By WAYNE LUSVARDI

Remember “Chinatown,” the murky 1974 movie about the water wars in the Los Angeles Basin in the 1930s, starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway?

A January 18 California appeals court water rights case is reminiscent of the multilayered plots and subplots in the flick.

The “Chinatown” movie plot involves fictional character Hollis Mulwray who is  murdered due to his opposition to the proposed construction of a new dam.  The fictional Mulwray is based on the real historical person of William Mulholland, the infamous head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, who allegedly stole water from Mono Lake in Northern California in the early 20th Century.

But the current court case is not like the movie “Chinatown” in one important aspect. There is no sex involved in the putting in and taking out of water from the Los Angeles Central Basin Water District water basin that is the focus of this court case. But there is alleged bureaucratic bigamy and robbery.

Quoted in the Long Beach Press Telegram newspaper, Long Beach City Water Department Director Kevin Wattier succinctly summed up the main issue in the case, “Right now it’s like a bank account where you can put money in but can’t take it out.”

The legal citation for the current case is Water Replenishment District of Southern California versus the City of Cerritos, Case No. B226743, Second District Court of Appeals, filed Jan. 18, 2012.

The Plaintiffs

The original complainants (plaintiffs) were five cities and a regional water replenishment district: Long Beach, Lakewood, Los Angeles, Huntington Park and Vernon; and the Water Replenishment District of Southern California.

A water replenishment district is a special agency of government that recharges underground water supplies from natural rainwater runoff captured from a local watershed.  In this case the water recharge basins are adjacent to the upper San Gabriel River and the 605 Freeway in Los Angeles County.  And the watershed involved is the San Gabriel Mountain and River watershed.

All the cities involved in the case are located downstream of the water recharge basins.  Long Beach is located near the mouth of the San Gabriel River to the Pacific Ocean. A map of the cities along the San Gabriel River can be found here.

The Defendants

The defendants (respondents) are three cities and one sub-regional water agency: the cities of Cerritos, Downey and Signal Hill, together with the Central Basin Municipal Water District.  The Central Water Basin is obviously located near the center of the land surface of the Los Angeles urban basin.

While there is no sex involved in this case, there is bureaucratic bigamy and alleged robbery: all of the parties to the case share the same underground water basin.  In fact, the Water Replenishment District was created to refill the Central and West Coast underground water storage basins.  There has been a history of court cases in the Central Basin alleging “overdrafting.”  That is water terminology for “highway robbery.”

The History of the Central Basin Water Wars

The Central Basin has a 277-square-mile underground footprint.  If the basin were square shaped, it would comprise an area of about 16.5 miles by 16.5 miles. The Central Basin serves city water departments, unincorporated areas, private water companies, school districts, electric utilities and landowners.  The Central Basin Water District sells treated water to cities and others within its regional service area. Like the movie “Chinatown,” water is a many-layered story.  There are no murders but there are plenty of complex water wars.

Going back to 1965, a court ordered that 500 parties having water rights in the Central Basin were subject to limits as to how much water they could take to prevent overdrafts.

In 2001, several interested parties sought unused storage space in the Central Basin.  A court appointed the California Department of Water Resources to serve as “watermaster,” or water traffic cop.  But at that time, the court rejected the legal notion that the right to extract water creates a concurrent right to store water.

By 2009, another group of water pumpers bubbled up. They filed a court action to use 330,000 acre-feet of “dewatered space” in the Central Basin for future water storage.  This would be enough water for about 660,000 households per year. This action sought even more layers of complexity: three “watermasters” were to be appointed.

The trial court issued an order on July 7, 2010. The order said it only had authorization to apportion water rights and not rights to unused capacity space in the Central Basin.  Additionally, the court believed it could not appoint “watermasters” over unused space in the basin that held no water today. The Water Replenishment District of Southern California is appealed the ruling.

The Current Court Ruling

On Jan. 18, 2012 the State Appellate Court ruled that the trial court: 1) had authority to allocate future storage in the Central Basin; 2) had jurisdiction over water transfers between the Central and nearby West Coast Basins; and 3) was not prohibited from appointing a “watermaster” over unused space in the Central Basin. The court additionally ruled that the Central Basin Water District might also be able to serve as “watermaster.”

The defendants — the cities of Cerritos, Downey and Signal Hill — contended: 1) their costs would be increased if others were given the right to lease unused capacity in the Basin; 2) over-drafting of the Basin could result if new “wet water” was not put in first; and 3) there was a threat the appointed watermaster could try to merge the Central and West Coast Basins. The Central Basin did not want a proverbial “shotgun marriage” to result over the issue of renting a room to the unwanted bastard child of unused basin capacity.

Presumably, the above issues can be heard and adjudicated now that the jurisdictional issues have been clarified.

Enormous Implications

The timing of this case has enormous implications for what is happening statewide.  The Delta Stewardship Council appointed by the State Legislature is about to put into place widely encompassing laws that could usurp powers from local water districts.  Local water agencies would no longer be able to do anything that adversely impacted the Sacramento Delta.  The Delta is where Southern California gets most of its imported water supplies.  Conceivably, local water departments might not be able to issue any new water permits or “will serve” letters to real estate developers if that meant using more imported Delta water.

