification. Those ranges can vary widely depending on position and years of experience. A first-level legislative director, for example, might make between $57,000 and $132,000 annually, while a more senior legislative director could make between $74,000 and $146,000.
The jobs with the greatest inter-party disparities are the legislative assistant/scheduler, who manages a member’s calendar and provides support on bills, and first-level legislative directors, who steer the member’s legislative agenda. In both of these roles, Democrats earn roughly 30 percent more than Republicans with the same title, on average.
The most common job in both parties, field representative, is also one of the lowest-paid. Over 150 Assembly employees hold this title, which can include a variety of responsibilities related to constituents and district affairs. On average, workers in Democratic offices earn over $360 more per month in this role than their Republican-office counterparts, the equivalent to $4,350 in annual earnings.
Unionization is not a new concept in the California Legislature. Staffers and, increasingly, their elected bosses, argue that those in the statehouse ought to be able to bargain for better wages and working conditions in the same way as public and private employees in California.
After several failed attempts in years past, Assembly Bill 1 made it out of the Legislature this year, and now awaits a signature or veto from the governor. If Newsom approves it, the law would go into effect in July 2026.
Republican supporters include Lackey, the Mojave-area representative who employs Mendoza. Because the union will represent all staff, regardless of party, he hopes it’ll bring parity to Republican employees.
“When I worked with the California Highway Patrol, I knew that my pay wasn’t going to be less because of my political affiliation, because I had those protections built into the system,” Lackey said. “I find that this AB 1 would restore that kind of fairness. So I’m all in.”
Most of his Republican colleagues, including the minority leader, aren’t sold. “We don’t need a union,” Gallagher said.
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Enters Governor’s Race
Politico
Tony Thurmond is running for governor, entering an open field early in a bid to become the first state schools superintendent elected California’s chief executive.
The former Democratic assemblymember and local school board member on Tuesday became the third candidate to declare for the 2026 race after Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis and former state Controller Betty Yee. The viability of Thurmond’s campaign is likely to hinge on backing from labor unions, which were pivotal in his ascension from state legislator to statewide official — though it will be at least two years before education labor groups decide whether to support his run for governor.
“SPI Tony Thurmond has been outstanding on defending education,” CFT President Jeff Freitas said in a text message about the race. “But we are focused on the 2024 election and are not taking any positions on 2026 statewide candidates.”
Donations and endorsements from the influential California Teachers Association and the state’s second largest education union, the CFT, powered Thurmond to his first-term victory in 2018 against charter school executive Marshall Tuck. Labor backing can be crucial in governors’ races, and Thurmond’s prospective opponents, including state Senate Pro Tem Toni Atkins and Attorney General Rob Bonta, have enjoyed support from union heavyweights in the past.
“Tony Thurmond has dedicated his life’s work to fighting for working families,” Thurmond campaign consultant Dave Jacobson said of the superintendent’s labor bona fides in a statement. “He’s been on the frontlines of the battle to raise wages and to protect the rights of working people. It’s also why he’s running for Governor, to build a coalition of, by and for the people, to create real, lasting change for workers and to build a better California for all.”
Even so, teachers unions alone are unlikely to be the kingmakers they’ve been in state superintendent races — which are far less expensive than governor’s races and draw in a narrower swath of policy and business interests. Candidates typically need a broad coalition to stay competitive, including from a large cross section of unions. Thurmond did in his last reelection campaign draw support from various trade unions including Service Employees International Union locals and unions representing electrical workers and sprinkler fitters, in addition to the CTA.
He also played a role in contract talks during past school strikes, including the last two teachers union strikes in Oakland. Thurmond traveled to Los Angeles during a strike earlier this year as Mayor Karen Bass hosted negotiations with the Los Angeles Unified School District at City Hall.
In his first campaign video, in which Thurmond is pictured fist-bumping a striking worker on a picket line, he calls for raising the state minimum wage and calls for higher teacher pay.
