Infospigot: The Chronicles

California Water: 'Crumbling Infrastructure'?

Sparse posts of late. The reasons are many. Let me toll off some of them: Facebook. Twitter. Another absorbing online project having to do with the future of California water. Work. Non-Internet recreations. Sleep. Dog-walking.

But about the water stuff: the current distraction was triggered by the Legislature's recent passage of five bills, including an $11.14 billion bond measure, intended to refocus water policy and "rebuild California's crumbling water infrastructure"--our governor's preferred formulation and one widely parroted by politicos, pundits, and journalists alike.

Yes, I question the "crumbling infrastructure" line. Why? The system of levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta--an area drained and diked more than a century ago--is known to be in need of constant attention. Some of the levees may even be said to crumble. But the description doesn't apply elsewhere. The state, federal government, and water districts have invested billions over the past couple of decades to keep their facilities from deteriorating.

"Crumbling water infrastructure" has become the early campaign slogan for the bond campaign. The phrase is standing in for a more complex reality, and one that has nothing to do with the condition of physical facilities. It's true California's water system seems broken. But the stress is the result of growing population, an ancient and unresolved battle for water between urban and agricultural interests, and the arrival over the past few decades of a new interest that demands water: environmentalists and fishery groups arguing on behalf of salmon and other species that have been extirpated or brought to the brink of extinction. And add one more factor: Schemes to divert Canadian rivers or the Great Lakes aside, there's only so much water to go around in California.

One thing that's struck me as I've pored paragraph by paragraph through the bond measure is that we've been here before. Just one for-instance. Back in the 1990s, there was a grand negotiation involving the state and federal government and all the interests, including environmentalists. Eventually, the process became known as CALFED--that's pronounced "cal-fed" and has nothing to do with newborn beeves. In August 2000 CALFED produced a behemoth set of agreements, principles, legislation and environmental studies, all designed to do the same thing the governor and Legislature say they're doing now. CALFED was to enhance the state's water system by building more reservoirs, better managing groundwater, and figuring out better ways of moving water from north to south without killing the Delta.

But the consensus that built CALFED disintegrated. Neither the federal nor state governments delivered promised support. The parties to the deal backed out as prospects for progress on any of the basic issues dimmed. The new state legislation specifically supersedes CALFED. Except for that act--killing a moribund program--you wonder how much the new laws will accomplish. Important components are widely denounced, the state's in no shape to take on the increased debt, and neither are the voters in a mood to write big checks to bureaucrats. And the political climate for the water bills seems simply poisonous: the bills were written virtually in secret, the bond has been faulted for being chock-full of earmarks, and only a small minority of voters express approval of the Legislature or the governor.

What's next, then? It would be nice to believe some sort of open process could result in solutions that could win support from most of those affected, that would be feasible, and that would be investments in the state's future. There's talk of an alternative bond measure that would be much more precisely targeted than the one the Legislature approved. That could be a start, because I would guess that that's the only way the voters approve a water bond in 2010. And if no money is approved, then California's looking at another still-born attempt at tackling its water problems.

November 11: The Notebook

Item 1: I've wondered to myself at what point I'll consider deer roaming around central Berkeley as unremarkable as, say, crows. A picture of a deer in the front yard comes to mind, maybe eating some choice vegetation (though the plants in yards to either side of us are probably a lot more delectable). It seems we're getting pretty close to that day. During our late evening walk, The Dog and I had two encounters with big hooved springing mammals. The first was a little startling as an adult-sized deer bolted from a front yard across the street and make a pretty good racket as it crossed a couple of hedges. Then it did that sproingy run that deer do all the way up the street into the dark. A few blocks away, The Dog got alert to something across the street, and two more deer went clattering up the pavement, paused at the next corner, then hung a right and vanished. I wonder who the next arrivals in the neighborhood will be. Mountain lions looking for a snack? No -- coyotes are a lot more likely.

