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
The Police and Public Health
by Melissa Morabito
August 16, 2020
This interview with Melissa Morabito, a professor in the Criminal Justice department at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and an expert on police response to public health problems, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Melissa | There are spaces that we don't necessarily want the police to be in, and the police don't necessarily want to be in, but they're there. I look at police responses to people with mental illnesses. I look at police response to sexual assault. I have a new project looking at public schools and police.
frank | How did it come to be that the police are the ones to call for all these situations?
The police create this boundary for unpleasant things we don't want to deal with, we rely on them because it's easier. I always give my students the example of an officer friend responding to a noise complaint during the first week on the job, and it was a woman who had turned her music up while she was vacuuming, but had refused to turn it down for her neighbor, so he called the police.
On top of the socialization piece, we have not fully funded alternative systems in these areas. Think about mental illness. We know that we built community mental health centers, but we established no funding for them. So you had people who were let go right out of psychiatric hospitals, and there was no community healthcare provider for them.
People ask, “what do we do about police response to homelessness?” Well, we can provide housing for people, but the police can't do that. They're still going to end up getting called when a person has been living in front of a business or in front of someone's house. And as long as those calls persist, the police have to figure out something to do there to keep the community happy and engaged.
Even if we fully fund other sorts of services, I think that there will always be times where the police are the ones who show up. That's a concern for me with the conversation around defunding the police because if the police are going to show up, we want them to be the best possible when they get there.
Does it feel plausible to socialize other outlets, different versions of 911?
Some cities have worked with 311, which is a non-police information line. In Houston, they have a behavioral health version of 911.
I mean, the Tampa Police Department put up some of the craziest 911 calls on Youtube - I am talking about calls completely unrelated to criminal activity, but people don't know where else to call. In many communities, it is the only 24 hours a day number that you can call and you can get somebody.
And if the police are to respond, what is the framework that underlines how they approach these crises?
If you're looking at police response, there are a few models. There's the Crisis Intervention Team (CIT), which came out of Memphis, Tennessee from Lieutenant Sam Proctor - you train 10% of your police department as CIT officers. They go through 40-hour training, they wear special pins so that the community members know who they are, and there is a partnership with a local hospital.
Co-Responders is another model. This is also the model in Boston, MA where I am the evaluator. In this model, a clinician rides along with a police officer. The clinician has access to medical records that the police officer doesn't and should have access to. For example, they know where and by whom someone is being treated so they can connect those pieces. The idea is the police officer makes sure everything is safe, and the clinician would then take over.
Can you see a change in the decision-making process when these models are used?
There has been research that shows that the training does reduce stigma. In that sense, it's an evidence-based practice. But terms of long term outcomes for people with mental illnesses, it is still unclear.
You wrote in one of your papers, “Not surprisingly because they are policed based interventions, they have historically been evaluated on quantifiable police outcomes."
What do you mean by that?
A police department is interested in what's happening at that moment.
Was force used? Are they able to deescalate the situation? If a person has committed a crime, how was it handled? Was that person arrested? They don't want to have a lot of arrests of people with mental illnesses because they know that that's not going to help, especially for a low-level offense where they will be right back out.
For a long time, taking that person to the emergency department was considered to be a successful outcome. But when we look at what happens for people who go to EDs they're unlikely to get hooked up with long term care. They're going to be patched up, and then they're going to be sent back on their way for this whole cycle to happen again. But for police departments, they're just concerned with what happens at that moment because that's what they're tasked with doing.
As a researcher, I want to know what happens next. And what are the outcomes with a crisis intervention team versus co-responders versus another approach? And are there long term benefits to the person? Are they more likely to get his housing? Are they more likely to get access to drug treatment if that's what they want?
What do you think the best approach is moving forward?
I think we need more relationships between police and mental health providers. On the emergency services side, we need to keep up in the partnerships.
If we are thinking long term, we need to fund other services, and we need housing for our most vulnerable people.
I think we want to continue training police and creating these partnerships for those times of crisis, but I think, overall, we just want to reduce the number of crises. I think we do that by beefing up some of the other services.
For me, when I hear “defund the police,” I hear let's move funding to take away some of those responsibilities from the police and put them where they should be. We know that these things are possible with money, but there has to be a political will to do that.
