interviews
Water and the American West
by Richard Frank
October 25, 2021
This interview with Richard Frank, professor of environmental practice at the UC Davis School of Law and Director of the California Environmental Law and Policy Center, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | Can you tell me a little bit about the story of water and how it's tied to the West, and to California in particular?
Richard | A friend of mine who's a Court of Appeals Justice here in California wrote an opinion on a water law dispute and started it with the quote, "the history of California is written on its waters." And I think that the point is true of the entire American West.
Water policy and legal issues are inextricably tied to the development of the Western United States; water is the limiting factor in so many ways to settlement, to economic development, to prosperity, and to the environment and environmental preservation.
Can you talk about the difference between groundwater and surface water– and the policies that regulate each?
There are really two types of water when it comes to human consumption. There's surface water: that is the water that is transmitted by lakes, rivers, and streams. Then there is groundwater, and a substantial amount of water that Americans and the American West rely on is groundwater. That is water that is stored in groundwater aquifers, which are naturally occurring groundwater basins. Both groundwater and surface water are critical to the American West and its economy and its culture.
Traditionally a couple of things are important to note, first of all, water is finite. Second, water gets allocated in the Western United States generally at the state level. There's a limited federal role. Primarily, policy decisions about who gets how much water for what purpose are made state by state.
I think allocation is really interesting in that it's more state-level than federal. How was water and the allocation of water in California designed? Is it a public-private combination? What goes on in terms of the infrastructure of water?
Another very good question. The answer is it depends. Most of our water infrastructure is public in nature.
Again, in the American West, the regulation of water rights is generally done at the state level, but the federal government, historically, has a major water footprint in the American West because it has been federal dollars and federal design and management that really controlled much of the major water infrastructure in the American West — you know, Hoover Dam, and the complex system of dams and reservoirs on the Colorado River in California, with the Central Valley Project that was built and managed by the federal government with Shasta Dam on the upper Sacramento River as the centerpiece of that project. But we also have a California State Water Project, the key facility being the Oroville Dam and reservoir on the Southern River that is managed by state water managers. If we were starting over, that kind of parallel system would make no particular engineering or operational sense.
But, we are captive to our history.
And then you have these massive systems of aqueducts and canals that move water from one place to another throughout the American West. They are particularly responsible for moving water from surface water storage facilities to population centers. In the last 50 to 75 years, these population centers have really expanded dramatically, so you need massive infrastructure to deliver water from those storage facilities, the dams, and reservoirs, which generally are located in remote areas to the population centers. So it takes a lot of time and energy to transport the water, from where it is captured and stored to where it is needed for human use.
California has faced continuous drought – what measures is the state taking now to manage water?
Just to frame the issue a little bit — we have, as I mentioned, a growing population in the American Southwest at a time when the amount of available water is shrinking due to drought and due to the impacts of climate change. We have growing human demand for residential and commercial purposes and at the same time, we have a shrinking water supply. That is a huge looming crisis.
And it is beginning to play out in real-time. You see that playing out in real-time. For example, several different states and Mexico rely on Colorado River flows based on an allocation system that was created in the 1920s, which is overly optimistic about the amount of available water. From the 1920s until now, that water supply has decreased, and decreased, and decreased. Now you have interstate agreements, and in the case of Mexico, international agreements that allocate the finite Colorado river water supplies based on faulty, now obsolete, information. It is a real problem.
What measures do you take now, knowing this information?
If you look at the US Drought Monitor, it is obvious the problem is not limited to the Colorado River. We are in a mega-drought, so cutbacks are being imposed by federal and state water agencies to encourage agricultural, urban, and commercial water users to cut their water use and, and stretch finite supplies as much as possible through conservation efforts.
In California, we have the State Water Resources Control Board, the state water regulator in California, and they have issued curtailment orders. Meaning, they have told water rights holders, many of whom have had those water rights for over a hundred years, that, for the first time, the water that they feel they are entitled to, is not available. Local water districts are also issuing water conservation mandates; the San Francisco water department is doing that, in Los Angeles, the metropolitan water district, is urging urban users to curtail their efforts.