Item 2: Sometime in the last couple months, an old colleague of mine called attention via Facebook to a remarkable series of articles in the Ann Arbor Chronicle--what I'm guessing is an "alternative weekly." The serial is running under the title "Washtenaw Jail Diary." The Chronicle hasn't announced a publication schedule, but a new installment seems to appear every couple of weeks. Elsewhere, I said I look forward to the new chapters the same way mid-19th century Londoners probably looked forward to the next piece of "A Tale of Two Cities." But this jail diary isn't fiction. It's a story of an anonymous 40-something middle-class white guy who gets tossed into the county lockup. What makes the stories riveting is the writer's skill in narrating his sudden passage from what he took to be "normal life"--telling the boss he'd be in late for work while he takes care of some business--to felony inmate. The Number One asked question about the series: What did the author do to wind up in jail? He hasn't said yet.

Item 3: It's November 11th. Veterans Day. Armistice Day. Remembrance Day. An occasion to reflect on a war so monstrously costly that a sequel was unimaginable. Today, we can imagine anything except, perhaps, an end to the killing.

Spare-Time Work Project

As I was saying the other day, California's new water bond measure sure is interesting. The voters will be asked next November to let the state borrow $11.14 billion for a whole slew of water projects: water conservation efforts, water reclamation, water recycling, groundwater monitoring, drought relief, and measures that will let local and regional agencies do semi-water-related things like build bike paths near rivers. A good piece of the $11 billion will simply be a pile of cash for the Legislature to sit on and hand out to worthy dam projects and other water-development initiatives. Governor Schwarzenegger signed the bill calling for the bond measure yesterday, and he's talking as if it's a done deal. At the same time, snipers have appeared. Legislators from both parties are saying the initiative is flawed and padded with unnecessary spending. Some reporters are getting in on the act, too. I decided to find the text of the bond bill myself and pore through it. Once I started to do that, I started thinking of ways to highlight the spending provisions. A spreadsheet? That's good if you like raw data. A map? It seemed doable, so I went to work on Google Maps. The result--still a work in progress, and sing out if you have any suggestions--is here and also embedded below. We put it up on a KQED page, it's gotten passed around some on Twitter and maybe elsewhere. And tonight I found out that one of the governor's press aides was consulting it (well--the press aide is a former colleague of mine).

View California's Water Bill: Where Would the Money Go? in a larger map

California Water: A Taste of Pork

Tomorrow, our Action Governor is going to star at a media event at Friant Dam, near Fresno. He's using the dam, which impounds the San Joaquin River, as a prop for a ceremony at which he'll sign an $11.1 billion bond measure that will go onto next November's ballot. The money's supposed to go for building new dams and reservoirs and for environmental restoration of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which has been laid waste by earlier generations' water schemes.

It's a big bond. In ordinary times it might be a tough sell. But these are lean, lean times for the state, which is suffering through a staggering series of budget deficits and will have to pay interest of $700 million or $800 million out of its general fund every year once all the water bonds are sold. Schwarzenegger said last week he thinks voters will go for the measure because they've recently passed other big infrastructure bonds, such as last year's $10 billion initiative to finance a California high-speed rail system.

Maybe so. But enter the Associated Press. One of its Sacramento reporters has been leafing through the bond bill. Here's what she found:

"... Dozens of projects ... were injected into the bond bill to secure enough votes to get it passed. The projects will add tens of millions of dollars to the interest taxpayers will have to pay on the bond if voters approve it next year.

"Many of the projects are only peripherally related to the purpose of the legislative package, which is intended to increase California's water supply and restore the ecologically fragile Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

"For example, $30 million was earmarked to the state Department of Parks and Recreation for grants for watershed education facilities. Another $20 million is set aside for the Baldwin Hills Conservancy, which manages land for recreation and wildlife and is the Los Angeles district represented by Assembly Speaker Karen Bass.

"In the final days of negotiations, lawmakers in both chambers padded the bond bill with an additional $1.7 billion, despite previous statements by legislative leaders that the state could not afford such a large bond."