“We need real change: raising the minimum wage, jobs that pay the bills and wages that ensure nobody who works full time lives in poverty,” Thurmond, a former social worker, said in the video.
The superintendent in an interview last month said he would prioritize higher education issues if he were to run for governor, including funding for public universities and broader health care access for college students.
Handling media and general consulting for the campaign is J&Z Strategies, which has done work for the United Teachers Los Angeles — CTA’s largest affiliate — as well as state legislative campaigns, SEIU and the AFL-CIO. Tracy Pillows of McKinley + Pillows Fundraising is heading up Sacramento fundraising, and longtime Thurmond ally and consultant Annie Eagan is helping raise money elsewhere. MissionWired — which conducts digital fundraising for President Joe Biden — is also on the Thurmond campaign.
Thurmond’s first term in office was fraught with challenges, including some of the nation’s longest stretches of remote instruction during the pandemic. Politico reported that he’d quietly hired a friend out of state and that had allegedly created a toxic workplace contributing to high turnover of senior staff at the California Department of Education. He told the Los Angeles Times that he’s since had “tough conversations with myself” and that “I continue to reflect on those things.”
Despite those problems, Thurmond sailed to reelection in 2022 over Republican challenger Lance Christensen
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/26/labor-tony-thurmond-california-governor-00118166
Drinking Water for All Californians Remains a Work in Progress
LA Times
More than a decade after California became the first state in the nation to declare that access to clean, safe and affordable drinking water was a human right, about a million residents remain connected to failing water systems — many of which may increase their risk of cancer, liver and kidney problems, or other serious health issues. The number of failed water systems has jumped about 25% since 2021, an increase driven partly by the collection of more data. Today, about 400 such systems exist across California, and experts warn that hundreds more are poised to fail because of new and higher testing standards. “It’s a bit of a ticking time bomb,” said Gregory Pierce, director of the Human Right to Water Solutions Lab at UCLA. With new regulations slated to take effect in the next few years, many systems will need to take urgent and proactive steps or “they’ll be out of compliance and be failing.”
The crisis has cast a harsh light on the state’s ability to provide clean and affordable drinking water to all its residents, particularly those in the Central Valley, where widespread natural contaminants afflict communities with substandard infrastructure and where the heavy use of agricultural fertilizers and fumigants, as well as the overpumping of aquifers, has worsened water quality. The State Water Resources Control Board insists that limited resources and a lack of involvement from some local governments have partly contributed to a persistent backlog of cases and assistance requests.
“The amount of work that’s needed across all of these failing systems is much larger than our capacity,” Bryan Potter, senior water resources control engineer with the Division of Drinking Water, said at a public gathering this year. However, some experts, community groups and government auditors say the state can and should be doing more to ensure that all Californians have access to clean, safe water.
The board, also known as the State Water Board, “has funding available to help these failing systems improve the quality of their drinking water. Nonetheless, the board has generally demonstrated a lack of urgency in providing this critical assistance,” Michael S. Tilden, then-acting California state auditor, wrote last year.
“In fact, the time necessary for water systems to complete applications for funding and for the State Water Board to approve and award that funding nearly doubled from 17 months in 2017 to 33 months in 2021,” Tilden wrote.
The delays, critics say, have added hardship to the lives of those who lack clean water, and increased the likelihood they will suffer negative health outcomes.
State water officials disputed the auditor’s criticisms. They said they’ve reduced the number of people affected by failing water systems by 40% between 2019 and 2022 — from 1.6 million people to 934,000.
Concern over the availability of clean drinking water has grown significantly in California as global warming, drought and climate whiplash threaten traditional sources. At the same time, increased understanding of the potentially harmful effects of both natural and manufactured contaminants has raised new health alarms. A Times analysis found that the problem of failed water systems is particularly acute in Kern County, where about 131,500 residents are served by 65 failed systems — the highest number of failing systems in the state. Nearly 80% of those systems have been categorized as failing for three or more years and nearly two-thirds have served contaminated water to customers in the last few years.