And then agriculture. Agricultural users — farmers and ranchers — have had to get water rights in many cases through the federal government, as the federal government is the operator of these water projects. They have contracts with water users, individual farmers, ranchers, or districts, and they are now issuing curtailment orders. They're saying, we know you contracted for X amount of water for this calendar year, but we are telling you because of the drought shortages we don't have that water to supply. Our reservoirs are low at Lake Shasta or at the Oroville Dam.
When you drive from San Francisco to LA on the five, you see a lot of signage from the agricultural farming community about water. There's apparently some frustration about this. What are the other options for them?
About 80% of all human consumed water goes to agriculture. That is by far the biggest component of water use, as opposed to 20% used for urban and commercial, and industrial purposes.
Over the years, ranchers and farmers, and agricultural water districts assumed that the water would always be there — as we all do.
And the farmers and ranchers have, in hindsight, exacerbated the problem by bringing more and more land into production. You see on those drives between San Francisco and Los Angeles, particularly in the San Joaquin Valley, all these orchards are being planted. Orchards are more lucrative crops than row crops — cotton, alfalfa, and rice. But, if you are growing a row crop, you can leave the land fallow in times of drought.
We don't have to plant. If the water stopped there, or if it's too expensive to get, it may make economic sense, but if you have an orchard or a vineyard it's a high value, those are high value crops, you don't have that operational flexibility and they need to be irrigated in wet years and in dry years. Now, you see these orchards, which were only planted a few years ago, are now being uprooted because the farmers realized that they don't have the water necessary to keep those vineyards and orchards alive. For ranchers, the same thing is true with their herds. They don’t have enough water for their livestock.
The water shortage has never been drier than it is right now. Farmers and ranchers are being deprived of water that they traditionally believed was theirs and they're very understandably, very unhappy about it. They see it as a threat to their livelihood and to the livelihood of the folks who work for them. Their anger and frustration are to be expected, but it's nobody's fault.
To say, as some farmers do, that it is mismanagement by state and federal government officials, I think is overly simplistic and misplaced in the face of a mega-drought. Everybody's going to have to sacrifice. Everybody's going to have to be more efficient in how they use water. All sectors are going to need to be more efficient with the water that does exist.
Looking at this percentage breakdown of water use – is it actually important for individual users to change their water habits?
Well, every little bit helps. When you're talking about homeowners, about 70% of urban water use is for outdoor irrigation. So we're talking parks and cemeteries and golf courses and folks' yards. You know, that used to be considered part of that American dream and the California dream — you would have a big lawn in front of your house and behind your house. Truth be told, that has never made much sense in an arid environment. That's where the water savings in urban areas is critical in the way it really involves aesthetics rather than critical human needs, like water for drinking and bathing and sanitation purposes. There is a growing movement away from big lawns, and away from the type of landscaping that you see in the Eastern US — there is no drought in the Eastern United States. As Hurricane Ida and other recent storms have shown, the problem is too much water, or rather than too little in most of the Eastern United States. So it really is a tale of two countries.
We just need to recognize that the American West is an arid region. It has always been an arid region, we can't make the desert bloom with water that doesn't exist. We need to be more efficient in how we allocate those water supplies. And it seems to me in an urban area, the best way to conserve and most effective way is to reduce urban landscaping, which is the major component of urban water use.
You also write about water markets and making them better – for those who don’t know, what is the water market?
Water markets, that is, the voluntary transfer of water between water users, is more robust in some other Western states. Again Arizona and New Mexico come to mind. California somewhat surprisingly is behind the curve. We are in the dark ages compared to other states. Water markets are kind of anecdotal. There is not much of a statewide system. It is done at the local level, through individual transactions without much oversight and without much transparency. And I have concerns about all of those things.
I believe conceptually watermarks are a way to stretch scarce, finite water resources to make water use more efficient. I can, for example, allow farmers or ranchers to sell water to urban uses or commercial usage or factories in times of drought.
Farmers sometimes can make more money by farming water, than they can by farming crops.
There are efficiencies to be gained here.
The problem in my view is really one of transparency. The water markets are not publicly regulated, and some of the people who are engaging in water transactions like it that way, frankly, they want to operate under the radar.
