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
Philanthropy X Local News
by Andrea Gabor
June 27, 2021
This interview with Andrea Gabor, author of After the Education Wars and Bloomberg Chair journalism, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Andrea | My background is as a business journalist. I worked at Business Week for several years, then US News and World Report. I wrote a couple of books, two of which were entirely about management. I segwayed into writing about education, because education had become such a big focus for business.
I specifically became interested in this at the start of the Bloomberg Administration in New York City, in which there was this great effort to bring business thinking to education. When Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric who had earned the nickname "Neutron Jack" because he had a tendency to fire executives and kill businesses that weren't "number one or two" in their business, got involved in education reform in New York City, I came away thinking, “what on earth can educators learn from the no-holds-barred, dog-eat-dog approach that Jack Welch is known for?” That is really what piqued my interest. Of course, from then on, we have seen a very heavy influence of business people, often via their philanthropies, in the education reform movement.
frank | How do you summarize the difference in mindset between those who are pursuing marketplace thinking in education, and the thought of traditional educators?
The first thing that struck me is that the culture of business and the culture of educators couldn't be more different. Business people are very bottom-line oriented: they believe in market solutions. In the United States, after the competitiveness crisis of the 1980s, it is the kind of thinking that has dominated the mainstream business culture. By contrast, educators — and I prefer to talk about educators rather than education, which is often confused with big-city education bureaucracies — are driven, for the most part, by social justice ideas. You become a teacher not because you think you're going to make the big bucks, but because you care about kids. You become a teacher because job stability is more important to you than climbing a corporate ladder. There's a whole lot of cultural issues that educators prize that is antithetical to mainstream business thinking.
Bloomberg recognized the cadre of really good educators in New York City, but he could never get out of that top-down, command-and-control mindset. In my book, After the Education Wars, I write about how, even though he promoted many of the city’s leading educators to key positions, he also ended up alienating a lot of them because of the way he went about things.
How so?
Let me give you one example. Bloomberg starts something called the Leadership Academy for principals. The idea was to recruit young people to be principals, give them intensive training, and place them into schools. He hired a woman named Sandra Stein to develop the curriculum for this program. She is one of the most respected educators in New York City, having run the Aspiring Leaders Program at Baruch College, which worked closely with District 2 in Manhattan, but she was made number two to Robert E. Knowling, a former telecommunications executive, whose company went bankrupt. He ended up lasting only two years, and only then was Stein promoted. The way that was handled is just typical.
Why do you think that is?
Business people--even mediocre business people--get more respect than the top educators.
Another example, which brings us to big philanthropy, is the idea of "merit pay", which was hugely popular in the education-reform movement. This is not about raising pay across the board, this is about trying to identify the "best teachers" by looking at test scores and incentivizing them with a few thousand extra bucks a year.
Sounds great, right? But there's been a lot of research, much of which has come out of Vanderbilt University, that has debunked the notion that individualized incentive pay works in a school setting. Well, the Gates foundation spent an enormous amount of money in Florida and elsewhere doing experiments with incentive pay — without showing any success.
There's a long history of philanthropy being involved in education. Do you see specific decisions being made to incentivize more philanthropic funding? Or does this come from individual interest?
During the Bloomberg years, Mayor Bloomberg brought philanthropy to New York City to help fund traditional public schools. That's one model. But, he also is a big advocate and backer of charter schools. He and other philanthropists have become very engaged in financing alternatives to public schools all over the country.
This is where we have to segway to the big philanthropies; the big players there are The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. They are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in two things. One is expanding charter schools, the private-sector alternative to public schools.
Foundations have long funded K-12 education. In the old days, however, organizations like the Annenberg and Carnegie foundations were, for the most part, funding programs within the traditional public-education sector. What changes is that you have these new foundations, Gates, Broad, and Walton, who start funding, what Jal Mehta at Harvard calls, jurisdictional challenges. In other words, these organizations are challenging traditional public schools. By 2010, the nation's top 15 foundations spent about $844 million on K-12 education. They were pooling their money to manage schools like stocks in a Wall Street portfolio. In fact, this model of education is called the “portfolio model,” and the crux of the idea is that you are going to measure schools by test scores. Test scores effectively become a proxy for profits: the higher the test score, the more money you get. The model reached its apotheosis in New Orleans, which became the first all-charter city in the country.
