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
Cutting Without Conscience
by Dan Kennedy
June 17, 2021
This interview with Dan Kennedy, professor of journalism at Northeastern University, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Dan | I'm a professor of journalism at Northeastern University and a part-time contributor to GBH News, which is one of two big public broadcasters in Boston. I write a weekly column on media and politics for their website and I am a regular on their Friday media program called Beat The Press. I’ve also been writing a blog on media and politics, Media Nation, since 2005.
Now, since we're talking about local news, I'll tell you about the beginning years of my career. I not only teach at Northeastern, but I'm also a graduate of Northeastern. Northeastern has something called the co-op program where students work in their field for about half of their education. My co-op job was at the Woonsocket Call in Rhode Island. This gave me an immersion into local news when I was just 19 years old. It was a terrific and formative experience. When I graduated, I worked for 10 years for a newspaper in Woburn called The Daily Times Chronicle — which continues to today and continues to be owned by the same family that owned them when I was there in the 1980s. And then probably for the greater part of my career, for 14 or 15 years, I was at the Boston Phoenix, one of the great alternative weeklies in the country. It was really a terrific place to work and I was their media columnist for most of that time.
So, I've been covering these issues since the mid-nineties. I have written a couple of books about the future of news, one called The Wired City. My more recent book, The Return of the Moguls, takes a close look at the very rich people who were buying newspapers: Jeff Bezos, John Henry, and Aaron Kushner. My current project, very much related to what we're talking about today, is called, What Works: The Future of Local News. My coauthor Ellen Clegg and I are going to be looking at 10 or 12 successful independent news projects around the country to determine what lessons can be drawn from those.
frank | I want to start by talking about the billionaires and the hedge funds that have started to take over local news outlets. When do you see this trend start and why are people like Jeff Bezos getting involved in what seems to not BE a very profitable business?
That's a great question. I think that when we started seeing people of means buying into the newspaper business, a lot of us were hoping that it would be a real trend. Even though the idea of billionaires buying newspapers is problematic in some respects, it certainly was a better fate for them than being squeezed to death by corporate chain ownership.
But, almost eight years out, we can see that it is not really a trend. Jeff Bezos and John Henry are almost alone. Aaron Kushner failed. Patrick Soon-Shiong joined them a few years later when he bought the LA Times, but, for the most part, we haven't seen very many other people join them.
That brings about the question of why people like Bezos and Henry and Soon-Shiong got into the business.
This goes to their ego — they believe that what made them successful can be applied to the newspaper business.
Well, what we saw, most obviously with Aaron Kushner at the Orange County Register, is that the newspaper business is every bit as difficult as people were saying. At the Boston Globe, John Henry made all kinds of mistakes and continued to lose money. Only in the past couple of years, have they been able to settle on a strategy of really pushing digital subscriptions to stabilize The Globe. John Henry says it's profitable, but it is a privately held company, so who knows. In Bezos's case, absolutely nothing has happened to make him question his own genius, I guess. The Post has been a success almost from day one, growing and profitable for five to six years now. Bezos has proven that he was able to bring The Post back to a sustainable enterprise.
So do you think that Bezos’ success came down to technique or to infinite resources?
Well, he certainly had to put a lot of resources into it. He sensed that there was an opportunity for another big, national news organization. The Washington Post is traditionally more of a regional paper than a national paper, but he decided that they were going to go national and that they were going to go digital.
A subscription is included with Amazon Prime at a steep discount. If you buy an Amazon Kindle Fire, The Post app is pre-installed on it. So, of course, he has had some unique advantages that have made it easier for him than it would for someone else.
I think some of the immediate concerns that come up in this model are concerns over him or other billionaires using newspapers for propaganda. Do you see any evidence of that either from people you talked to at The Post or from specific stories?
No. I think both Jeff Bezos and John Henry have been good billionaires in the sense that they have not interfered with the news coverage of their papers. Bezos doesn't even interfere in the opinion pages and as the owner, it would not be unethical for him to do so. In fact, he kept the editorial page editor who he inherited, Fred Hiatt, and has left it alone. The Post has featured plenty of tough coverage of Amazon. Maybe not as much as The Times has had, but they certainly haven't shied away from it.
Now, of course, there are bad billionaires. As I was reporting for The Return of the Moguls, Sheldon Adelson, the casino mogul, acquired the Las Vegas Review-Journal. I talk about it in the book, but it was a wild, wild story in which he originally came in as the secret owner. It was the staff of the Review-Journal who was able to expose the fact that he was the new owner. And this is so complicated that I don't even know how to explain it, except that he ordered up a hit piece on a judge who was aggravating him, but it never appeared in the Review-Journal. Instead, it appeared in a couple of newspapers in Connecticut owned by a businessman Adelson had hired to help run the Review-Journal. That’s a case of a billionaire buying a legacy newspaper, putting resources into it, and using it to serve his own business interests.
