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
Fundraising off of Catastrophe
by Jecorey Arthur
December 31, 2020
This interview with Jecorey Arthur, Louisville Councilman-Elect, Professor, and Musician, was conducted and condensed by franknews. We first spoke Jecorey in August 2020.
Jecorey | I’ll just start at the beginning. I announced that I was running for Louisville Metro Council at Simmons College of Kentucky, the HBCU that I teach at. I was inspired by the fact that the HBCU should be the center of the Black community, and I wanted to bring people to that school. Little did I know that our local NPR station released a 2,500 plus word hit piece about me, calling into question whether Simmons had contributed to the campaign illegally. In the end, everything was cleared. But this hit piece was kind of a culture shock for me. That was my introduction to the world of campaign finance: getting hit with allegations of criminality.
I wasn't overly energized about raising funds. When I think of money, I think of service. I think of exchange. I think of contracts. If you're going to give me money, you need to get something in return. That is not the case with campaign finance.
I did not ask for a single donation publicly from early March for the rest of the campaign. It felt criminal or tone-deaf to be begging people for money for your campaign when they're living through the nightmare of COVID-19 and all the uncertainties that came along with it. At the time, people were rationing toilet paper and bottled water. We didn't ask for donations.
Then Amaud Aubrey was killed. George Floyd was killed. Breonna Taylor was killed. Everything that I had been talking about in my campaign had already been amplified by COVID-19, and my message was further amplified after these murders. We saw a reflection of how America treats Black people. I became a voice for racial justice in the local movement, and, honestly, I didn't have to ask for money. People heard me talking about these problems and introducing solutions to those problems, and they wanted to get behind what I was doing.
We utilized our funds to get community members PPE, and it wasn't some marketing scheme where you got a mask that says 'Vote for Jecorey.' It was just a solid black mask. We raised over $40,000 in a local race. To put that in perspective of another city council race in 2016, there was a three-way race, and the current councilwoman raised over $80,000.
frank | You're one of the first people I've spoken to who has said, I can't believe the audacity of these candidates and institutions, raising hundreds of millions of dollars, continuing to ask people for money. Do you feel like you have a conversation about the ethics of that with other people in politics or with people around you?
Well, I've had that conversation a number of times. It's really criminal when you think about it. Let's say you put together all seven candidates in my race alone, and let's say we raised a quarter-million dollars. In the end, only I won my race. Everyone else just wasted $210,000. You wasted space on that billboard. You wasted these yard signs – yards signs that I am pissed politicians still aren't picking up. Amy McGrath lost to Mitch McConnell and she still has yard signs throughout the West End of Louisville, the blackest area in this region. We got your yard signs everywhere, but you lost your race by like 20 plus points.
Amy McGrath raised over $74 million and only 3% came from inside the state. There is, as you say, the physical residue of that loss: yard signs on your constituents' lawns, but the non-physical component is that all that money came from people who will never have to bear the burden of that loss.
Amy McGrath is a perfect example of what I'm about to say: I don't believe we should give candidates money unless they have a proven track record to back up their platform. When I talk about creating jobs, I have already been doing that through my business and through arts organizing. When I talk about education, I've been to over 120 schools out of the 150 schools in this school district. I have already been doing education work. When I talk about housing, it's rooted in my lived experience. And some of that experience is personal, some of it is professional.
Mitch McConnell said this about Amy McGrath, and some people thought it was funny and some people thought it was kind of sexist, he said, you ran on a platform of being a mother and being a Marine. I was already saying that before McConnell.
You can't talk to me about racial injustice as a white woman who lives far removed from what I'm going through if you have never worked on racial justice or racial injustice. You can't talk to me about how to deal with this pandemic if, at the bare minimum, you have never worked with aging healthcare facilities, worked with healthcare facilities in general. You've never volunteered. You've never spoken up and advocated for them.
She was selling hopes and dreams, and if I have no reason to believe that you are going to make my hopes and dreams come true, I shouldn't give you money. You don't deserve my money. You gotta know what you're paying for. Would you go to a restaurant and give them your money if they had an F health rating? Well, McGrath basically had no rating at all. She had no experience.
Do you think you need to raise that much money to be competitive in congressional and Senate races?
If I had a burger, and instead of being made out of beef, it was made of feces, it does not matter how much money I spend on marketing. It is still going to be a feces burger no matter what. In the case of that race, you had a Democrat with a nothing-burger. Meanwhile, Kentuckians were starving. We didn’t really know what she stood for until the end.