The AP is following up here on what was widely rumored around the state Capitol when the bond was passed In fact, a reporter asked Schwarzenegger about the add-ins during his a self-congratulatory press conference the governor held after the Legislature acted. Here's what the governor had to say last week to the suggestion that some of the projects in the bond measure might be "pork":

QUESTION: Governor, how can voters support this package when you passed it in the middle of the night and the -- so the pork, so-called pork, inserted in there including (Inaudible) pulled out?

GOVERNOR: Are you talking about -- I don't know what you're talking about, because the end package does not have any pork whatsoever, so I don't know what you're talking about.

QUESTION: Late in the evening the bill, as it was being drafted, contained -- was amended and contained -- and these projects were added for various counties and for various projects. So the tab grew from 9 billion to 11 billion. So how can the voters take on something like this at a time when they're still feeling the pinch and how can they be sure that all the money will be spent well?

GOVERNOR: Well, first of all, as you know, I'm not as interested in the process as in the end result. So throughout the process we went from 8 billion to 12 billion, to 9 billion, to 11 billion, back to 9 billion and back up to 11 billion. So I think this is maybe something interesting for the journalists but it definitely is not as interesting to me. To me always what's interesting is the result and the result was a great, great package of approximately $11 billion.

One of the things you have to love here is the way Schwarzenegger, reputed to be a hard-headed businessman, so breezily dismisses the appearance of billions of dollars of extra stuff. That's something that's only interesting to journalists, he says. And, he may find out very soon, to the people who will have to pay the tab.

Deck the Halls with Piles of Initiatives

If you could do anything to make California better--anything at all--I'm sure you'd do exactly what Merry Susan Hyatt is doing: promoting a ballot initiative that will require public schools to offer real, honest, genuine Christmas music (in effect, Christian Xmas carols) during the holiday season. Ms. Hyatt's initiative is creating a little buzz now that state officials have given the OK for signature gathering. Mostly, the critics (we plead guilty) point to it as another example of how dumb the state's initiative process can be.

The would-be doctors assessing the civic illness that seems to afflict California look at their clipboards and see a long list of other symptoms, too: broken budget process, hopelessly polarized Legislature, a disconnect between what people say they want and what they're willing to pay for.

Then there's the initiative process, nearly a century old and the chief reason the state's Constitution has been amended more than 500 times. It's become a system for the voters--or actually, a select group that's whiter, richer, and older than the electorate at large-- to dictate sweeping policy shifts and budget priorities without much regard for the long-term consequences. The most famous example, probably, is Proposition 13, the 1978 measure that overnight leveled and reduced property taxes and forever restricted local governments' ability to raise them. But there are plenty of others, including the series of bond measures that fueled a prison-construction boom in the 1980s and '90s and made possible the rise in the state inmate population from 25,000 in the late '70s to 170,000 now. And just to make sure the new institutions were filled, the voters also approved tough anti-crime measure like the Three-Strikes Law.

Lots of people are talking about trying to rein in the initiative process. One modest proposal, which comes from UC-San Diego political scientist Thad Kousser among others, is to require initiatives that will cost the state money to say how it will be paid for. The thinking is that with the cost made clear, voters would be less willing to continue writing checks that the governor and Legislature have to find a way to cash even when the state is virtually bankrupt.

The talk about reform is coming on the eve of what may come to be known as the Year of the Initiative. Right now, the June 2010 primary ballot lists a modest total of three measures that have qualified to go before the voters. One is a constitutional amendment that would change the way seismic retrofits are assessed for property taxes. One would set up a system of public financing for state elections. One would create a sort of open-primary system for state offices.

But those three June 2010 initiatives? They're just the tip of the iceberg. The calm before the storm. The overture to a grand electoral opera. The California Secretary of State's office lists 68 initiatives--68!--that could wind up on the ballot next year. Of that number, 24 are out in the wild, with organizers and their (often paid) volunteers collecting signatures. Forty-four are under review at the state attorney general's office to make sure legal i's are dotted and t's crossed.

Next year's ballot booklet will be the size of a phone book.

