For Clients & Friends of The Gualco Group, Inc.
IN THIS ISSUE – “Democracy Done in Public is Going to Be Messy”
RETAIL POLITICS
- Drawing the Lines: New Legislative Map Starts Political Musical Chairs
- A Looong Ballot: Initiatives & Massive Election Spending Soar for 2022
- Trial Lawyers v. Business in Tort Wars Latest Ballot Battle
- Another “Monumental Ballot Fight” – $18 Minimum Wage
WATER & POWER
- Californians Saving More Water
- Farmers & Oil – Water Wizards or Wasters?
- Air Board OKs Nation’s Toughest Truck & Yard Equipment Emissions Rules
THE GRINCH
- Fixing Cargo Ship Traffic Jam by Christmas “Is Not Possible”
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 service.
READ ALL ABOUT IT!
FOR THE WEEK ENDING DEC. 10, 2021
Drawing the Lines: New Legislative Map Starts Political Musical Chairs
CalMatters
California’s independent redistricting commission is taking a lot of heat for the congressional and legislative maps it’s drawing to beat a Dec. 27 deadline.
But it’s not just the at-times confusing product that’s under the microscope. It’s also the commission’s messy process — with accusations of secrecy, complaints about public input and now questions about whether taxpayers are getting their money’s worth.
The state is funding the commission with $20.3 million — about twice as much as the previous independent commission received.
Steven Maviglio — a Sacramento-based Democratic consultant who has been one of the commission’s most outspoken critics and opposed its creation to begin with — said it has been plagued with “cost overrun after overrun.”
“Everyone understands that redistricting is an ugly process no matter who does it, but what I’m seeing here is amateur sausage-making,” he told CalMatters.
Jane Andersen, chairperson of the commission this week, said that the panel has demonstrated a commitment to an open process with extensive public outreach – one that took place under “extraordinary circumstances,” including the pandemic and an unprecedented delay in the 2020 Census data.
One reason for the current commission’s bigger budget is because it started four months earlier than the previous one, and its work has been extended by the Census delay. Having to conduct public outreach virtually over the summer due to COVID-19 also drove up costs – audio and video, translation, captions and interpretation, said Fredy Ceja, director of communications for the commission.
“The people of California entrusted the redistricting process to a group of their peers without a blueprint for how to do so,” Andersen, a Republican from Berkeley who is a civil engineer, said in a statement issued Tuesday night. “The Commission created and executed a robust community input process, which may not be perfect, but was led with integrity and transparency in hopes that it will result in fairer maps for the people of California.”
When voters approved the 2008 ballot measure that created the commission and took once-a-decade redistricting away from the Legislature, the initiative stated that the cost would be set at the amount of the prior redistricting, plus inflation. After the 2000 Census, that was about $3 million.
In reality, the first independent commission that drew districts after the 2010 Census spent $10.4 million in state money, plus $3.3 million donated by a private foundation for public outreach.
Of the $20 million state appropriation for the current commission, it had received $8.4 million as of July 1, according to budget documents provided to CalMatters. The commission wasn’t able to give an updated spending total.
The money goes to pay staff, rent venues, produce audio and video and provide translations. There are also costs for public outreach: printing marketing materials, purchasing ads online and other costs to educate the public about redistricting and seek its involvement.
The budget also includes $1.2 million for its legal counsel. Under the contract with Strumwasser and Woocher LLC, the senior counsel and partners are paid $575 an hour and associates $375 an hour.
And the commission has budgeted $1.6 million for its mapping consultants: HaystaqDNA and Q2 Data & Research, LLC. The previous commission paid $592,000 to Q2 for line drawing.
The Legislature allocated money separately to the Statewide Database to create a mapping tool. And the state auditor’s office received a separate $5.2 million appropriation to select and empanel the commission.
Commissioners, themselves, get a stipend — $378 per day when attending meetings or doing commission work. Though some commissioners have been noticeably absent from meetings, there are no attendance requirements. The commission voted to allow those commissioners who wanted to meet in person to do so, and their travel is reimbursed. The others participate via Zoom.
Republican political strategist Matt Rexroad said that while he understands that the citizens commission members might be juggling multiple jobs, they need to hear the public input to make decisions.
“If you value the public input, you show up to listen to it,” he said via email.