And that raised another question of, do you really care about serving people?
I mean, she had a decent amount of money left over and I think she made a PAC. Was it ever about the people you're supposed to serve? How much of that money have you pocketed? We have to raise these questions.
How do you begin to change the narrative that raising this much money is a democratic success?
Organizing. That takes us away from the politician, and it takes us to the people.
Organizing is the way that we counter this, and we change this mindset. There are 26 Metro council members in Louisville, Kentucky, and all 26 of them have 26,000 constituents. There are way more of the constituents than politicians representing those constituents. What would happen if all 26,000 of your constituents organized around an issue?
What does that look like to a representative? On average, in my city, you might get hit up a few times a week, maybe dozens of times. But if you get thousands of calls for justice on a specific issue, that level of political engagement is going to cause change. The president at the HBCU I teach at, Dr. Kevin Cosby, says that politicians don't change because they see the light, they change because they feel the heat. And over the summer we thought we felt some heat, but I truly believe if we were organized, that was just preheat. And we were only going to turn it up.
I was impressed with the level of political engagement when these protests were at their peak. People were watching council meetings and disappointed that it took so long. People were engaging in politics when before they never even knew who their city councilperson was. I was so impressed, but you have been living in the city for many decades, and you're just now getting politically engaged in a process that controls your life?
I’m surprised people aren’t rioting more, and over other issues, like poverty.
A lot of people just don't know the numbers. Or, if they do know the numbers, if the people in power know the truth — they just hide it, ignore it, or perpetuate it. What we as the people have to realize is that politicians do what we allow them to do. And if we're not organizing around issues, it's almost like some of those protests happened in vain. It's almost like Breonna Taylor died in vain. It's almost like Dr. Martin Luther King died in vain because we did not have the amount of care that it took to continue fighting.
Of course, it's going to get cold. Of course, it is going to be hard. Of course, there's going to be so many hurdles and obstacles and battles on the way, but we ain't free yet. There's so much left to do. And people were having parades and brunches when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won.
I think we use the word change all the time and people really don't mean it. It just sounds cute.
People aren’t serious, period. I was on Twitter earlier, watching this debate happen because some woman calling the GOP “fuckers”. No serious person could possibly think this mattered.
Yeah. They're unserious.
Yeah. It just feels like some sort of dishonesty that people are contributing to in order to participate in the game that they know is a game.
Yeah. I'm constantly disappointed in some of our adults. It's crazy. I mean, even over the summer, some of these people’s whole lives and whole identity were centered around protesting. A protest is just a tool, but what are you doing now?
It makes me wonder, how long has it been this way? And when will we see some actual uprising and some seriousness in terms of change? Because right now, people aren't serious. It's very disturbing.
I was just on a call earlier about housing. There's this woman who was in charge of an office that they were essentially trying to discredit by saying she doesn't do her job. Their solution was to create other initiatives that basically did her job for her. Well, okay, but she makes over a hundred thousand a year and you help pay for her salary. Instead of calling her and emailing her and pulling up on her and making sure she is doing her job, you're going to try and do her job, halfway? While taking donations from poor people to do it? No. Don't let these people off the hook.
That's it. That's the reminder. People just need to go spend one day in like dingy Congress to get rid of this idea that they know better than you. They don't know better than you. They know what you tell them is the truth.
I alluded to this earlier, but I want to really say it plainly: because of our wealth position, our interests end up not really being represented in government. It takes so much work on the back end to get politicians to commit to our needs. The average Black family is worth $1,700. We aren't going to max out on our campaign contribution if we even donate to campaigns.
Of course, it is illegal for favors in exchange for campaign contributions to exist, but they definitely exist. And if you have a group of people who aren't involved in campaign contributions at all, you have to ask, is that why we're not getting our needs met?
The National League of Cities, released an agenda of what they would like to see from Biden and Harris. And the Black Caucus, might as well have not contributed to it at all. It had no value to us, and no reflection of what we're going through.
And on the flip side, how engaged are we? I'm not even in office yet, and I get emails and phone calls every day from some group wanting to talk to me about funding something, or acquiring some building, or getting my support on something. And these are all white groups with interests that have nothing to do with Black people in our city. Politicians need to be held accountable, and we also need to be held accountable. We can't just engage during the election cycle; we have to engage all year around because they are making decisions to impact your life all the time.