We can get into why that is a problem. On the one hand, measuring everything by test scores ends up really kind of distorting the educational mission. On the other hand, it works to the detriment of the most underserved kids because those kids are least likely to be able to score well.
We seem to ask everyone this but why do you think they are so interested in education?
One part of the answer is that politicians drive interest. You have George W. Bush, who claimed to be the first “education governor” in Texas. He claimed to have completely transformed Texas education, which was actually not the case. There was all kinds of test-score manipulation in Texas that made the state look a lot better, at the time, than it was, and then he became “education president”, and thus began ed reform on a national level.
At the same time, there was an effort, going back at least to the Reagan era, of conservatives trying to privatize government services — public education was a big part of that, in part as a way of getting rid of the teachers’ unions. A key example is the work of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation; they underwrote the 1990 school-voucher law in Milwaukee. This is the beginning of the idea of “government schools”, as Republicans will sometimes derisively refer to public schools.
Right.
The other thing to focus on is the media, which, as you know, is greatly damaged and is in desperate need of funding. So, philanthropies have been funding news media companies, often, specifically, the education coverage of news media companies.. So on one hand, you have the philanthropic sector trying to dismantle public education and, on the other, they are funding news organizations reporting on public education and the education-reform movement.
What does that look like?
The Gates Foundation, for example, devoted about a billion dollars between 2000 and 2010 to what they call “policy and advocacy.” This includes training programs for journalists, funding things that produce media fact sheets and newspaper opinion pieces, and conferences where they pay for experts to go and hear about all these great, Gates-funded programs, so the experts can go off and do more opinion pieces.
They also fund newspapers directly. The Gates Foundation in 2013 gave the Seattle Times, its hometown newspaper, a $530,000 grant to launch something called the Educational Lab.
They are directly funding education coverage at the Seattle paper. They say it's for a “partnership” between the Seattle Times and The Solutions Journalism Network. Now the Solutions Journalism Network is very important; it also has partnerships with the New York Times and other organizations. The Solutions Journalism Network is looking to “write about promising programs and innovations inside K-12 schools and colleges that are addressing some of the biggest challenges facing public education.” That is a direct quote.
There is nothing wrong with writing about things that work, but, to a great extent, things that work are in the eye of the beholder. Almost by definition, that is the antithesis of doing investigative work. It gives very much a positive spin on whatever is going on in education reform and can, in the process, undermine public education. A similar thing is going on in Los Angeles, by the way. In 2015, philanthropists donated $800,000 to fund something called Education Matters at the Los Angeles Times. That money came from the Broad Foundation as well as several other foundations.
In the same year, 2015, Eli Broad formed a $149 million plan called Great Public Schools Now. The aim of which was to double the number of charter schools in Los Angeles. I mean, this is huge. At the time he did this, in terms of the total number of kids in charter schools, Los Angeles had more than any other city, and they were trying to double that number.
Wow.
Part of the Great Public Schools Now initiative was investing in advocacy. They earmarked $21.4 million over six years for “organizing and advocacy.”
Broad, and other big philanthropies, also are very involved with funding education-specific publications. Broad is a big funder of a publication called the LA Schools Report. And he, along with Walton and Gates, also founded a publication called The 74, which is essentially the house organ of the ed reformers.
What is the solution?
There's obviously been a lot written about charter schools and, clearly, I have a particular view on charter schools. There are charter schools that are excellent, I'm not going to dispute that. My argument is that, going back to the founding of this country, public education has been seen as crucial to American democracy.
And I would argue that actually the goal should be both. On one hand, you have to have young people who are thoughtful citizens who have the critical thinking skills need in a democracy and, when need be, to determine what is true and what is not when you have a demagogue in power. On the other hand, you also need young people who have the skills, especially in a quickly changing technological world, to fill those jobs. It is not an either/or. But, the problem that we have seen in many charter schools is that dual mission becomes confused when it is privatized.
I would say there is a compelling national interest to maintain public education as a public good. I can critique different kinds of charter schools or traditional public schools ad nauseum, but I am making a different argument, which is that we have a national interest in maintaining public schools in the public sphere. It does not mean that we don't try to pursue all sorts of efforts to improve public schools, but I would argue that in a democracy, undermining public education is dangerous business.