Many people connected to failed systems must drive multiple times a month to neighboring towns or cities to purchase potable water at a cost of hundreds of dollars, while paying monthly bills for water they can’t consume.
Some rely on twice-a-month deliveries funded by state grants and ration their water until the next distribution. When that runs out, some families are left with no choice but to drink and cook with contaminated tap water.
Experts, officials and community activists say the proliferation of failing systems is due to multiple factors — aging infrastructure; inadequate financial, managerial and technical capacity within systems; aquifer overpumping; decades of discriminatory policies and chronic disinvestment in affected communities.
They also blame widespread use of agricultural fertilizers and fumigants, and say the health risks are borne disproportionately by rural, low-income and predominantly nonwhite communities. “The issue is, [the human right to water] is a moral obligation more than a legal obligation,” said Mark Gold, director of water scarcity solutions for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
“That’s why you see the results that we’ve had. Unless there’s a legal obligation to clean up the water supply and provide it to your residents, then we end up perpetuating the system that we have, which is environmental racism.”
In California, the State Water Resources Control Board is responsible for enforcing regulations that ensure systems meet federal and state drinking water standards.
As part of its role, the board’s Division of Drinking Water monitors risks that could tip water systems to failure — such as violations of drinking water standards and treatment techniques; extreme water bills and household socioeconomic burden; and the net annual income of system ratepayers.
In effort to address failing systems, Gov. Gavin Newsom established the Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Fund, which provides $130 million annually until June 2030 for struggling water systems.
Similarly, California’s Safe and Affordable Funding for Equity and Resilience Program, administered by the water board, provides tools — including maps and data, funding sources and regulatory powers — to increase access to clean drinking water.
Under the program, the board works with residents, water systems, local governments and other agencies in an effort to achieve the state’s goal of providing safe, clean, affordable and accessible water to all of its residents for drinking, cooking and sanitary needs. Other drinking water funds have also been established.
Yet water system operators and organizations working with them say they are frustrated with the lengthy and complicated application process and how long it can take to complete projects.
Since 2008, the water system in El Adobe, on the outskirts of Bakersfield, has exceeded arsenic standards. Although it has agreed to consolidate with the nearby Lamont Public Utility District — an effort that has received a $25.4-million grant from the water board — the state estimates the project won’t be completed until June 2025.Kyle Wilkerson, president of the El Adobe Property Owners Assn. who runs its water system on a voluntary basis, said he’s frustrated by the length of time it’s taken to get clean water.
“This is just ridiculous. There’s no reason for it to take this long,” he said. “They keep saying two years, three years or six years, and it’s been 12 years since I’ve been out here.”
The Board said the consolidation has taken time partly because Lamont’s water is also contaminated, which has to be remediated first.
The state audit blamed the water board’s “lack of goals and metrics” for likely delays and warned that “the longer the board takes to fund projects, the more expensive those projects become. More importantly, delays increase the likelihood of negative health outcomes for Californians served by the failing water systems.”
Also, in March, the State Water Board adopted new protocols for its Expedited Drinking Water Grant Program to fast-track projects in disadvantaged communities.
Joe Karkoski, deputy director and head of the board’s Division of Financial Assistance, said officials are hoping to expedite funding approvals from a year or more to four to six months. But he acknowledged the goal is ambitious.
- Joaquin Esquivel, chair of the water board, acknowledged the scope and complexity of the challenge but also touted the state’s progress in recent years. Since 2019, more than 200 systems that were failing to meet drinking water standards have been brought into compliance, he said. He attributed the gains partly to $600 million in grant funding that has gone to small and disadvantaged communities.
Yet funding and local roadblocks, such as volunteer-run and under-resourced boards, remain fundamental obstacles, he said. He conceded that it was a “travesty” that one of the largest economies in the world had so many people living without reliable drinking water.
“I take the charge very seriously and with a lot of humility when I hear about the endemic lack of investment and attention,” Esquivel said, noting that he grew up in the eastern Coachella Valley and has seen many of these challenges firsthand.