The commission has been meeting six days a week most weeks since mid-November and plans to continue on that schedule until adopting final maps late this month.
It approved preliminary maps Nov. 10, but it’s already blowing some of them up. It wrapped up new versions of state Assembly maps, but not until about 12:40 a.m. Tuesday.
To balance the various criteria the commission has to weigh, some of the districts ended up oddly-shaped. There were long “necks” within districts, for example, in San Pedro to separate the ports, as requested by community input.
Commissioners, who started reviewing congressional districts Tuesday, asserted that there isn’t a great way to evaluate one community of interest’s input over another.
Jonathan Mehta Stein, executive director of California Common Cause, a government reform group that pushed for independent redistricting, said the messiness is better than the alternative.
“Democracy done in public is going to be messy. These are 14 folks with the best interests of California in mind, trying to draw a huge number of districts on a public livestream,” he told CalMatters via email. “They can’t take things into a back room for a couple weeks to work on it, make some mistakes, and then bring back a more polished product. We’re seeing everything — and that includes the good and the bad.”
Commissioner Sara Sadhwani defended the new Assembly map, which she said was “based on compromise and consensus.” But in a Tuesday tweet, she acknowledged that “not everybody will be happy.”
For some, it’s more than unhappiness with the maps themselves.
On Nov. 30, five Republican voters filed an emergency petition with California’s Supreme Court to order the commission to disclose its analysis on past racially polarized voting, which it uses to draw districts to comply with the Voting Rights Act.
The petition, filed by Harmeet Dhillon, a Republican National Committee member, also says that any private conversations between commissioners and interest groupsshould be made public. Finally, the complaint urges that the commission’s legal counsel be fired because it has also worked for legislative leaders and the campaigns of former President Barack Obama.
In its response, filed with the court Tuesday, the commission categorically denied the allegations and gave no indication it will comply with any of the demands in the petition. The commission’s lawyers said it had posted maps showing the results of the racial voting analysis, and said commissioners have not been holding any secret or illegal meetings.
The petition is lacking in merit and, at worst, “represents a politically motivated attempt to obstruct the Commission’s efforts by denying it the advice of its chosen counsel in these final crucial days of the redistricting process,” added the response filed by the commission’s counsel.
The commission is already expecting to be dragged into court again, even after it submits its final maps to the Secretary of State. Its budget includes $4.3 million for litigation following redistricting.
The previous commission spent about $2 million on legal costs after the 2011 redistricting. The congressional and state Senate plans were challenged in state and federal court, and the composition of the commission, itself, was challenged in state court, according to research from Loyola Law School. None of the challenges were successful.
Aside from the GOP voter petition, redistricting experts and close observers have complained about the public comment process, including a lack of clarity on specific timing, files not posted early enough for the public to review and comment, or file formats that were hard to read.
Other voters, however, have commended the commissioners for their labors on a compressed timeline.
“This is not easy work and very time-consuming,” said one caller from Bakersfield. “Thank you for what you have done.”
A Looong Ballot: Initiatives & Massive Election Spending Soar for 2022
California Politics from John Myers, LA Times
The official deadline for getting a statewide initiative in front of voters next November isn’t until early summer, which means there’s only so much accuracy in any early predictions of what will be on the ballot.
Even so, there’s a growing sense that the ballot could be a long one, within striking distance of the 17 propositions that California voters considered in November 2016. And the measures that do qualify could spark massive campaign spending.
Getting something on the ballot isn’t easy, at least for groups without the money to hire paid petition circulators. A sufficient number of voter signatures must be turned in to county elections offices in time for the verification process to end by June 30. The official advice issued by Secretary of State Shirley Weber is that campaigns should submit signatures to the counties by late April.
Twenty-one initiatives are already in circulation and an additional 19 await a formal title and summary to be drafted by the office of state Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta. Four measures have already earned a spot on the Nov. 8 ballot.
But even if half of all of this year’s pending proposals fizzle, the ballot will be extensive. And the list includes some fascinating proposals. Here’s an early look at some of what voters could face and the politically powerful players behind those efforts.
The most recent measures to qualify for the ballot did so after supporters spent $3 million to $4 million on signature-gathering operations. But those were the early birds and the costs are likely to go up, especially for any last-minute efforts.