In my opinion, water markets need to be overseen by a public entity rather than private or nonprofit entities. We need oversight and transparency, so that folks like you and myself can follow the markets to see who's selling water to whom, for what purpose, and make sure that those water transfers serve the public interests and not just the private interests.
There have been a number of stories in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Salt Lake City Tribune about efforts in some parts to privatize water transfer. Hedge fund managers are buying and selling water, as a means of profiting. And it strikes me that when you're talking about an essential public resource — and in California, it is embedded in the law that public water is an inherently public resource, that water is owned by the public and it can be used for private purposes, but it is an inherently public resource — the idea of commoditizing water through the private, opaque markets is very troublesome to me. I think it represents a very dangerous trend and one that needs to be corrected and avoided.
Why is California so behind?
There's no good reason for it. It's largely inexplicable that since the state was created on September 9th, 1860, we've been fighting over water. In the 19th century, it was miners versus farmers ranchers. In the 20th century, with the growth of urban communities, the evolution of California into one of the most populous states with 40 million Californians, it has been a struggle between urban and agricultural uses of water.
In the second half of the 20th century, there was a recognition that some component of water had to be left in streams to protect ecosystems, landscape, and wildlife, including the threatened and endangered wildlife. That suggestion has made agricultural users in California angry. You will see those signs that allude to the idea that food and farming are more important than environmental values. I don't happen to believe that's true. I believe both are critically important to our society. But the advocates for the environment have a proverbial seat at the water table. So that's another demand for water allocation that exists.
Do you maintain optimism?
Yes. I think it's human nature to look on the bright side. I try to do that through research scholarships and teaching. There are models for how we can do this better in the United States. Israel and Saudi Arabia and Singapore are far more efficient with their water policies and efforts. Australia went through a severe megadrought. They came out of it a few years ago, but they used that opportunity to dramatically reform their water allocation systems. That's an additional model. I think most people would agree in hindsight that their previous system was antiquated, and not able to meet the challenges of climate change and the growing water shortage in some parts of the world.
Here in the United States, we can learn from those efforts. There are also some ways to expand the water supply. Desalination for one. Again, Singapore and Saudi Arabia have led the world in terms of removing the salt content from ocean water and increasing water supply that way. In Carlsbad, California, north of San Diego, we have the biggest desalination plant in the United States right now, and that is currently satisfying a significant component of the San Diego metropolitan areas’ water needs. It's more expensive than other water supplies, but the technology is getting more refined, so the cost of desalinated water is coming down at a time when other water supplies, due to shortages and the workings of the free market are going up.
At some point, they're going to meet or get closer. Unlike some of my environmental colleagues, I think desalination is an important part of the equation.
In a proposal that came up in the recall election, one of the candidates was talking about how we just need to build a canal from the Mississippi River to California to take care of all our problems. That ignores political problems associated with that effort, as well as the massive infrastructure costs that would be required to build and maintain a major aqueduct for 2000 miles from the Mississippi to California. That's just not going to happen. Some of those pie in the sky thoughts of how we expand the water supply, I think, are unrealistic.
interviews
When Schools Become Everything Else
by Nick Melvoin
April 22, 2020
This interview with Nick Melvoin, Representative of Board District 4 on the LA Unified Board of Education, was conducted and condensed by frank news.
What is already happening within the LAUSD [The Los Angeles Unified School District] – and what are you looking ahead to?
From the beginning, we wanted to make sure we were taking this seriously. We actually closed the schools before the city and the state had stay at home orders. When we look at the curve that has flattened, at least in California, I'd like to think we had something to do with this mass wave of school closures. The reason it was so difficult for us to close, as I alluded to in the New York Times piece, is because schools are a social safety net for millions of kids around the country. We made that decision a month ago, and since then, our focus has been on triaging the needs of families.
We approached it like Maslow's Hierarchy, asking what it is that people need immediately. The first things were stability, personal health and safety. One of the first things we decided to do actually didn’t directly affect kids.
For people who didn't qualify for benefits, but who we were going to ask to do things like help us give food, we were going to provide temporary benefits throughout the length of this crisis so that we weren't asking anybody to work who didn't have health care. Before we even got to the educational aspect, as one of the largest employers in LA County, we made the decision to say that we are going to pay everybody.