The pressure of more droughts, floods and other challenges due to climate change is only adding to the urgency. But California continues to have more stringent drinking water standards than any other state in the nation, he said. “At least we have technical capacity, money, and I hope the continued faith that California is actually leading the nation, and doing well by really difficult topics that span multiple generations.”
Athough a system that’s failing does not necessarily mean it’s contaminated, 77% of the state’s failing water systems have at least one contaminant exceeding safe drinking water standards. In Kern County, 83% of failing water systems have exceeded a maximum contaminant level, or MCL.
The most common contaminants in 2022 were arsenic, which is naturally occurring, colorless and odorless; nitrate, which can come from animal manure, fertilizers and sewage leaks; and 1,2,3-Trichloropropane, a carcinogen found in industrial solvents and some pesticides.
According to state data, 22% of primary MCL violations last year were for arsenic, and 22% were for nitrate, the highest of any contaminants. Twenty percent were for 1,2,3-TCP.
Systems are required to routinely test their water sources. If test results exceed an MCL, systems must attempt to address the contamination, such as with treatment techniques or dilution. When it can’t get levels below standards, they must routinely notify customers that their drinking water is contaminated.
Across the state, 81 systems in the last three years have sent 850 notices to customers that their drinking water had high levels of one of the three most common contaminants, according to system-level data obtained by The Times.
Arsenic is typically contained in rocks and sediment, but it can become soluble and enter groundwater supplies when it encounters conditions of low oxygen and high pH levels — both of which are particularly common in older groundwater.
That can be a major problem for the Central Valley, where worsening cycles of drought and dwindling supplies are causing growers to drill deeper than ever and tap into older reserves.
A recent study estimated that nearly 1.5 million people in the Central Valley rely on public water systems that may have moderate or high levels of arsenic. Elevated nitrate levels may affect more than 500,000 people.
Clean water advocates say delays in addressing such problems have potentially grave health impacts.
Joseph Heide, community development manager at the nonprofit Self-Help Enterprises, said that projects to address water quality problems can take five to 10 years to finish, and that officials need to expedite them to three.
“A lot of these small systems operate to failure,” said Darrin Polhemus, deputy director and head of the Division of Drinking Water at the State Water Board. “A well-run, larger system never actually gets there.”
Contamination problems can surprise small water suppliers if they haven’t been doing sufficient maintenance or charging enough to pay for needed upgrades, he said.
It’s why state officials often believe that the best long-term solution is consolidation — connecting smaller failing suppliers to larger utilities or nearby towns. But some water systems are too remote to physically consolidate, and at roughly $1 million a mile, it’s a costly option and can be met with resistance.
To add to the challenges, some counties have not been active partners in remediation efforts. “The governing structures of the district level, then the communities and then the county, they’ve been really kind of hands off,” Polhemus said.
It’s a problem that clean water advocates have noticed as well.
“The state does have some responsibility in not addressing the challenge, but I think the board is trying to do a lot to address the issue,” said Erick Orellana, senior policy advocate for the nonprofit Community Water Center and a member of the Safe and Affordable Funding for Equity and Resilience Program’s advisory group. “It really just needs more local partners to help address the challenges, and certainly Kern County has not stepped up to be a partner yet.”
Amy Rutledge, assistant director of the Kern County Public Health Department, said the county can do only so much because it doesn’t regulate its public water systems.
“We are here to provide the water systems with any support they may need, answer any questions or concerns they may have and to facilitate between the water system and state as best as we can,” she said.
But getting counties and municipalities to be more involved is easier said than done.
State Water Board Begins Bay-Delta Plan Update – After 6,000 Pages & 30 Years
CalMatters
With the Bay-Delta watershed in the throes of an ecological crisis, California’s water regulators Thursday unveiled several controversial options for managing the heart of the state’s water supply.
The long-awaited, nearly 6,000-page draft is part of a fiercely contentious but under-the-radar process to update the Bay-Delta Water Quality Control Plan, with high stakes for both wildlife and water providers serving cities and millions of acres of farms.