Your Berkeley Weather Outlook: Nice; Really Nice

At the risk of unleashing a wavelet of hate mail, here's a quick take on the Berkeley weather for this week. Meantime, the calendar says it's November. Please remind me of this when next I snivel about the cold and rain. Of course, in the next 48 hours I'll hear someone spoil the party by saying global warming is responsible for the continued warm, dry conditions.

Berkeley Halloween, Before and After

Halloween morning on Holly Street. You can just feel the anticipation: tricking and treating, overindulgence, and vandalism just hours away. Late in the afternoon on the front porch, Kate and I carved pumpkins. Hers looked like something; mine looked like nothing you could describe. Then nightfall and the troops of costumed youngsters. Well, first we saw maybe a dozen kids make their way up the other side of the street who never made it to our side. Maybe they were scared of odd-numbered addresses. After that, infrequent visits by one or two kids at a time. One bigger group, including the neighbor kids, knocked at the door. By the time we realized no one else would show up, at 8:30 or so, maybe 15 or 20 kids had contended for the five pounds of candy we had (a jumbo-sized bowl was contributed by a neighbor a couple of houses down at whose door no one stopped, apparently).

An acquaintance on Facebook talked up a San Francisco neighborhood where residents get together to do a full-on trick-or-treat fest. Lots of decorations and the like. "Haunted houses, horror films projected on bedsheets, hundreds of happy screaming kids trick-or-treating with their parents. Real Halloween."

Real Halloween? Maybe where he came from. But in that odd place and time I grew up--the suburbia of the American Midwest, 1950s and '60s--the adults didn't organize much beyond treats and defensive measures against kids who might not be satisfied with them. Unless their kids were very young, parents didn't have much of a presence on the street. There were hundreds of kids out and about because there were hundreds who lived in any given half-mile radius, and just about everyone was out in search of loot. A generation later, when our kids were little here in Berkeley, that culture didn't seem to have changed a whole lot. Bunches of kids out after dark, trooping up front walks to whatever welcome awaited them.

The latter-day neighborhood festival my friend talked about in San Francisco is very un-Halloween-like in those terms. I suspect it's purely a reflection of a culture that has decided that fun is fun within bounds: organized and controlled. You wouldn't want kids interacting with strangers on the scary night of all scary nights, would you? So if there were kids out anywhere last night, I think that's where you'd find most of them--where the parents could make sure the program contained enough of the right kinds of entertainment, but not too much, and none leading in some unpredictable or untoward direction.

You could argue about the value of our old Halloween customs. It has never been a favorite occasion of mine, even with the candy. Maybe there are good reasons for that tradition of door-to-door greeting to die. But I think its disappearance is just one more bit of distance we put between ourselves and whoever else we chance to encounter--not just on Halloween, but every other day and night of the year. Another barrier, another measure of isolation. And it's really too bad for the kids, too.

"Modern American life"--i.e., we parents and our fears, helped along by media that seize on the most lurid of crimes, paint them as the stuff of unversal reality, and suggest we're powerless to respond rationally--has already killed pick-up sports, going to and from school without a chaperone, and free-style loitering, among other pleasures of youth. In addition to the sweets, Halloween night used to represent a chance to explore one's surroundings (an impromptu geography lesson), a chance to judge neighbors by the goodies they'd offer (applied sociology), experience in dodging ne'er-do-wells and dealing with fear of the dark (survival training), and hands-on practice with negotiations and bartering (economics and entrepreneurship). All that on top of healthy exercise in the out-of-doors.

It's all a shame. Almost as big a crisis as the tens of thousands of candy calories our household must now figure out how to consume.

News Tales: 'You're Still a Kid'

Sometime back in the rich Early Middle Era of my news career -- 1987, I'll call it, at The San Francisco Examiner -- something awful happened at about 5 o'clock in the afternoon. A wire-service bulletin said an airliner had gone down somewhere down the coast. I was new on the city desk, and had just started my shift. I had been part of many newsroom scrambles for big stories on deadline, but I was never really in charge of the response. I wasn't, really, on this night, either. I remember that the senior city editor grabbed a reporter who was just about to leave for the evening and told him he needed to fly down to the crash site. Done. I think my fellow editor collared two or three other reporters who thought they were going home and told them to stand by.

