For Clients & Friends of The Gualco Group, Inc.
IN THIS ISSUE – “It could be well past any of our lifetimes, to allow natural processes to cover up the sins that we did during the Gold Rush”
Patrick Pulupa, executive officer of the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board, on cleaning up Delta waters
- Powerful Unions’ High-Profile, High-Dollar Split Over State Senator
- No Quick Way Out: Cleaning Up Delta Waters, From Redding to Fresno to SF Bay
- Air Board’s Pending Carbon Standard Could Pump Up Gas Prices – 65 Cents a Gallon
- Hot Weather Puzzles Top Climate Scientist
Capital News & Notes (CN&N) curates 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 OCT. 11, 2024
Powerful Unions’ High-Profile, High-Dollar Split Over State Senator
Politico CA Playbook
A powerful union is deploying an unconventional tactic to punish a Democratic state lawmaker for opposing its pet legislation: boost a Republican opponent by attacking the most vulnerable Senate Democrat in California.
AFSCME 3299 this week poured nearly $700,000 into a TV ad blitz hammering Democratic state Sen. Josh Newman as he fights for reelection in a swing Orange County seat that could determine if the party maintains its super-duper majority in the upper chamber.
It’s the kind of cutthroat strategy labor unions could only dare to use in a state like California because Democrats have such large majorities in both chambers of the statehouse.
The union, which represents 30,000 University of California employees, has long had beef with Newman after he declined to support one of its priority bills — a constitutional amendment that would bolster the labor rights of UC workers. The proposal stalled in 2023 and again this year.
AFSCME similarly sought to prop up Democratic challengers to Newman in the March primary, when it spent more than $500,000 to pummel him with negative ads.
But its latest effort to sink a vulnerable Democrat in the general election takes the feud to an unusual level. The tactic is an audacious gambit that appears designed to send a sharp warning to Sacramento Democrats who have blocked the union’s efforts to force the UC system to adopt more union-friendly policies.
AFSCME’s UC members — who include hospital technicians, student service workers and research lab staff across more than 10 college campuses — appear to be on the verge of striking as they fight with the university system over contract negotiations.
The union’s ad campaign against Newman is scorched earth, featuring TV spots that sound straight out of a GOP playbook, tying the Democrat to concerns about crime and gas prices.
Newman told Playbook he was shocked by the tactic given that he’s endorsed by the California Labor Federation, a statewide umbrella group. He argued it is born out of “spite” and sends a “problematic message” to lawmakers that the union will turn to counterproductive tactics if Democrats disagree with its proposals.
“Their members should be angry,” Newman vented.
Newman’s opponent in the November election is Republican Steven Choi, a former state Assemblymember and staunch conservative. Choi is far from a labor ally and received a failing score on the Labor Federation’s annual report card when he was in office.
The union didn’t respond to requests for comment. Its lobbyist Richie Ross, who has clashed with Newman in the past, said he’s been removed from discussions about AFSCME’s controversial play. “You’d have to ask them,” he said.
Labor Federation head Lorena Gonzalez said the organization stands by its endorsement of Newman. “We’re not involved with this IE at all,” she said, referring to AFSCME’s independent-expenditure committee targeting Newman.
However, Gonzalez hinted that the union’s frustration with Newman, who chairs the Senate Education Committee, is the result of multiple disagreements. In that sense, AFSCME’s move could be part of a broader calculation that taking out Newman clears the path for their agenda in the Senate, even if it means Republicans gain a seat in the process.
“By all means, we have heard and understand the frustrations that AFSCME 3299 has with Sen. Newman,” Gonzalez told Playbook. “Nonetheless, a majority of our unions supported his endorsement.”
The union’s targeting of a vulnerable Senate Democrat comes as Senate President Pro Tem Mike McGuire said protecting Newman is among the caucus’ top priorities this cycle. In a statement Wednesday, McGuire didn’t directly address AFSCME but projected confidence in Newman’s chances.