Then we went to food and childcare needs. Our initial plan was to roll out 40 family centers. We closed on Friday, we were going to open family centers that next Wednesday that would provide meals and childcare for 12 hours a day. We were thinking specifically of our employees who needed support and of the first responders and medical professionals. However, we never got the sign off from public health officials because social distancing orders were coming in new waves.
We are in the midst of rethinking that bit, but in the meantime we transitioned from doing childcare to doing 64 food distribution centers. We are currently running the largest food bank in the country, serving over 5 million meals.
That was what week one looked like, food safety and checking in on the kids. Then we shifted to figuring out our core mission as a school district. We estimate about 100,000 kids don't have access to the needed technology to get online. I was getting calls from some parents like three days after the closure saying, “My friend's kid is in a private school. They're just doing their normal day on Zoom. Why hasn't that started?” I was like, well, for one, we have 100,000 kids who don't have a way to get on Zoom.
We made an emergency procurement of about $70 million to buy basically every Chromebook and iPad in the state of California, and hotspots for kids, because even if some kids had the tech, they didn’t have the internet access at home. We purchased hotspots, we purchased iPads with LTE capabilities, and we partnered with internet provider companies. Then we spent about a week getting kids tech and then started to transition and support teachers with their online learning and their professional development. It took us a few weeks to get to a point where we're at now with most students and teachers online.
Now that we have made sure that the learning is continuing, we also have to figure out what to do for the kids who haven’t signed on. Do we do home visits, do we do phone calls, how do we make sure those kids are okay? We also want to bring in a repertoire of the other services we have, counseling, college counseling, mental health family support, as we settle into what is going to be months of shutdown.
Additionally, as a government actor, we are trying to be a good partner. We procured 195,000 masks for the wildfires months ago. Though we continue to need those and to procure those, we made a donation last Friday of 100,000 to local area hospitals. We've been trying to use our purchasing power and our stockpile to support the effort. We have some really innovative teachers in classes using 3-D printers to make masks. There are different layers of this. We're continuing to provide meals, we're using our distribution networks to distribute other things to families, whether that's diapers or headphones or rent support, and then we're transitioning an entire district to online learning for likely now until fall.
It really is triage at a grand scale. Have you made progress on the childcare element of this?
Yeah. The idea is basically to use some city facilities and our schools – no more than six or seven people in a room together at any time. This wouldn't be school, this would really be just childcare. We would provide meals, we provide a clean, safe environment, but we would have service providers who would be doing childcare.
The more this evolves, the harder it's going to be. When we initially created our plan, the guidance was to have no more than 50 people in any one place. Then it went to 25, and then it went to 10. One of the frustrations on our part has been that for weeks folks from the CDC to the governor have been saying, you should still provide child care, but no one said how or yes, we approve your plan. It's been this moving target and we're getting, I think, close to a point where we can say, okay, we can move forward with a plan.
What does this look like for juniors and seniors and their college application process?
For seniors, we've been working a lot with our college counselors on virtual advising. There are some really innovative virtual college fairs happening. The UCs announced that for next year, they're not going to require the SAT or the ACT because our juniors this year, who would be taking the SAT right now, can't do that – that's a nice burden lifted. We're trying to figure out how to continue to make sure they're filling out financial aid forms. A lot of the colleges have pushed back deadlines for when kids can accept.
I was talking to a college counselor, and she said that she had had a lot of students who were looking at going out of state, who are now thinking about going in state because of the tumultuous times. One of my fears with that is that there is a lot of data around that decision and college retention for first generation students. You might think if they go closer to home, they are likely to stay in school, but actually it's the opposite. When they're close to home, there is a lot of pressure to work or to support the family, and often they will take a semester off or a year off. When kids who are first in their families to go to college leave, they're really committed. That becomes a tough tension, because I get the impulse right now for people to be closer to home. But also, we have the data around retention, and we really want students, especially those first generation kids, to have the best shot they can.
What are your guidelines and needs for reopening – independent from outside recommendations or guidelines?
It's a really important question. Even though we were one of the first to close, I was really resistant, in part because of all the social safety elements that we provide. One of the questions we had then was under what conditions are we going to reopen? It's going to be a lot harder to reopen than it is to close. I don't think we know the answer yet, and we are going to be waiting on a lot of guidance so that there's some consistency around school districts.