Just recounting the incident revives its horror for me, though I don't think of it often. What made a more conscious impression, one that still rises to the surface whenever I'm in a newsroom--every working day, now--was the way the editors and reporters reacted to the simple suggestion that a story was happening, that game was afoot.

I'm thinking about that now because my current newsroom, at KQED Public Radio, is in the midst of trying to respond to this week's problems on the Bay Bridge. Circumstances are a little different now. Much smaller newsroom--which means much smaller staff. No one to stop at the door on the way out and say, "Hey -- wait a minute. Big problem on the bridge." In fact, when the incident occurred the other night, I was winding down from our evening newscasts and getting ready to edit a feature story, a guy wandered over from an adjacent (non-news) department and asked if we knew what was happening on the bridge. When it came down to it on night one, it was me, the local traffic reporting service, and our evening announcer who held the fort. (One of the bosses said to me, "These all-hands-on-deck situations are fun." I didn't reflect until later that at first, mine were the only hands on deck.) I had started work before noon and sent my last new email of the night after 1 a.m. I complained mildly on Facebook that it's harder for me to do those long news days and come back the next day to do it again. The very same editor I was so impressed with that evening back in '87 responded to that note: "And yet ... you're still a kid."

Not so sure about that. But some old news reflex is still there.

Guest Observation: Howard Nemerov

Kate's a teacher. We talk a lot about school around here, and everything that happens there, and all that should or might and doesn't. We brought out this poem this evening and read it aloud: "A school is where they grind the grain of thought,/And grind the children who must mind the thought." Wow--what a description of the institution. (And who was Howard Nemerov? Here's a good writeup from the American Academy of Poets.)

September, the First Day of School

I

My child and I hold hands on the way to school,
And when I leave him at the first-grade door
He cries a little but is brave; he does
Let go. My selfish tears remind me how
I cried before that door a life ago.
I may have had a hard time letting go.

Each fall the children must endure together
What every child also endures alone:
Learning the alphabet, the integers,
Three dozen bits and pieces of a stuff
So arbitrary, so peremptory,
That worlds invisible and visible

Bow down before it, as in Joseph's dream
The sheaves bowed down and then the stars bowed down
Before the dreaming of a little boy.
That dream got him such hatred of his brothers
As cost the greater part of life to mend,
And yet great kindness came of it in the end.

II

A school is where they grind the grain of thought,
And grind the children who must mind the thought.
It may be those two grindings are but one,
As from the alphabet come Shakespeare's Plays,
As from the integers comes Euler's Law,
As from the whole, inseperably, the lives,

The shrunken lives that have not been set free
By law or by poetic phantasy.
But may they be. My child has disappeared
Behind the schoolroom door. And should I live
To see his coming forth, a life away,
I know my hope, but do not know its form

Nor hope to know it. May the fathers he finds
Among his teachers have a care of him
More than his father could. How that will look
I do not know, I do not need to know.
Even our tears belong to ritual.
But may great kindness come of it in the end.

(Used without permission, but in a noncommercial spirit.)

You've Been Warned

This was posted adjacent to the campus of Santa Clara University. We spotted it Saturday night when we were down there to watch soccer with Eamon and Sakura.

Let's not even talk about what the reaction a poster like this is trying to elicit. Let's focus on the wording. If prompted, my slogan might be, "Vaccines save lives." Clearly this local leafleteer is of another mind. Fine--let's resolve this disagreement in the marketplace of ideas. But here, the pitch isn't "vaccines may be dangerous" or "Vaccines: use at your own risk"--statements that would probably be attention-getting and may not stray across factual lines. That's not enough for this broadside, which says flatly "vaccines are poison." In a world where apparently no one can be trusted to think--hey, which vaccines are we talking about here?--nothing but the most alarmist message will do.

[Update: NPR's "Morning Edition" did a segment this morning addressing questions about the safety of the new swine flu vaccine. ]