Well-funded campaigns can easily pull that off. Case in point: Tobacco companies spent more than $13 million to qualify their referendum to overturn a 2020 state law banning the sale of flavored tobacco products — costs driven, in part, by the fact that a referendum has only half as long to qualify for the ballot as an initiative.
The newest effort could be one of those that spend a lot. On Thursday, progressive business investor Joe Sanberg said he will file an initiative to raise California’s minimum wage to $18 an hour by 2025, with small businesses getting an extra year to comply. Sanberg pledged to spend some of his own millions to gather the signatures.
Expect a well-funded effort too in the looming battle over whether to legalize sports betting in the state. A still fluid political playing field of Native American tribal gaming interests, card clubs and online betting companies such as FanDuel and DraftKings are all likely to be involved.
From there, examining political fights of the past suggests big money could also be spent on two do-over efforts: a proposal to increase the state’s cap on medical malpractice awards, after a similar effort came up short in 2014, and what appears to be the third try in four years by healthcare unions to revamp the rules governing kidney dialysis clinics.
Who else has money? Don’t count out Tim Draper, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist whose 2018 effort to split California into separate states was removed from the ballot by the California Supreme Court. This time, Draper has proposed abolishing public employee unions — an effort that, if it qualifies, would surely be met with a well-funded opposition campaign by organized labor. (For some context, it’s worth noting that public-sector labor groups spent some $65 million in 2012 in persuading voters to reject a proposition that sought to constrain their ability to collect membership dues.)
Business groups also have deep pockets and may go all in on a proposed ballot measure to repeal California’s law that allows workers to file lawsuits seeking both unpaid wages and a portion of penalties paid for violating the law. Backed by the California Chamber of Commerce and others, the proposal promises to strengthen the state labor commissioner’s power to combat wage theft while possibly limiting the number of cases that end up in court.
Several proposed ballot measures focus on government revenues — how much should be collected and how the cash is used.
This includes an effort by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn. that would ask voters to revise Proposition 19, a 2020 property tax break aimed at older homeowners while also limiting the instances in which inherited property doesn’t trigger a higher tax bill. The group’s initiative would significantly expand the low-tax opportunities to pass property from one generation to the next.
New taxation limits would be imposed under a different ballot plan, one that would make local tax increases harder to pass while stripping the Legislature of its power to raise state taxes without voters’ consent.
Taxes would be increased under a proposed 10-year tax increase on Californians with annual incomes above $5 million, using the money to fund pandemic detection, prevention and mitigation efforts.
And existing tax dollars — 2% of annual state general fund revenues — would be set aside to boost California’s water supplies to an additional 5 million acre-feet of water under a proposal filed by influential rural and agricultural groups. A nonpartisan fiscal analysis estimates the water supply proposal could divert as much as $100 billion over its lifetime.
Earmarking of existing tax dollars is also the goal of a ballot measure designed to combat climate change with more spending on electric vehicle infrastructure and wildfire prevention.
A raft of hot-button issues could also make their way to California voters, touching on some of the state’s most vexing problems and some of its most intense debates.
Led by Redondo Beach Mayor Bill Brand, a group of local officials submitted an initiative to block recent legislative efforts to ease the state’s housing crisis. Their proposal would amend the California Constitution to leave a number of zoning and development decisions to local governments, a big change following legislation signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom in September that gave the state a new role in zoning decisions.
Less clear is who, if anyone, will step up to champion a ballot measure filed just before Thanksgiving seeking to strengthen the prosecution and punishment for retail theft and similar property crimes — a hot issue across California this fall with complaints from chain stores and luxury retail shops alike.
The official proponent, Tom Hiltachk, is a prominent Republican campaign attorney. He didn’t respond to an email seeking comment on who he’s representing in the effort. The topic, though, seems custom-made for the 2022 election season. Newsom, who will be seeking a second four-year term, was asked Wednesday by reporters to respond to the spree of retail thefts. He insisted the incidents were not the result of a widely debated criminal justice measure from 2014, Proposition 47.
Other criminal justice measures are also vying for a spot on the ballot, including an effort to redirect money no longer needed to pay for a shrinking prison population and a grass-roots effort to enact additional policing reforms in California.
Conservative activists are behind two separate proposals to allow parents to use state tax dollars to pay for private and parochial school tuition, with one of the proposed initiatives backed by Richard Grenell, who served as acting director of national intelligence and ambassador to Germany under former President Trump.