That's crazy. What ended up happening, did he remain an owner once staff found out?
He continued to own the paper up until his death. I believe his family is going to continue to run the paper. I have read anecdotally that the result of his ownership has been kind of a mixed bag. I mean, he did put resources into the paper. It is probably doing a much better job of serving the community than it would have if it had been acquired by a chain or a hedge fund.
Why do you say that? What happens when a chain or a hedge fund comes in?
Well, when a chain or a hedge fund comes in, and basically we're talking about Alden Global Capital and Gannett since they are the two biggest players, they walk into newsrooms that have already had budgets cut over the years and just take a chainsaw to them. They cut in order to pay down debt that they've taken on to build the chain and they cut to enrich their owners; there's very little interest in journalism.
Does the difference between hedge funds and billionaires or philanthropists come down to a difference in profit incentives?
Yeah. I mean, the billionaire owners who come in, generally consider themselves to be business geniuses. They don't want to run their newspapers at a loss, even though they could afford to, but they're not looking to do much more than break even. The chains and the hedge fund are looking for big profits. That's the only reason that they're in the newspaper business. And you might think, well, how can you make a big profit from the newspaper business, given all the problems that it has? Well, it turns out that if you are willing to cut without conscience, you can cut expenses faster than the revenues are falling and run up a fairly healthy profit margin. Alden’s Media NewsGroup, which owns about a hundred papers around the country, runs up a profit margin of about 17 percent.
Do you think that looking to philanthropists and billionaires is the most sustainable model of local journalism going forward?
Well, as I said when we opened, we haven't seen a rush of billionaires coming to save America's newspapers, so I don’t think so. There have been precious few. Not to say that there aren't some very good ownership models out there, but in terms of billionaires buying up newspapers, that's about the extent of it.
What models do you find most sustainable?
Well, there is a difference between the medium to large size newspapers that these billionaires are acquiring and the small, local papers that we will be looking at in our next book.
In the medium to large range, The Salt Lake Tribune is now a completely non-profit news organization, the first good size legacy paper to have taken that road. Now non-profit ownership is not all that novel in news, there are public TV stations, public radio stations, and a lot of the small hyper-local news websites that are out there, but for a big daily newspaper, that's very unusual. The Philadelphia Inquirer is a for-profit newspaper owned by a nonprofit organization, and they have done okay. They've had to make some cuts here and there, but they're still doing really good work and they don't have to answer to a corporate chain. Pretty much everything else is owned by chains at this point.
Now to get down to the next level of real community journalism, the type of journalism that keeps tabs on the city council, the school committee, zoning, all those kinds of things, there are different models and more experiments going on. One we are looking at is the Mendocino Voice. It started about five years ago by two journalists and they are experimenting with the cooperative model.
Why do you think it is important that we seek out these models to save local news?
Well, we live in communities, but it feels like everything has been nationalized today, and we are incredibly polarized at the national level. At the community level, people still have the skills they need to get along with each other, but they need news and information that's reliable to help them in that process.
In addition to that, it's just really important that we know what's going on at the local level. There have been studies that show that in communities without reliable news, there's more government corruption. You get people forming Facebook groups out of desperation to try to keep up on what's going on and it becomes rumormongering and scaremongering. I don't really believe that we have a true democracy unless we have participatory democracy at the local level. And it is impossible to have that participatory democracy unless we have reliable sources of local news.
Why do you think local news is more effective in dealing with polarization?
The old cliche is that there are no Republican and Democratic ways to pick up the trash. I think that everybody is concerned about the vacant lot in their neighborhood, and what's going to be built there, or is anything going to be built there. That is an issue that unites people. Zoning unites people. People want good schools and effective but humane policing. These are areas of common interest. I think that if people find that they can talk to one another, and work together on local issues, it may have some sort of a spillover effect to the intense feelings of alienation and polarization they feel on a national level. I think good local news can move us away from the problem of some of these incredibly divisive national issues by coming down to the local level. You start with Trumpers worried about certain things being taught in the school system, for instance. If school systems are well covered by reliable local news organizations, that could stave off some of those rumors about what is being taught.
Are you hopeful about the local infrastructure finding its footing and being built back up?
We are really in deep, deep trouble with so many of these news organizations being bought by chains and hedge funds. The projects that Ellen and I are highlighting and that we're optimistic about are very much an exception to the rule. I think all of us were devastated when Alden Global Capital was able to acquire Tribune Publishing recently. These continue to be very dark times for local and regional news. So no, I'm not hugely optimistic, but I do think that by showing places and projects where local news continues to be healthy, it can point the way toward a better future. Maybe we'll figure out some way of getting there in more and more communities.