David O. Powell, the former chief engineer of the San Diego Office of the State Department of Water Resources and the Alameda Water District, said he believed the proposed Delta Plan would result in cutting water allocations to Southern California in half.

This is despite Southern California using about the same amount of water it used 25 years ago, even with 35 percent more population. Through conservation, Southern California has already given up about 1 million acre-feet of water per year to the Delta ecosystem. That is enough water for about 2 million households or 4.5 million people. Yet the Delta Stewardship Council wants to reduce water use by and additional 20 percent by the year 2020.

State and regional water agencies have shown an inability to bring more water to Southern California without huge, costly infrastructure projects, such as: the proposed Peripheral Canal that would route water around the Delta and/or the proposed $11.1 billion water bond.  Both of these projects would pinch the already deficit-plagued state budget.  There are matching fund requirements in the proposed state water bond.  Thus, the real cost of the proposed water bond may be about $18 billion.  The cost of the Peripheral Canal is estimated to cost $13 billion, or $23.5 billion with bond interest costs.

Consequently, local water districts and cities are going to have to find a way to capitalize on the unused storage capacity in the eight underground water basins in Southern California.  They may be compelled to contract for some of their own water supplies instead of depending on more imported water from regional water wholesalers.  This could mean water transfers from recycled water, from the new Cadiz water basin in the Southern California desert, voluntary purchases of water from farmers, desalinated ocean water or the development of new water resources. This will require a much more open water conveyance and storage system with reasonable transfer costs than the present semi-socialized system with many trade barriers.

So the outcome of the Water Replenishment District versus the city of Cerritos case may have huge consequences for Southern California’s cities and economy.

Economic Homicide? 

To add another subplot to the story, Assembly Bill 375 – the anti-urban sprawl bill passed in 2008 — would divert future population growth to the coastal urban areas.  But this may result in “no growth” if the water spigot from imported water from the Delta is simultaneously shut off.  This could kill off an economic recovery.

So maybe the above-mentioned court case is like the movie “Chinatown” and will involve murder — economic homicide — anyway.

Or it may have a wedding and happy ending: economic reproduction if local water agencies and city water departments are allowed to contract for future water and deposit it in fertile underground local water basins.

A sequel to “Chinatown” came out in 1990, called “Two Jakes.” It wasn’t as good, even though it starred Jack Nicholson and another great actor, Harvey Keitel.

It’s time for a better sequel. Call it, “Central Water Basin Blues.” Jack Nicholson could star once more, this time with Arnold Schwarzenegger, now an actor again after his stint as governor. As in the original “Chinatown,” and as with the real California, reality and fiction would blend on the celluloid.

By DAVE ROBERTS

Like a giant octopus grabbing helpless humans in a horror movie, a new bureaucracy is squeezing the Bay Area.

One Bay Area is a plan to push Bay Area residents out of their cars and jam them into pack-and-stack high rises in the coming decades. The goal: cut greenhouse gas emissions and supposedly help save the planet from global warming.

One Bay Area is mandated by SB 375, the Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act of 2008. It was passed by the Democratic-controlled Legislature and signed into law by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican. SB 375 is not as well known as AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. But SB 375 well could affect Californians’ lives more directly.

One Bay Area is supported by the Bay Area’s liberal politicians, planning bureaucrats, environmentalists, social justice advocates and other elites. The plan is scheduled to be approved by the Association of Bay Area Governments and the Metropolitan Transportation Commission in spring 2013.

Fighting Back

In the meantime, a few folks, many affiliated with the Tea Party, are putting up a fight, despite the long odds. A number of them raised objections last year at the first round of public input meetings in the nine Bay Area counties. And they did so again this month in the second round’s first meeting in San Francisco.

An additional 2 million people are expected to live in the Bay Area by 2040, bringing the current population of 7.1 million to more than 9 million. This will result in a need for an additional 770,000 to 1 million apartments, condos and houses. That’s a jump from the current 2.6 million units. And, theoretically, an additional 1 million-1.4 million jobs will be created to provide employment for them. That’s up from the current 3.2 million jobs.

One Bay Area is designed to accommodate that growth while meeting the SB 375 goal of reducing carbon dioxide, particularly from cars and light trucks, by 7 percent by 2020 and 15 percent by 2035. The five planning scenarios actually fall short of that goal. So more social engineering will be coming, in addition to One Bay Area’s realignment of land use policies.

The plan attempts to thwart individualistic human nature in the name of communitarian progress. Basically, people who live in the suburbs and drive to work are bad. Those who live in apartment/condo buildings above shops in mass transit-oriented villages where everyone walks, bikes and rides buses and BART are good.

Blowback

Sensitive to the blowback from suburbanites who cling to their McMansions and SUVs, Lou Hexter, the moderator at the San Francisco meeting, was careful to emphasize that the plan “will not prescribe what a property owner must do and will not change the authority of local jurisdictions to make decisions.”

