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
Crude Accounting
by Stacey Walker
December 17, 2020
This interview with Stacey Walker, Linn County Supervisor, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | Happy to have you back. How was your personal experience in fundraising for your campaign?
Stacey | Happy to be back. County races in Iowa typically aren't the races that you think about when you're talking about campaign finance reform. People running for county office, supervisor, county auditor, county treasurer, county recorder, county sheriff, county attorney, are probably raising well under six figures.
In my race, I raised under a hundred thousand dollars. I think we were between $60 and $80,000. There have been some anomalies, but typically county races stay below six figures. State house and state senate races, on the other hand, can raise over a million dollars depending on how competitive the seat is. That is largely a function of outside interests pouring money into those campaigns. At the county level, you don't see a whole lot of outside groups eager to spend money in that way.
I imagine the majority of your money came from small donors in small increments?
Absolutely. Over 90 percent was from small individual donors and almost all of my contributions came from individuals inside the state. In fact, most of them came from individuals inside the county. As a matter of policy preference, I would prefer that my funding come from small donors and from local folks. But this came down to the fact that special interests were not concerned in a county supervisors vision for that community. These folks typically want tax laws changed. They want marijuana legalized. They want abortion prohibited. And the folks that make those decisions operate at the state and federal level, so that's where you see the influx of money.
Is there any public financing system or option in Iowa?
There's nothing codified by law. I will tell you that I've had some conversations with a few individuals connected to Senator Bernie Sanders, who are thinking about running in the 2022 cycle for different offices around the state. There is an ongoing conversation about how resources could be pooled between candidates running on similar platforms. It was an idea that was floated.
What would it look like if our fundraising events were such that several of us could speak to the same group of people at a given time? And if people were to give, those funds either be distributed equally or put to best use where the candidates need them.
This idea of collaboration between like minds doesn't solve the problem of big money in politics, but it can increase access. It could democratize the electoral process for individuals who aren't connected to monied interests, who aren't individually wealthy, whose professional networks don't include millionaires who can write really big checks. It allows everyday people to hitch their wagon to an ideology. Ideology no longer drives elections, which is terribly unfortunate. But, in this case, you can say here's the team, this is what we believe in, we all believe in this, help this ideology win.
Joni Ernst’s race in Iowa raised over $200 million, the second most expensive Senate race ever. We saw it in Lindsey Graham’s race as well. We see it now in Georgia. What do you make of raising and spending that much money for these seats – especially without a guaranteed outcome, proven in some of these races where the most moneyed candidate didn’t win?
I think there are a lot of lessons. As you mentioned, the Iowa Senate race from this past cycle claimed the number two spot being the second, most expensive Senate race in history. That was second to Jamie Harrison's challenge to Lindsey Graham. The Iowa Senate race cost $218 million in total. The Democrat, Teresa Greenfield, who outraised Joni Ernst, lost, and lost pretty handily.
Lesson number one, which isn't a very popular lesson in the narrative of campaign finance reform, is that it's not always the case that the candidate with the most money wins the race. Usually it is the case, but not always.
That should make us question: One, is all this money necessary, and two, can candidates effectively spend that much money?
Also, what are you doing with $15 million leftover cash on hand?
It's at the prerogative of the candidate. Candidates can make contributions to other nonprofits. Candidates can make contributions to other campaigns. We had a Republican challenger to our Republican governor here in Iowa. I knew this guy pretty well. He lost the primary and had a bunch of money in his campaign account. He said it wasn't even a week after he lost the primary when he started getting all these phone calls from Republican leaders in the party who had all these ideas as to how he could invest, if you will, his leftover campaign funds. He intimated that the conversations suggested that if he were to support this cause or this candidate, there may be opportunities for him in the future of the party. This happens often. We've had people caught by the FBI trying to sell future seats to people at a premium. In recent memory, there was a case where Rod Blagojevich tried to sell former Senator Barack Obama's seat to the highest bidder. What happens when you end the campaign and there are millions of dollars still in the bank is an interesting question.
The money raised in the Iowa senate race, or other high profile senate races, came from somewhere. It certainly didn't come from Iowa. I think in Jamie Harrison's race over 90% of the money raised came from outside of the state. These are people who can't actually vote for the person running for office that are having an outsized impact on the electoral outcome. And in this case, the person who raised the most money didn't win. The case in Iowa was similar.
I think a lot about the ethics of fundraising during a time of economic depression and joblessness. The panicked tone from Biden’s campaign team about getting $20 from you, and then the data says, actually yeah those emails worked, many people who couldn’t spare $20 were scared enough to keep donating – it just sits wrong.
You hit on a lot. Joe Biden would have been just fine if you didn't send him 50 bucks, but you felt compelled to do so because you're reading all of these communications from the campaign that makes it seem like if you don't send 50 bucks, everything's going to go to hell in a handbasket.
