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
Sustaining the Local News Ecosystem
by L. Rashad Mahmood
June 16, 2021
This interview with L.Rashad Mahmood, co-director of the New Mexico Local News Fund, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Rashad | I came to journalism in a really roundabout way. I studied international relations and Middle East politics in college. I then got a master's in middle east politics.
I ended up living in Cairo, working for the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt as a business analyst. I then worked for the United States Institute of Peace, a government-funded think tank. I worked for them in Iraq. I went back to Egypt with my wife, and when I was looking for a job my old boss at the American Chamber of Commerce offered me work as a journalist for their business magazine, and I took him up on the offer, journalism had always been in the back of my mind as something that I was interested in. I just think journalism is so critical. The desire to be informed about what is going on in the world around you is just this basic need all humans have.
Eventually, my wife got a job at the University of New Mexico as a professor and I got a job at the local public radio station here, KUNM. After five years at KUNM, I was looking for other opportunities when my now co-director Sarah Gustavus founded the New Mexico Local News Fund and invited me to join her.
frank | Can you tell us more about the New Mexico Local News Fund?
We started in 2019. We were founded by Sarah Gustavus, an experienced journalist in New Mexico who had worked for a number of newsrooms here.
We think of the local news media landscape as not just several individual stations -- but a local news ecosystem that needs support. Sarah conducted assessments through meetings with the public and with journalists about what needed to happen to support that ecosystem. She then secured funding from the Democracy Fund, our major funder, and created our initial programming. Our goal is to support the local news and information needs of New Mexicans — whether that means working with existing media organizations, community organizations, the creation of new forms of media, or new organizations.
We don't want to turn a blind eye to the many communities in New Mexico, and across the country, that feel that mainstream media hasn't served their news and information needs well. Lower-income communities, communities of color, rural communities, often have no one to report on what is going on.
What does specific programming look like?
Our programming came directly out of the needs articulated in the assessments.
The first thing every news organization said was that they need more resources to do their jobs. And that is true all over the country. Revenue has declined for all sorts of news.
We also spoke with recent graduates who wanted to be journalists here in New Mexico, but because of a lack of resources, there are no entry-level journalism jobs. That means people from New Mexico, who know the community best, that want to be a journalist, are leaving for Texas or Arizona or Colorado.
We created a fellowship program based at the University of New Mexico that funds the first year out of college for three or four recent graduates. They get placed in newsrooms around the state and grow as journalists and the newsroom gets an extra, much-needed staff person. Many of the fellows have gone on to have successful journalism jobs here in New Mexico afterward, which really validates our vision.
Another important thing is that, even though there is a majority of people of color in New Mexico, the media landscape doesn't look like that. Our universities do, though. One of the priorities for the fellowship was to provide opportunities for diverse New Mexicans to get into journalism. We've been succeeding in that as well.
We also support collaboration between newsrooms. We see it as a tool for strengthening the ecosystem as a whole. If you're a small newspaper in rural New Mexico, there's just no way that you're going to be able to accurately and fully report on what's going on during the legislative session. But, if you can create networks of newsrooms working together, then you can inform your audience through those larger reporting networks, and provide a better service to your community. We did a series of collaborative grants to newsrooms and newsrooms and community groups working together. That was really successful.
New Mexico is not a wealthy state compared to a lot of other places. There's limited capacity for funding for philanthropy. One of our priorities is to try to encourage funders to invest in journalism in New Mexico. And obviously, The Democracy Fund has done that in a big way.
Are you philanthropically funded?
Yes. The Democracy Fund’s founder is Pierre Omidyar, who started eBay. The Democracy Fund supports a number of areas, and local journalism is one of their top priorities.
It is obvious that the business model of local news has been eviscerated. Is the future philanthropy, is there a role for government, or do you think there is another way to make money?
I was talking with my co-director about this just before this.