Meanwhile, former Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. Austin Beutner has submitted an initiative to create dedicated funding for arts and music programs in public schools.
Finally, two well-known California Republicans are seeking changes in election-related processes.
Former San Diego City Councilman Carl DeMaio has submitted a proposed initiative requiring the state to issue ID cards for voters. And then there’s the issue of how ballot measures are filed and prepared for voters: former state Senate Minority Leader Sam Blakeslee has filed an initiative to strip the attorney general of the job to write an official title and summary for measures.
Blakeslee’s effort comes after years of complaints, mostly that attorneys general have often overseen politically motivated descriptions of propositions, a criticism lobbed against almost every Democrat who has held the office. His plan would hand the duties over to the independent Legislative Analyst’s Office, which already drafts the fiscal analyses of initiatives.
Trial Lawyers v. Business in Tort Wars Latest Ballot Battle
CalMatters
One of the Capitol’s most enduring conflicts pits personal injury attorneys and their allies in consumer advocacy groups against corporate interests and their insurers.
The two factions clash incessantly over what events are deemed wrongful acts (torts), who can sue over those acts and what monetary damages can be awarded.
Dubbed “tort wars,” the conflict has raged for decades in the Legislature, in the courts and occasionally via ballot measures, each side depicting itself as the good guys and the other as rapaciously evil. Millions of dollars are spent each year on lobbyists, media strategists, political campaign advisors and other tools of the political trade.
The intensity of the war varies from year to year, and 2022 is shaping up as one its hotter periods as the factions propose dueling ballot measures. One would effectively undo a 1975 law that limits damages for “pain and suffering” in medical malpractice cases, while another would place a new limit on the fees that personal injury attorneys can claim.
That 1975 law, entitled the Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act (MICRA) and signed by Jerry Brown during his first year as governor, limits non-economic damages for malpractice to $250,000. Its passage was not only a big win for medical providers and their insurers but the opening salvo of the war.
The attorneys not only have tried — very unsuccessfully so far — to repeal or modify MICRA but have sought to expand opportunities to sue and collect damages and fees, such as allowing them to intervene in cases that ordinarily would be handled by local or state legal authorities.
Business groups and insurers, meanwhile, have not only attempted to blunt the attorneys’ expansive ambition but to carry the MICRA model of damage limits into other potential injury cases.
In 1987, 12 years after MICRA was enacted, the speaker of the state Assembly, Willie Brown, mediated extensive negotiations between the warring factions on a truce, culminating in the infamous “napkin deal” worked out in Frank Fat’s restaurant near the Capitol with Brown hopping from table to table.
Quickly ratified by the Legislature, it gave lobbyists for every interest involved something to take back to their clients, including a slight modification of MICRA and new protections for the tobacco industry from lawsuits by smokers for cancer and other illnesses.
The napkin deal truce lasted for a few years, but tort wars resumed in the 1990s and have been waged ever since on specific issues, including several unsuccessful efforts to change MICRA. One subset of the conflict, involving roughly the same interests, has been perennial jousting over workers’ compensation, the employer-financed, multi-billion-dollar system that covers job-related injuries and illnesses.
A ballot measure that would indirectly but effectively repeal MICRA is already qualified for the 2022 ballot even though the anti-MICRA coalition has failed repeatedly in the past to undo what the Legislature and Jerry Brown wrought 46 years ago.
Meanwhile, the Civil Justice Association of California, an umbrella organization of business and insurance interests, has unveiled its own initiative measure that would limit lawyers’ contingency fees in personal injury cases to 20% of monetary judgements, sharply lower than the traditional one-third or more. The goal, obviously, is to make attorneys less willing to take on cases.
The stage is set, therefore, for the competing factions to spend tens of millions of dollars to persuade voters, which would be a tiny fraction of the many billions of dollars at stake in the outcome. And regardless of what happens next year, the immense stakes mean tort wars will continue to rage indefinitely.
https://calmatters.org/commentary/2021/12/californias-tort-wars-heating-up-again/
Yet Another “Monumental Ballot Fight” – $18 Minimum Wage
Politico California Playbook
Our state’s base pay could rise to $18 under an initiative the affluent progressive activist Joel Sanberg wants to put on the 2022 ballot. And it wouldn’t need to halt at $18, which is already 20 percent higher than the $15 minimum that will be imposed statewide in 2023 — the wage could continue to rise in parallel with cost of living increases, pushing California to $20 and higher in the years to come. A baseline that’s among the loftiest in America could climb even higher.