State water officials have said that existing requirements for water quality and flow through the critical but imperiled San Francisco Bay and Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta watershed have “failed to protect fish and wildlife” and must be updated “to halt and reverse the ecosystem collapse.”
Several of the strategies the report evaluates would set minimum amounts of water to remain in rivers and streams, which could ultimately require water suppliers and other water users to cut back on how much they divert for people and farms.
Another approach assessed is a controversial pact that Gov. Gavin Newsom reached last March with major water suppliers, who volunteered to surrender some water and help restore habitat in the watershed.
Next comes a gauntlet of workshops, hearings and public comment meant to help shape regulations that the State Water Resources Control Board likely won’t even consider adopting for at least another year. Once it does, it could take years to put the updated Bay-Delta plan into action.
For the vast majority of the watershed, it’s already been 30 years since water officials made meaningful changes — a delay that has infuriated environmentalists, Native tribes, Delta-area residents and the fishing industry.
The draft report weighs several approaches to update standards for most of the Bay-Delta watershed, including the Sacramento River and its tributaries; the Mokelumne, Cosumnes and Calaveras rivers; and the San Francisco Bay-Delta itself.
Spurred by inadequate flows, the loss of habitat and degraded water quality, native fishes are experiencing “prolonged and precipitous declines” in the watershed, state water regulators reported in 2018. Among the threatened and endangered: the winter-run chinook salmon and the tiny Delta smelt, a cucumber-scented indicator of the ecosystem’s health.
Though the State water board said it remains agnostic for now about which of the strategies it will ultimately approve, the document devotes a lot of ink to discussing one that’s sort of a Goldilocks proposal when it comes to water flow — not the highest or the lowest, but in the middle.
It calls for minimum flows of at least 55% of the amount of water that the rivers would have carried were they not dammed or diverted, resulting in an average of about 1.5 million acre-feet more water flowing out through the Delta, state water official Diane Riddle said at a media briefing.
This water, which then couldn’t be exported south to farms and cities, would be enough to supply about 4.5 million households.
That’s more than the flows that would result from the “voluntary agreements” deal reached by the Newsom administration and water suppliers, which results in about 500,000 to 700,000 additional acre-feet flowing through the Delta, according to Riddle — less in extremely wet or dry years.
A coalition of water suppliers — including the State Water Contractors, an association of 27 public water agencies — responded to the report with their strong support for these voluntary agreements.
“These innovative agreements … will improve environmental conditions more quickly and holistically than traditional regulatory requirements, while providing more certainty to communities, farms, and businesses,” the coalition said in a letter to the board.
But environmentalists say the voluntary agreements do not provide enough water to protect fish and wildlife. And tribes and environmental justice organizations said they were the result of backroom negotiations that excluded people of color, a complaint that the U.S. EPA is now investigating.
Malissa Tayaba, vice chair of the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians, said they were not given sufficient notice of the report’s release. “If they cannot get the process right, it creates a great deal of distrust for working through the substance, or lack of substance, within the Bay-Delta Plan itself for tribal concerns,” she said.
Despite their dueling visions, both water suppliers and environmental organizations said it’s high time for the draft to be completed.
The Delta has long been the epicenter of some of the most turbulent water wars in California, and the Bay-Delta Plan touches many of them.
Here’s more to know:
Stretching from about Fresno to beyond the Oregon border, the vast Bay-Delta watershed drains water from about 40% of California. It’s formed by the Sacramento and San Joaquin river systems, which join at the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and flow out to the Pacific through San Francisco Bay.
This critical water hub is where state and federal pumps move water from Northern California reservoirs south to help supply more than two-thirds of Californians with drinking water and irrigate millions of acres of agriculture.
It’s home to more than 750 species of animals and plants, and is vital to the fishing industry, supporting about 80% of the state’s commercial salmon fishery. This year, for only the third time ever, California saw its commercial and recreational salmon season cancelled.
“Without healthy Bay-Delta salmon runs, we don’t have a healthy California salmon fishing industry,” said Barry Nelson, a policy representative for the Golden State Salmon Association.