I do think there is potentially a role for the government in funding local news. Personally, I'm more comfortable advocating for government funding of civic engagement rather than a direct investment in journalism. That is something that I have evolved on overtime.
At first, I thought the potential conflict of interests was too immense. If you want local journalism to be holding the government accountable, how can that be done with government funding? But, increasingly there are models that I think have a lot of promise. New Jersey just launched the first round of grants from their state-funded civic information consortium. Some parts of the country are experimenting with investment zones.
I think there is a role for government, but I think more important and more promising is the shift towards nonprofit and field philanthropic funded news. There are huge swaths of our society that we just accept are funded by philanthropy: food banks and homeless shelters, and we're not like those homeless shelters need to find a better business model. I think I have come to accept that, especially in smaller communities, journalism needs support and investment from philanthropic sources. As a society, we have to decide that journalism is important enough and worthy of support.
Do you find that philanthropies have any hangups about investing in local news?
A lot of funders are used to very concrete outputs. For example, with this grant, I will feed 200 meals to homeless people. You can't really do that with journalism. The outputs aren't as well defined. For a lot of funders, it is outside of the framework that they're used to thinking about.
Right. I feel like there can be just as many concerns about the influence that comes with philanthropic funding, as there is with government funding.
That can be tricky: finding a funder that is willing to relinquish control. It is possible but it is hard.
I'm curious if either anecdotally or empirically, you can speak to what local journalism leaves behind?
There are several effects from the lack of access to news and information in communities. It's hard to quantify obviously, but there was one study that showed when the local newspaper closes the city's lending rate goes up because as a lender if there's less accountability you are more worried.
In a qualitative sense, there are definitely effects on lack of accountability and local government. Here in New Mexico, it shows. We have had so many cases of corruption in the sheriff's department, in the mayors’ offices, or in city councils in smaller towns where abuse of power can run rampant until it gets so bad that it gets out to a larger audience or a larger publication. Often these things have been going on for years and had there been local reporting, picking at the story, it could have been exposed much earlier.
Another thing that is lost is just the sense of community. We are working with a new startup in Columbus, New Mexico, which is a town of fewer than 2000 people right on the border of Mexico. Until recently, they had no source of local news. The closest town that has its own paper is a 40-minute drive from them — a newspaper that is already understaffed.
The startup, Columbus News, was telling me that the town has three Facebook groups just devoted to town news. I think that's great, personally.
So they would form one Facebook group and apparently it would get so politically divisive that someone would break off and start a new Facebook group. And then someone broke off from the second group to start a third group.
CNN, MSNBC, Fox News…
Right, exactly.
There's so much demand for it. People really have this innate need to know. I think we're realizing that. For a long time, people wrote off smaller publications. There was this attitude that the march of technology is just going to inevitably make them obsolete and technology will solve all our problems and we'll live in this information tech utopia. Over time, we've come to realize that's not how people work. We need real local sources of information.
I feel like we hear over and over again that algorithms give us exactly what we want, and we can never go back. But I wonder if we want more and if we are smarter than we give ourselves credit for, in a way.
I think we're in this weird phase of adjustment as a society right now — not just here in the US, but all over the world. If you think about it, the internet and all the things that come with it, Facebook and social media, are basically brand new. I am not THAT old, but I grew up completely without the internet. I just think it's inevitable that it's going to take us a generation or two to figure these things out and come to a more stable place. I think as a society we are coming to acknowledge that we need more.
Right. What else do you feel is important for people to know?
Well, while there is this trend towards more philanthropy and funding for local journalism in general, I think the focus really needs to be on rural and lower-income communities. So much money ends up going to these institutions in big cities, which have big communities that could support themselves. The real need is with communities that can't support local journalism themselves.
This is emerging as a priority for us as an organization, and for me as an individual. I think it is really crucial to be an advocate for these small newsrooms that don't have access to funding networks.
That makes sense. Thank you so much for your time.
Thank you so much for taking the time to talk!