Sanberg told us that while $15 may seem generous relative to other states, in California it “doesn’t give people financial freedom” or cover “life’s basic needs.” That focus on putting more money in peoples’ pockets tracks with Sanberg’s dogged support for a state-level earned income tax credit. Echoing his sentiment that current wages are not enough was Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez, who backed Sanberg’s initiative in a statement, decrying that “millions of California workers are earning starvation wages at their full time jobs.”
That Gonzalez is already on board naturally made us wonder who else will back Sanberg’s measure — particularly whether the blessing of a staunch union ally like Gonzalez means Sanberg could draw on the firepower of organized labor, which was instrumental in securing the $15-an-hour standard.
Sanberg was coy but optimistic on that front, telling us he saw a natural alignment with labor and believed “we will earn their support.” That could mean a busy ballot for unions, who may also be playing defense over education and collective bargaining for public employees.
Pockets as deep as Sanberg’s make it likely he’ll secure the signatures to qualify — that, and the natural allure of a wage increase to passersby buttonholed by signature-gatherers. Pressed on how much he was willing to spend, Sanberg repeated that “this will be on the ballot.” And while the $15 deal Gov. Jerry Brown signed in 2016 reflected his desire to avoid a ballot brawl, Sanberg said he won’t bend to a Sacramento compromise that boosts the minimum wage without also allowing it to rise with cost of living.
So we could be hurtling toward a monumental ballot fight. Sanberg said he’ll roll out some private-sector endorsements, and he argued the measure has a built-in support base in the 5 million or so Californians earning minimum wage. But you can bet some well-resourced business groups will battle this one, invoking warnings about inflation and overburdened restaurants forced closing.
Californians Saving More Water
Associated Press
Californians stepped up their water conservation in October, a move made easier by a massive storm that dumped record rain in some parts of the state but still wasn’t enough to combat the drought.
Collectively, people reduced their water use by 13.2% compared to last October, a major jump from prior months when water conservation lagged. Still, total water usage is down just 6% since July compared to the same period last year, far short of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s 15% goal.
The calls for voluntary conservation follow California’s second driest year on record and what’s feared to be another dry winter as the state remains gripped by drought.
“The important part here is to continue to prepare for worst-case scenario,” said E. Joaquin Esquivel, chair of the State Water Resources Control Board.
Most of the state’s reservoirs are still well below historic averages. That prompted the state’s Department of Water Resources to tell water districts last week they likely won’t be getting any of the supply they’ve requested from the state for 2022 except what’s necessary for health and safety.
Newsom, a Democrat, has avoided mandatory statewide water restrictions but his administration has urged local water districts to bolster supplies. Next month, the state water board may prohibit certain “wasteful” actions such as outdoor watering during storms.
In October, the storm and cooler weather reduced how much water was being used for outdoor activities, which can account for up to 80% of all use, said Charlotte Ely, who presented the conservation numbers to the board.
“There is still a lot of work to do to reach the governor’s call for 15% savings from that 2020 baseline, but we’re making better progress,” she said.
The storm, a powerful atmospheric river, drenched California in the final days of October. More than 5 inches (12.7 centimeters) of rain fell in Sacramento over a 24-hour period, breaking an 1880 record for the most rainfall in a single day.
Northern California, which saw the most rain from the storm, had the greatest reduction last month compared to October 2020, dropping by as much as 22%, while the southern region that includes Los Angeles and San Diego dropped by about 12% in October compared to last year, according to state officials.
Many of the state’s urban water suppliers are urging conservation through public education and restrictions such as limiting outdoor watering and requiring hoses to have shut-off nozzles, Ely said. About 17% of urban water suppliers have told state regulators they’ve taken no actions to encourage conservation, she said.
Farmers & Oil – Water Wizards or Wasters?
Bakersfield Californian
The second year of an extraordinary drought has revived a debate over whether two pillars of Kern’s economy, oil and ag, are using more than their fair share of the state’s precious water supplies.
A coalition of environmental groups sent a letter Tuesday calling on Gov. Gavin Newsom to take executive action to “balance water use and access in the state” by reining in what it called large and polluting corporate interests.