No Quick Way Out: Cleaning Up Delta Waters, From Redding to Fresno to SF Bay
CalMatters
From the Bay Area to Sacramento and Stockton, from Fresno to north of Redding, Californians — particularly low-income immigrants from Asian countries and other people of color — rely on the San Francisco Bay and the rivers that feed it for food.
But the vast watershed is in trouble, plagued by low flows, algal blooms, urban and farm runoff and a legacy of mercury contamination that dates back to the Gold Rush.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is now investigating claims that California’s management of the state’s largest estuary has “discriminated on the basis of race, color and national origin” with “its failure to update Bay-Delta water quality standards,” which involve how much water is diverted to cities and farms.
The investigation also includes allegations that the State Water Resources Control Board “has intentionally excluded tribes and Black, Asian and Latino residents from participation in the policymaking process.”
Filed by environmental justice groups and tribes, the discrimination complaint accuses the state water board of allowing the “waterways to descend into ecological crisis, with the resulting environmental burdens falling most heavily on Native tribes and other communities of color.” Water board officials wouldn’t comment on specifics, but said it is giving the EPA “relevant information to demonstrate its compliance with all civil rights laws.”
As California water regulators weigh new plans for managing the Bay-Delta, community groups and tribes have sounded the alarm about a $2.9 billion pact the Newsom administration reached in March 2022 with water suppliers over operations in the region.
If approved, the deal would allow major urban water providers and agricultural irrigation districts to take more water from the Delta than another regulatory proposal would permit, but would also support improving habitats.
Tribes and environmental justice groups fear the deal, along with a Newsom-backed, $20 billion proposal to replumb the Delta with a tunnel to send more water south, will worsen the stagnation and algae blooms.
No one tallies how many people rely on Bay-Delta fish to eat, but the region has popular sport fisheries for striped bass, catfish and other fish. About 377,000 anglers from the Bay Area and Delta region are licensed to fish in California, according to California Department of Fish and Wildlife data.
About 90% of people surveyed in low-income communities of color in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta region reported that they eat locally caught fish four or more days per week. “This suggests that subsistence fishing plays a central role in (their) lives,” the 2021 report produced for the California Department of Water Resources says.
Environmentalists say in addition to the Delta fish declines caused by diversions, people of color are disproportionally harmed by contamination of the fish they eat.
Poisons have been polluting the Bay-Delta and its fish for generations. Mercury from gold mining nearly 200 years ago contaminates the sediments. Industrial chemicals past and present linger in the waterways. And a confluence of stagnation, warming waters and discharges from farms and cities foster stinking, sometimes toxic algal blooms.
African American, Lao and Vietnamese anglers who fish in the Delta ingest excessive amounts of mercury, much higher than the U.S. EPA recommends, according to a 2010 UC Davis study. Southeast Asians ate the most locally caught fish, followed by African American and Hispanic anglers.
“A whole generation of subsistence fishing families have already been exposed to harmful amounts of mercury and other poisons,” wrote Fraser Shilling, the study’s co-author who now directs the UC Davis’ Road Ecology Center.
Environmental groups want the two regional water quality boards responsible for the Bay-Delta to officially recognize subsistence and tribal fishing and cultural uses of its waterways, a step toward setting targets that protect people who use them. The Bay Area water board says it plans to propose designating tribal cultural uses in the next year, and then tribal and other subsistence fishing within five years.
The process has already dragged on too long, said Sherri Norris, executive director of the California Indian Environmental Alliance.
“What’s at stake is neurological learning disabilities, …not being able to teach culture to future generations and not being able to eat traditional foods,” Norris said. “We’re trying to protect our lives and our health.”
But cleaning the waterways enough for people to rely on them for food “could be well past any of our lifetimes, to allow natural processes to cover up the sins that we did during the Gold Rush,” said Patrick Pulupa, executive officer of the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board, which manages Delta water quality issues.
“The uncomfortable truth is we have to look at the laws that we have available…and many of those laws would not allow us to turn the clock back to pre-Gold Rush times,” said Pulupa.