I think it opens the door to a conversation around ethics in campaigning and ethics in fundraising. As an ethical exercise, if it is the case that we have a system right now that allows candidates to raise obscene amounts of money from people who can afford to give it, is there an ethical question about going to people who can't afford to give. There are all sorts of questions you can ask that dovetail from there. Citizens United treats money as political speech. You, like anybody else, have the right to exercise political speech through your contribution, but making it seem like you have to, is, I would say, unethical.
And when you get these emails, it tells you this is how much our campaign has raised, and this how much the other campaign has raised.
That makes politics hard for me to stomach. You divorce people's political platforms and their views from the equation. And now it is, I need to keep giving to this candidate because look how much money they raised, or I need to give more to this candidate because their opponent is raising more money. And that is what the race becomes. That is not a good thing.
I think it's widely recognized that there are deep structural failures in how we do elections. For one, this system of money has an impact on who gets to run for office. I mean the DCCC, the DSCC, and the DGA would likely never support a person running for office who wasn't already connected to monied networks. They wouldn't do it. They have an interest in finding wealthy people who have wealthy friends to recruit them to run for office. And then they place these expectations on these individuals by saying, we're only going to support you if you raise $6 million in your first quarter.
A teacher from a low-income neighborhood, who probably has incredible insights into our education system, is never going to be able to compete with that and is never going to be able to run for office. The musician who has an idea about how we can transform the social fabric of this nation, but is a starving artist, is never going to be able to compete with the developer from Des Moines like Theresa Greenfield who had people backing her who treat electoral contests as investments.
That's essentially what it is. There is this fascinating case study where people who are experts at picking winning stocks are bringing this applied knowledge of analyzing data and trends to politics. When you see a lot of Wall Street investors, maxing out to certain candidates, it's because they believe for whatever reason that these candidates are going to win. And they will give to Republicans and Democrats equally, they are partisan agnostic. They want to give to the person they think is going to win, because they expect something in return.
Do you think it's possible to return to a federal financing system?
I think progressives who actually want a public campaign finance system are in a catch 22. In order to be effective and win a seat in this system, you need to be able to spend as much money as your opponent. You need to be up on TV as much as they are up on TV. It's not in the interest of the institution to have people who are supporting campaign finance reform. The institution is sort of biased towards those folks who want to preserve it. That is not a new concept.
Right. I mean AOC launched a PAC earlier this year.
I get it. I get why AOC has a PAC. I understand it. The democratic party, in so many ways, is spending money to move her out of the Democratic party. There is this need to fight fire with fire.
It's tough. What I will say is this, I'm an eternal optimist but not naive. There was a time 30 or 40 years ago when grassroots activists working to reform our criminal legal system were talking about defunding bloated police department budgets.
That wasn't a conversation that just happened this summer. It is something people have been working at for decades. And now, largely because of this confluence of activity over the summer, the human rights movement for Black liberation has gained more traction. We've gotten major cities across America rethinking their police budgets. That is something that most observers of American politics would have told you would never happen just two years ago. I believe in movement politics. I can see a space in a time where movement politics addresses campaign finance reform with the same energy and efficacy as it has addressed many other issues throughout the history of this country. Its time may come, but right now all of the good women and men in politics advocating for it can't be an advocate for this issue inside of the system, unless they win the election. And it takes big money to win, hence the catch-22.
“Money in politics” has become a catch-all. What does it mean to you, what’s most concerning about the confluence of money and politics to you?
The fact that a corporation or an extremely wealthy person can write a check for as much money as they want. I can write a million-dollar check, a $10 million check to a super PAC that is explicitly engaging and influencing an election. The fact that they can do that is very concerning. And they can do this without people knowing who they are. Depending on the type of political entity, their information can be withheld from the public. The PAC can spend money without having to tell people where they got their money from. That seems to be an egregious violation of the spirit of an open democracy, which at some point or another most people in America believed we had and thought was a good idea. It's bad for a number of reasons, but it's scary and it's dangerous because we all know that corporations don't have to exist for the public good. In fact, most corporations don't exist for the public good. They exist explicitly to enrich their stakeholders and shareholders. So if it is the case that these monstrous entities are able to influence democratic elections, then you have to wonder what the long-term impact of that is.
We have politicians now openly questioning climate science, because the vast majority of corporations buying these politicians have interests that are contrary to saving the environment. We have a bloated criminal legal system, and bloated a prison industrial complex.
That is the antithesis of a free and open democracy. That is moving us toward oligarchy. I think most sophisticated observers of American politics would tell you we’re probably there. I don't believe that we are at the point of no return, but I do believe we're very close.