Representatives of the oil and ag industry countered the coalition’s assertions, disputing estimates of their net consumption in some cases and asserting the accusations fail to account for benefits of the products they provide.
“I think we see during drought times an interest in finding sort of scapegoats for the drought,” said CEO Richard Waycott of the Almond Board of California. “Of course, the drought’s caused by Mother Nature rather than anybody in California.”
The fundamental claims made by each side have been around for years. What’s new is their urgency as the state makes hard decisions about how to stretch California’s tight water supplies.
Worried about low reservoir levels and a small snowpack in the Sierra Nevada so far this season, state officials on Wednesday announced the smallest-ever initial allocation from the State Water Project: zero percent of requests with the exception of uses serving health and safety.
Almost four dozen groups that signed onto last week’s letter, including Center for Biological Diversity, Food & Water Watch and Fossil Free California, pressed the governor to use his authority to place a moratorium on new oil and gas operations and factory farms.
The coalition also asked him to declare the growing of almonds and alfalfa nonbeneficial uses of groundwater. It requested he halt all new plantings of those crops, “while providing assistance to help small growers transition to more sustainable and less thirsty crops.”
The group further called for greater transparency on water transactions and mandatory water conservation measures statewide, among other changes, some of which pertained to industries other than oil and ag, such as water bottlers.
“Taking these steps now will help protect the environment and water for all people in our state, and avoid much harsher measures as this drought continues,” the letter stated. “Now is the time for bold leadership.”
According to Food & Water Watch, almond and alfalfa irrigation uses about 3 trillion gallons of water yearly. It estimated large dairies use more than 142 million gallons per day and oil and gas operators have consumed 3 billion gallons of freshwater since 2018.
Spokespeople within the oil and ag industries took a different view about their water use.
The CEO of the California Independent Petroleum Association, Rock Zierman, said by email the state’s oil industry produced more than 25 billion gallons of oil during the period highlighted by Food & Water Watch. All of the water was consumed by Californians, he wrote.
Another industry trade group, the Western States Petroleum Association, noted California’s oil and gas producers are a net supplier of water. It said they clean up several billion gallons per year of produced water — the fluid that comes up from the ground with oil — for use by agriculture.
“If enhanced oil recovery and hydraulic fracturing stopped today, the state would be even worse off in the drought,” WSPA said in an August informational release.
The Kern County and state farm bureaus did not respond to requests for comment. But people familiar with certain commodities spoke up in defense of the industry.
Waycott of the almond board said ag’s water use boils down to “an existential issue, if you will, in terms of providing food for humans.”
He disputed the characterization of almond growers as corporate interests, saying more than 90 percent of the nuts grown in-state are produced by family farms holding fewer than 1,000 acres.
Plus, the kernels most consumers see accounts for only about a third of what almond orchards produce, Waycott said. Hulls and shells have other uses, including feed for livestock that produce milk and cheese.
On a more fundamental level, he said, almond orchards absorb carbon and release oxygen, offsetting net carbon dioxide releases by urban areas. He added that about 90 percent of the water used by almond trees for transport nutrients escapes back into the atmosphere through the leaves.
He pointed to estimates California almond producers have reduced their water consumption by a third between 2000 and 2020, and that the industry’s goal is to cut it by an additional 20 percent by 2025.
“What’s overlooked is the continuous effort that agriculture’s making” to reduce their water consumption and become more environmentally sustainable, Waycott said.
Daniel H. Putnam, an agronomist and forage specialist in the Department of Plant Sciences at UC Davis, asserted that criticism of alfalfa growers’ water use overlooks a number of factors important to resiliency and food production.
He referred to a presentation he put together earlier this year with other researchers saying examinations of certain crops’ water use, such as almonds and alfalfa, should be balanced with considerations of productivity, economic return and food production.
Alfalfa, though a relatively high user of water, offers high flexibility during times of variable water availability, according to the presentation. It determined alfalfa’s deep roots make use of residual moisture, allows multiple harvests per year and survives summer dry-downs such that it can regrow when re-watered.
Plus, it tolerates high salinity and can be flooded in winter to recharge aquifers, the presentation said.
Air Board OKs Nation’s Toughest Truck & Yard Equipment Emissions Rules
CalMatters
Big rig trucks and lawn equipment face stricter pollution requirements under a suite of landmark rules approved today by California’s clean air regulators.