The vast watershed, including the Sacramento and San Joaquin river systems, stretches from around Fresno to beyond the Oregon border. The rivers come together at the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and flow out to the Pacific through the San Francisco Bay.
For two centuries, cities, mining, agriculture and industry have flushed the waterways with their waste, even as they’ve sapped freshwater flows.
“That’s why they call it the dirty Delta,” said Jacob Weber as he fished at the Antioch/Oakley pier on the San Joaquin River one morning. Even on a clear, bright day, the sun couldn’t penetrate the murky waters.
“You’ll get a lot of people saying, ‘Hey, let’s go out to the Delta,’” said Weber, an Oakley resident who fishes mostly for fun but will sometimes eat fish caught farther out toward the Bay. “Y’all go on your boat, but I’m not swimming in that nasty-ass water.” As for the fish, he said, “It’d be nice if they weren’t so nasty.”
Mercury, which is responsible for the majority of California’s warnings to limit eating fish from across the state, is among a cocktail of contaminants in the Bay and Delta. The heavy metal is especially dangerous for the developing brains of unborn babies and children, contributing to birth differences, developmental delays, and vision, hearing and learning difficulties.
During the Gold Rush, forty-niners mined mercury from the Coast Ranges and used it to extract gold scoured from the Sierra Nevada. Millions of pounds leached into the environment, flowing into creeks and rivers that empty into the Delta and Bay, where it has poisoned sediments and built up in fish ever since.
Heavy industry brought the state’s second-greatest contaminant of concern: polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. Used in electric transformers and an array of products, PCBs increase cancer risk and can harm the growth and brain development of unborn babies and children. Although their manufacture was banned in 1979, the chemicals persist in sediment and fish tissues.
Flame retardants and forever chemicals known as per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, also are found in San Francisco Bay and Delta fish
Because of the contamination, California’s environmental health agency warns children, teens and people who could become pregnant to completely avoid eating popular sport fish such as striped bass and sturgeon caught in the Bay and in the Northern, Central and South Delta. Men should only eat one hand-sized serving of these fish a week.
For areas near the Port of Stockton and a Superfund site in Richmond, the waters are so polluted that no one is supposed to eat anything they catch.
Harmful algal blooms — many of them fed by fertilizers from farm fields and urban runoff, fueled by warming temperatures and nurtured in stagnant waters — are on the rise globally and in the Bay-Delta. Back to back red tides killed tens of thousands of fish, including sturgeon, for two summers in a row in San Francisco and San Pablo bays.
Inland, blooms of microorganisms known as cyanobacteria regularly turn parts of the rivers a stinking, neon green in summer. These blooms also sometimes produce toxins that can make people sick and kill dogs and other animals, and can be so noxious that they drive people away from areas they once fished.
But officials say there is only so much they’ll be able to do.
MORE:
Air Board’s Pending Carbon Standard Could Pump Up Gas Prices – 65 Cents a Gallon
LA Times
As Gov. Gavin Newsom wages a high-profile campaign to prevent sudden spikes in gasoline prices, California air regulators are quietly pushing through a policy change of their own that could raise pump prices by almost a half-dollar a gallon or more.
Newsom recently called a special legislative session to consider controversial new controls on state oil refineries, and the California Air Resources Board — the state agency tasked with regulating planet-warming emissions — soon will consider stricter limits on the carbon intensity of fuels.
In September of last year, CARB estimated that the change could lift gasoline prices 47 cents a gallon, or $6.4 billion a year.
Other analysts put the price even higher — 65 cents a gallon, or $8.8 billion a year.
Now, as CARB nears a November vote on its low carbon fuel standard, or LCFS, the agency is backing away from its price hike forecast. Recently, an air board official told legislators that the 47-cents-a-gallon estimate was just a “snapshot” based on a forecasting model that “can never capture real world conditions.” However, the agency has refused to offer a revised estimate to the public.
Legislators from both parties are now voicing frustration over what they say is CARB’s troubling lack of transparency.
Some legislators are questioning whether the air board has become too powerful and requires more oversight from elected officials.
