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 Perennial Endeavor to "Save" Education
by Sarah Reckhow
May 6, 2021
This interview with Sarah Reckhow, associate professor in the political science department at Michigan State University and author of Follow the Money: How Foundation Dollars Change Public School Politics, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Sarah | My work is on philanthropy in politics, education, policy, and urban politics. I've studied the role of big philanthropy in urban school district reforms, including cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Detroit. I've also looked more recently at the way city budgets have been impacted, especially rust belt cities, and how philanthropy is stepping in where there's fiscal austerity.
frank | How did you find yourself looking at philanthropy in this way?
In a nutshell, from 2002 to 2004, I was a Teach for America Corps member. I taught high school in Baltimore before I went to graduate school. At the time I was teaching high school, I had a lot of friends and colleagues teaching in other high schools in Baltimore city. A peculiar thing was going on in Baltimore.
Texas Historical Commission. [University Junior High School, (UT Child Care Center - interior hallway lockers)], photograph, April 1, 1998; (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth962154/: accessed May 7, 2021), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas Historical Commission.
Suddenly, these schools were thrown into plans where they were just going to build walls in the halls, and one school is on one side of the hallway, and one is on the other side. I had a vague sense at the time that the Gates Foundation was involved, but didn't have any kind of systematic understanding about how they were involved.
After that, I went to grad school to study political science and ended up working on a project on Oakland school reform. What I had observed in Baltimore was happening there. We essentially looked at local nonprofit organizations that were involved in partnering with the school district to set up these small schools.
Our research interest had very little to do with philanthropy specifically; I actually think we were pretty naive about the role of philanthropy at the beginning. When I went out to do the interviews with board members, school administrators, local nonprofit leaders, they kept talking about the Gates Foundation and the Broad Foundation, and others. At that point, I started to reformulate my dissertation and focus it on philanthropy. I thought what was going on with philanthropy in these cases was clearly political and that it was something we should be studying political scientists. So I decided to do that.
Why were they doing this?
This is the early 2000s. The Gates Foundation was pretty new at this point in time and their first big initiative in education reform was a push for small schools. There had been earlier reforms in the 90s centered around this idea that high schools needed to be smaller and more personalized in order to better address the needs of students. This idea predates the foundations' involvement. In Oakland, for example, there were grassroots organizations that had coalesced around the idea of small schools.
I think Bill Gates latched onto this specific idea and Tom Vander Ark, who was doing the education programming at the time, was also very enamored with this idea. When the Gates Foundation became involved, the approach to implementation significantly changed from the way nonprofits had been approaching it. It became about expanding quickly, scaling up quickly, and figuring out ways that you replicate practices so that you can do things faster. They saw it as, “We're going to take this kernel of an idea and we're going to try to implement it on school district-wide scales in places like Oakland and New York City and Denver. And we think it's going to transform high schools.”
What was the effect? There's always the threat of paternalism, was that at play here?
The two cities I looked at most closely were Oakland and New York. What I think you could say here is that, in one sense, the foundation, by significantly ratcheting up the resources involved in efforts that were originally locally rooted, was positive. It gave these organizations more money to expand their ideas and do exciting things. However, there is a but.
They were working with school district administrations to figure out a systematic transformation of high school, after high school, and that extended into communities and neighborhoods where there wasn't a preexisting nonprofit already involved in this work, or maybe the community didn't want their high school renamed and broken up into smaller chunks. That becomes a real issue. People feel very strong attachments and identities a lot of times with their neighborhood high school and the athletics and the bands and all the things that go along with that.
What do extracurriculars look like when you go from high schools that have 1500 students to 300 students? New York started to see some real inequalities between resources at the schools.
The reformulation towards a more top-down approach to implementing it, which came with the large infusion of money was probably the biggest thing that started to create pushback in both communities. And over the longer term, financially, it is a little harder to sustain a large number of small schools. You're paying more principal salaries, you are sustaining more separate schools as organizations and institutions. Can you still do that financially? Oakland, which has had some financial difficulties as a city, started to roll back some of this for those financial reasons.
What does the community want is an undervalued question. Dollar for dollar, how does this money get spent?
That's a big question, and it changes over time. What I can say from my work in the early 2000s is that the major funders started to pick cities to focus on. So that's part of this Oakland and New York story, but other places apply as well. Washington DC is another one. New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina as well. Chicago is one. So, first of all, some cities are getting far more money on a per people basis than others.
As you press into that, and interrogate where that money is actually going, you see it is not going so much directly to the public sector, but going to nonprofits that either work in partnership with the school district or charter schools.
Why? What does that say about the philosophy of philanthropic giving?
To some extent, this comes from the philosophy of the funders. Whether it was a belief in charters as an alternative to public schools, or it was this idea that nonprofits could work more efficiently, be more innovative, and be more responsive — this certainly directs the money.
There was a degree to which some school districts really try to attract funding and to demonstrate to funders. There was a lot of that in New York City under Mayor Bloomberg. They had a very proactive approach for public schools that got a lot of philanthropic grants.
I also think it is worth pointing out a certain point for the public sector, in accepting these philanthropic funds, there is always going to be scrutiny about whether this money is driving their agenda.
Why are the largest donors and foundations so focused on education?
This is just one of these very basic features of philanthropy. Education is dominant. It's perennial. You can look to earlier philanthropic funding to see its roots. The Annenberg Foundation did a huge initiative around schools in the nineties. You can go back to earlier grants from the Ford Foundation where education was a major share of their grant funding.
As to why that is the case, I mean, philanthropists have ideas about changing the world and it might be that children and the youth are the logical places to focus their work when thinking about the future. I mean, I don't know to what extent that is true, but kids look good on brochures.
Do you have a positive outlook on how education will continue to change? With or without philanthropy?
On the one hand, I think a lot of things about the era of philanthropy I studied most closely, the early 2000s, coincided with No Child Left Behind being passed, the rise of accountability and standard-based movement, the rise of charter schools, and a lot of technocratically framed policy through the federal level. This extends from Bush to Obama. You could say the time frame extends right up until 2015 and the adoption of the Every Student Succeeds Act, which really softened some aspects of No Child Left Behind.
US National Archives
Right, education was a huge piece of Bush’s 1999 campaign.
I think there were things about the federal policy landscape at that time that were conducive to a certain type of philanthropy. There was a shared mindset around an accountability framework, a technocratic approach to policymaking. I'm not necessarily trying to weigh all the pros and cons of all that mindset, that era seems to have had an endpoint.
We're in a different moment in education philanthropy that I cannot myself totally characterize yet. The ideas about formulating top-down approaches to transform school districts are a lot less salient now than they once were.
I worry about the investment in public institutions and how they're able to maintain themselves in their own right, and not have to fall back on philanthropy, particularly with the pandemic.
Schools are losing enrollment during the pandemic. We have hugely bitter political fights over schools reopening all over the country. We've had the flat-footed response at every level of government in terms of how schools operated over the last year. It is not a good look. And I worry, in moments like this, when the public sector looks as weak as it does, that this is where it can look really attractive for external groups to come in as the "saving entity."