The culprits behind fish decline are many, including habitat loss, invasive species, and Delta water export pumps so powerful they can make rivers run backward. But a “significant contributing factor”, state water board staff reported in 2018, is the loss of water diverted for farms and cities, which reduces freshwater flows needed to keep water quality, temperatures and other conditions hospitable to fish.
“The overall health of the estuary for native species is in trouble,” water board staff wrote five years ago, “and expeditious action is needed on the watershed level to address the crisis.”
“Expeditious” is the last word most would use to describe the process of updating water quality and flow standards for the Bay-Delta.
In 2018 the state water board adopted new standards for saltwater encroaching on the southern Delta and set flow requirements for the Lower San Joaquin, Stanislaus, Tuolumne and Merced Rivers. The update has not yet been implemented, and is already the subject of a dozen lawsuits.
But for the rest of the watershed, aside from minor modifications in 2006, it’s been almost 30 years since the plan was updated.
“I will acknowledge this has taken us longer to get to this point than we had all hoped,” said Eric Oppenheimer, chief deputy director of the state water board. While it was hard to ascribe a specific reason, he said, the droughts diverted personnel and attention.
Environmental groups blame the delay on negotiations with major water users to develop those voluntary agreements. The agreements have been in the works since 2016 and have not yet been finalized. Riddle said the state board expects additional documents needed to flesh out the deal to be submitted by the end of the year.
Even the federal government has urged state officials to move faster.
“EPA is concerned about the ongoing delays in completing revisions to the Sacramento and Delta portion” of the water quality control plan, Tomás Torres, water division director for EPA Region 9, wrote to the State Water Board in January.
Torres encouraged the state to “make decisions expeditiously now” and amend the plan later “should more specific voluntary agreements be developed in the future.”
Signed by powerful suppliers like the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and agricultural providers like Westlands Water District, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and state agencies, the voluntary agreements take aim at the uncertainty of the regulatory process and the lawsuits that result.
“There’s been fights and lawsuits about how much flow should go to outflow, how much flow should go to habitat, how much flow should go to cities and agriculture,” said Alison Febbo, general manager for Westlands Water District, a major Central Valley irrigation supplier. “And the (voluntary agreements) are trying to say, ‘Let’s stop that fighting. Let’s all work together and collaborate.’”
Still, she said, there’s much to be hashed out. “If anybody leaves the table, it kind of falls apart,” she said. “I can’t say that Westlands is 100% completely supportive no matter what. We think it’s a good path. We think it’s the right way to go. But we have to see how it all turns out.”
Environmental and fishing organizations said that habitat cannot be traded for water, and that the trade contradicts the state’s own science.
“Habitat restoration is definitely necessary for some of these fish, but there is no solution to what ails the San Francisco Bay and its watershed that does not involve significant increases in flow,” Rosenfield said. “Flow controls all of the habitat conditions.”
State Water Board scientists agreed in a 2017 report, saying that “recent Delta flows are insufficient to support native Delta fishes for today’s habitats…Flow and physical habitat interact in many ways, but they are not interchangeable.”
In 2022, the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians’, Winnemem Wintu Tribe, and several environmental organizations including Stockton-based Restore the Delta filed a federal complaint with the EPA, saying that the state has allowed “waterways to descend into ecological crisis, with the resulting environmental burdens falling most heavily on Native tribes and other communities of color.”
Among their concerns: the state’s lengthy delay in updating the water quality standards, which the complaint says has worsened harmful algal blooms, low flows, and contamination — interfering with cultural, subsistence and recreational uses of the waterways for tribes and communities of color in the watershed.
“Instead, the health risks of (harmful algal blooms) layer on top of outsized environmental burdens already borne by these communities,” the complaint says.
The coalition asked the EPA to investigate and to develop its own water quality standards for the Bay-Delta. The board has said that it will cooperate with the investigation, and is weighing adding tribal and subsistence fishing beneficial uses to the Bay-Delta Plan.