“For me, this special session has been about ensuring that gas prices are going down,” said Assemblymember Corey Jackson (D-Perris). “And certainly, if CARB is creating regulations that will increase gas prices, we’re going to have to take a look at that and see if we have to rein in their authority.”
What concerns him most, Jackson said, is the board’s resistance to acknowledging the consumer costs of its forthcoming policies. “The increased quality of our air may be worth higher prices,” he said, but he doesn’t understand how keeping forecasts under wraps encourages public debate over government policy.
Assemblymember Joe Patterson (R-Rocklin) shares Jackson’s concern. “Maybe the cost is worth it because we’ll have cleaner air,” he said. “But how do you make informed decisions if you don’t want to know about all the possible outcomes?”
He also questioned the timing of the special session. “It just feels like the governor is more concerned about sticking it to the oil companies than he is about the actual costs of gasoline.”
Assemblymember Blanca Rubio (D-Baldwin Park) was traveling and unavailable for an interview, but emailed the following: “While the Legislature is currently working to address petroleum price spikes through the public process, it is unfortunate CARB is unwilling to provide an estimate of the monetary impacts amendments to the LCFS will have. This process is intended to be public and collaborative, but the Legislature will struggle to make significant positive impacts to fuel prices if CARB is unwilling to address the role their regulations play in determining prices.”
The air board’s November vote centers on amendments to the LCFS, a carbon market program that took effect in 2011. The program penalizes refineries that make high carbon fuel, such as diesel and gasoline, and benefits makers of lower carbon fuels such as renewable diesel.
The amendents would impose far stricter limits on the carbon intensity of fuels, leading to far higher costs for refineries to buy credits to comply with the law. Extra costs are passed through to consumers at the pump. But the air board won’t will talk about how much that might be.
CARB’s chief, Steven Cliff, told The Times that no new numbers will be forthcoming because “what we are not equipped to do is analyze what the effect would be on retail gasoline prices.” Instead, “we look at all the economic impacts” including economic growth, job creation and public health.
On that basis, Cliff said, the amendments are a net positive for Californians.
Asked whether estimating fuel costs and releasing the figures might help inform public policy, Cliff said: “We put out the analysis that is mandated by law.”
It’s not only legislators who are concerned about CARB’s approach, however.
Danny Cullenward is a carbon markets expert and vice chair of California’s Independent Emissions Market Advisory Committee. He’s the analyst that used data also available to the air board to come up with his estimate of per-gallon costs up to 65 cents in the near term and possibly much higher in the long term for policies under the air board’s consideration.
Cullenward said CARB needs to release more information, and that the air board in November will be making an “opaque regulatory decision that will take place three days after the election,” when media attention will be elsewhere.
On Monday, Cullenward released a paper written for the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania on the fuel standards issue. “Rather than discuss these implications openly, the regulator has distanced itself from its own initial assessment of costs,” he wrote.
Cullenward is considered a champion of carbon reduction, but sometimes takes flak when he questions the efficacy of some carbon market programs. The air board’s fuel standards policies, he believes, favor lower-carbon biofuels over far cleaner electrification of transportation.
He’s not surprised that the Legislature is suddenly paying more attention to CARB. Although the fuels program “is regularly reviewed and updated every few years, it has not been guided by specific legislation since implementation — despite its evolution into a multi-billion-dollar market with substantial environmental and economic consequences,” he wrote in his paper.
Hot Weather Puzzles Top Climate Scientist:
“It’s still pretty much amateur hour in terms of assessing what actually happened”
Yale e-360 newsletter
NASA’s top climate scientist, Gavin Schmidt, talks about the recent unexpected spike in global temperatures, which experts are still struggling to explain. Several developments may have contributed to the unusual heat — changes in the solar cycle, the eruption of an underwater volcano, new rules on shipping pollution — but none of these factors, or even a combination, seems sufficient to explain the heat.
“It’s still pretty much amateur hour in terms of assessing what actually happened,” Schmidt said.