It looks unlikely that we're going to have a vaccine by the fall. So the question is, are we going to do temperature checks for every kid that comes in? We are procuring masks for kids and teachers, gloves, more PPE and thermometers, because we know that likely we're going to have to do some sort of temperature check, and it’s possible that we’ll be advised to have kids and adults on campuses continue wearing masks.
Maybe we have waves of reopening. There's really a lot of questions we all have to answer, and we have to answer those with guidance from public health experts. I think that testing and being clear and precise about that is going to be necessary.
Due to the fact that there can be multiple waves, I'm also encouraging the district and other districts to have the infrastructure ready, so that we could close quickly and learning could continue, should another outbreak occur. We are thinking about what normal will look like for the long term, not just the short term.
What are your biggest concerns for your students?
The things that keep me up at night are the kids for whom we know home is not a safe environment. We opened a mental health hotline last week for kids, families, for anyone. I'm doing a virtual webinar next week with folks from Cedar Sinai and others around regulating mental health at home for families. We are really nervous about the students who have not checked in, the thousands of students who have not logged onto a device. I’m concerned about students with special needs who can't choose to transition even if they had the tech because of their physical or mental challenges with just logging onto a Zoom.
One of the opportunities is to think more about student mastery of content. What they call competency based learning or mastery based learning. Let's say we reopen in the fall – students are going to be at varying levels of what they were supposed to know. This idea that you were an eighth grader, you go away for summer, and now you are a high schooler, that transition isn’t always smooth and can be difficult on students. There is an opportunity to think differently around this. I think we need to be thinking creatively about diagnostic testing at the beginning of the year. We are figuring out if we should require some sort of multi measured passing assessment before kids can go into the next grade to make sure that they're getting the stuff they need.
This is also an opportunity to think differently about summer. There's so much research that kids lose a lot of what they've gained during the school year over the summer. There are studies that test kids in schools in more and less affluent areas over summer, and the gap in learning becomes huge because affluent kids are going to camp and summer school. I want us to use this opportunity to say that maybe summer should always be a point of continuous learning. Maybe it is more online or project based, or maybe you find your greatest teachers and you have them teach thousands of kids over Zoom.
It is also exacerbating what is already a lost generation of students – all the kids who are finishing every year, but not mastering the content. Maybe this helps us re-examine all of that.
This crisis is laying bare a lot of our issues in society.
In some ways it accelerates evolutions that were taking too long, but it puts a lot of other things on pause.
I was a teacher in the district during the last recession. I got laid off every year. Thousands of teachers lost their jobs, and predominantly at lower income schools.
As we're trying to figure out how to recapture six or seven months of learning, we're going to also be trying to figure out how to keep districts like ours afloat.
What would have made a difference to you, as a teacher, during the last recession?
The state is in a better position now with a reserve they've built – so they can use that. I think if you ask others, they will say the reserve is not nearly big enough for what's coming.
The conversations around labor, around raises, though valid, all that has to stop. We really need to protect the school district and public budgets from the downturn. I spent 10 years trying to fight seniority based layoffs, inequitable layoffs that just lay off young teachers serving high need kids. I have not been successful, but any protections we can get from the legislature around equity in your lay off policies is important.
And those teachers are predominantly serving kids in high need areas. It's never been a politically popular idea because the union and the legislature had been against it, but those are the flexibilities needed so that districts can be more surgical about the allocation of resources.
What can LA residents do to be helpful?
Appreciate the question. From a public health standpoint, stay at home, don't be silly, help us flatten that curve. We have set up two funds to raise money for folks who are interested in contributing. One is called LA Students Most in Need, and One Family LA. Students Most in Need is helping the district provide food and technology infrastructure to our families. One Family LA is helping families of school children with everything from rent to groceries to medical payments.
One of the themes I keep returning to is that pandemics just take what was in the background and bring it to the foreground. These problems, whether it's housing and homelessness, or education, were all crises in their own right, and this is just exacerbating all of them. They are just compounding crises.
It has also been amazing and inspiring to see people come together in ways that I hope last. I think some of these things we're seeing from the federal government, like paid sick leave – it seems like a no-brainer that we should make sure things like that continue.