Manufacture of new, polluting models of lawn and garden equipment will be phased out in 2024 under the rule unanimously adopted by the California Air Resources Board, despite opposition from gardeners and landscapers.
And in a separate rule, big rigs will have to undergo periodic smog checks, just like cars, except most trucks will undergo the tests remotely through onboard diagnostics.
California is the first in the nation to require heavy-duty trucks to undergo smog checks or mandate zero-emission lawn equipment.
Together, the two rules are expected to avoid 8,400 premature deaths linked to air pollution and result in health benefits of more than $84 billion. The trucks rule alone “is the largest emissions reduction measure since the truck and bus rule, and that was 2008,” said Jason Hill-Falkenthal, an air resources supervisor with the board’s mobile source control division.
The total cost to comply with the two rules: An estimated $8 billion spread over more than 20 years.
Under the new lawn equipment rules, manufacturers must meet zero-emission standards for new models of yard equipment, including weed whackers, lawn mowers, leaf blowers and smaller chain saws, in three years. Residents and workers, however, can continue to use and repair their gas-powered equipment.
Gardeners and landscaping associations raised concerns about higher costs to buy the equipment and additional batteries needed for a day’s work.
“The cost to transition would be significant and probably kill my small business,” Elizabeth Burns, president of Zone 24 Landscaping Inc., based in Torrance, said today at the hearing. “One other issue is the technology is not yet there for battery life and that’s super important.”
Also, under the new rules, new portable generators must meet stricter emission standards in 2024 and reach zero-emissions for model-year 2028 generators.
Bill Magavern, policy director with the Coalition for Clean Air, celebrated the new rule, warning that it’s the workers who suffer the worst consequences from yard care equipment emissions. But he also acknowledged the cost.
“We do think that as you move forward, there will be more incentive money needed,” Magavern said. “And we’ll be asking the Legislature and the governor for that.”
California lawmakers and clean air regulators say it’s critical to ramp up requirements for heavy-duty vehicles, which make up about 3% of the vehicles on the road but account for about half of smog-forming and fine particulate pollution churned out there.
The new rule is projected to cut more than 680,000 tons of smog-forming gases and more than 6,000 tons of particulate pollution between 2023 and 2050 — equivalent to removing half of the trucks on the road today. The pollution reductions are expected to prevent more than 7,500 cardiopulmonary deaths, 2,500 hospital visits for heart and lung conditions and 3,500 emergency visits related to asthma.
The goal is to catch trucks with malfunctioning pollution-control devices, such as particulate filters. During field tests, air board staff discovered that 11 to 17% of heavy duty trucks with on-board diagnostics showed a malfunction indicator light, meaning that their emissions controls might be faulty.
https://calmatters.org/environment/2021/12/california-lawn-equipment-trucks-smog-rules/
Fixing Cargo Ship Traffic Jam by Christmas “Is Not Possible”
CalMatters
The Los Angeles and Long Beach ports decided to delay imposing fees on container ships that don’t move their cargo quickly enough, citing a 37% decrease in piled-up containers since the Oct. 25 fee proposal.
But the ship and cargo backlog is still dire enough that four California Democrats joined 18 other members of the U.S. House of Representatives in calling on Speaker Nancy Pelosi to take “additional action to specifically address the supply chain and resulting higher prices experienced by families across the country.” However, “it’s not possible” for Congress to relieve pressure in the global supply chain before Christmas, Christopher Tang, faculty director at the UCLA Center for Global Management, told the Sacramento Bee.
That means prices and inflation will likely continue to rise — though the omicron variant has led to a drop in gas prices in California and across the nation.
Meanwhile, the backlog’s ripple effects continue to make themselves felt, as illuminated by a Wall Street Journal story tracking how one ship’s 54-day wait to unload goods impacted three California small businesses.
Increased shipping costs and delayed delivery of chess and backgammon sets forced Petaluma toy manufacturer John N. Hansen Co. to raise prices 10%, while Youth Rise Up, a Chino shoe store, didn’t receive a shipment of Halloween boots until Nov. 20.
According to the Marine Exchange of Southern California, for much of October over 100 vessels were at anchor or loitering near the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, meaning billions of dollars worth of goods destined to be U.S. imports were unable to enter the country during October.