What do you make of the push for reform and abolition?
I'm really happy to have these conversations and I'm so glad that they're occurring. I think discussions about reform and abolition and defunding are important.
I think we need to start off with an honest accounting of what that job looks like, what we want them to do, and what we don't want them to do. If we want that job description to change, how do we take those responsibilities away and who do we give them to? I'm not a big fan of just saying, we're going to take all money away. Because in a time of crisis, if you call 911 and if they're not ready to respond right that is a problem.
Also, 911 call takers and dispatchers make the decision of who to send. And 911 call takers are frequently left out of reform efforts. That was one of the big problems with community policing. A lot of communities didn’t train the dispatchers. So they didn't care that you were problem-solving and talking to community members, they were going to respond to the next call.
How do you feel like the reputation of police officers affects their ability to police and the interactions that they have?
We can look back at history. This is not the first time we've been here. If we think about the 1960s, you had Kent state, you had the Vietnam War protests, you had civil rights protests, you had rioting throughout cities.
Police morale was at an all-time low, crime was at an all-time high, and budgets were low. And they came back from that. I think it will come back around, and officers will retain the legitimacy that they had before. Even now, if you look at polls of police officers, people generally will say that they don't like police officers, but when you ask them about the police officers in their community they have a much higher rating for them.
In the 1990s where there was a big push for transparency. There are things now that came out of that. You go on websites for most major police departments and you can pull up crime data. You could never do that before. You can find out a lot about what's happening in your community because it was demanded.
Now, there is a lot of discussion about officers who have a lot of complaints who are not fired, and instead given the opportunity to be very resigned and can move from one department to another. The police community owes it to us to make sure that they do not become police officers. If they're doing such a bad job, that your department is telling them they need to leave, there needs to be a way to make sure that they can't work someplace else.
Why hasn't that happened?
Well, I mean, it's the same reason that businesses allow people to resign rather than fire them: because we don't want a lawsuit. We hope they will get another job and it won't be a problem.
I don't think that what happens in policing is so different in that regard from the corporate world, but the implications are much greater.
What needs to be done about addressing racism directly?
There needs to be greater transparency in the discussion about where resources are put in communities and which communities are going to receive the bulk of patrolling.
Are police departments organized locally? Who is in charge of coming out and saying that they are going to make these changes?
There are between 12,000 and 18,000 police departments. And I can't tell you how many, because police departments can open up and shut down at any time and they don't need to tell anybody.
We have designed it on purpose because they are hyperlocal. When we look at the national incident-based reporting system and when we look at those national crime numbers, that is all voluntary response. They are not required to submit to the federal government.
Who knew.
There has been a big push in Congress to collect more data, but again, they can not mandate it.
What do you think about that?
States that will create their own posts, officer standards, and training, and they will set minimum standards for the state. And then you have departments that may go above and beyond. But states can require that the police department do something, and the federal government can not.
Interesting. Have you seen a push by states to get more information and data from their local police departments?
Absolutely. Here in Massachusetts, there is a big push for reform. They're pushing for a Peace Officers Standards and Training (POST) to set minimum standards in Massachusetts, which we never had because we didn't think we needed it, apparently.
Academy training is decided either by the individual department or by the state, depending on what type of Academy. Most police departments don't have their own police Academy, they're not big enough. They will go to a regional one, or a larger city.
And are they public or private academies?
In the Northeast, they're all public. If you go down to Florida, you can go to a community college academy, which you can pay for yourself and then put yourself out to be hired. So it depends on which part of the country you're in. The standards are very different all over - some of the more rural areas the rules are quite flexible.
In parts of Louisiana, if you work 35 hours a week or less, you never have to have to go through the Academy because you are considered part-time.
Do you think there needs to be some sort of blanketed national police exam that you need to pass in order to carry a gun?
But what would that entail? Really?
I don't know...
When I think about it, like universally, every police officer has to qualify with their firearm. They have to know how to use it. When you think about it, most police officers will never even pull their weapon out of their holster, and they never fire it except in training. Research tells if they're not great shots.
What happens on top of that, that is different across communities and across states. So what would a blanket policy look like?