But money is power. The Metropolitan Transportation Commission has the ability to determine where to spend the $256 billion that is slated for transportation improvements in the Bay Area in the next 25 years. If the Bay Area’s nine counties and 101 cities toe the transit-oriented infill development line, they are more likely to get a piece of that funding. If they allow more suburban growth, particularly into farms, orchards and open space, they could lose out.

In any case, those who prefer to drive where they want to go, rather than taking a bus to BART and then another bus to their destination, are likely to suffer in the coming decades. Despite an approximate 30 percent increase in population, under current plans roadway capacity is planned to increase by only about 7 percent between 2005 and 2035. The One Bay Area plan likely will not affect that much.

Double-Nickle Speed Limit

On the other hand, mass transit capacity is currently planned to increase by about 22 percent from 2005 to 2035. One Bay Area’s initial vision scenario would increase that to 55 percent.

The idea seems to be to make traffic congestion in the Bay Area, which is already among the worst in the nation, so horrible that tens of thousands of people, perhaps hundreds of thousands, will voluntarily leave their cars at home and instead crowd onto buses, trains and ferries. And if they don’t get sufficiently discouraged from the daily freeway bump-and-grind, the One Bay Area options include increasing parking fees and setting the freeway speed limit at 55 mph (on the rare occasions that such speeds would be possible).

In essence, One Bay Area is the San Franciscation of the Bay Area. So it was appropriate that two San Francisco supervisors who also sit on the Metropolitian Transportation Commission provided the opening remarks. They were David Campos (a leader on the board in sponsoring anti-business legislation) and Scott Wiener (who elicited national snickers by requiring nude San Franciscans to place a cloth underneath them before they sit down in public)

“We have to identify what our priorities are to make sure we have effective use of the limited resources, and equitable outcomes so we have a Bay Area that works for everyone,” said Campos.

“We can’t just bury our heads in the sand and pretend we won’t have more people here and don’t need more housing and transit infrastructure,” said Wiener, who touted San Francisco as leading the way in transit-friendly housing. He also put in a plug for High-Speed Rail, “despite the Republican and media feeding frenzy against it.”

Limited Info

The intent of the meeting was to inform the public — or at least the 100 or so people allowed in to each of the nine meetings — about the plan and gain their feedback. But the information provided was limited, general and vague. And public input was mostly circumscribed to fit the pro-urban bias of the plan. Participants were broken into three groups, who then rotated among three rooms that focused on either transportation trade-offs, quality of complete communities or the Bay Area in 2040.

Any doubt on whether the fix was in to turn motorists into an endangered species was dispelled in the transportation room. Participants were asked to select their five most important transportation investments out of nine options — none of which included building more roads. Most of the options focused on mass transit and pedestrian and bicycle paths. Participants were also asked to select “the five most appropriate policies to reduce auto emissions.” The final question asked whether they supported finding ways to improve public transit.

Blood, Sweat and Tears

The presentation on the quality of complete communities was, naturally, skewed in favor of transit-oriented villages on infill land. San Francisco was touted as a model of urban planning by Ken Kirkey, director of planning for the Association of Bay Area Governments. He said, “No place in the region has done more than San Francisco. There’s been a lot of hard work and pain and blood, sweat and tears in the city.”

Not everyone at the meeting welcomed the prospect of sharing or spreading San Francisco’s pain, blood, sweat and tears.

“There are lots of assumptions about complete communities,” said one man. “I hear they will work because we get neighborhood services so people can walk and won’t have to have a car. In my time in San Francisco, the local supermarkets have shut down, corner stores have gone away. People have to drive for services. Nowhere have I seen how those factors are addressed.”

Another man said, “This is one of the most superficial meetings I’ve been to in a long time. Things were skimmed over, videos were at a middle-school level. I’m shocked at the low level of discourse and ideas presented today. We were shortchanged by MTC and ABAG. Let people speak and listen to them.”

Criticism also came from a man who said, “I have a very hard time with this process. This notion of trying to urbanize and turn the Bay Area into Brooklyn seems like madness to me. Forcing people into four-story walk ups. Those are the places people fled from. These are not homes, folks.”

Frankenstein

One woman warned that One Bay Area could be a Frankenstein’s monster or Pandora’s box. “Whenever you plan and build for two million people, four million people will come,” she said. “Growth has some of its own natural limitations. What you’re doing removes those natural limitations. You are altering things, and there will be many unintended consequences. The densification theories you apply, apply to Europe. They do not apply to the West Coast.”

Despite the fact that nearly three-fourths of the participants live in San Francisco, they were split evenly on whether they support the One Bay Area plan. The tally was 43 percent in favor and 43 percent opposed, according to the electronic polling at the end of the meeting.

They also were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement, “Changes will be needed in my community and lifestyle to improve the quality of life in the future.” On that question, 47 percent strongly disagreed, which was the top choice. Asked whether the meeting presented the right level of detail on the One Bay Area plan, 62 percent strongly disagreed.

Ironically, for a process touting the virtues of mass transit, at the beginning of the meeting the moderator announced that the shuttle to the BART station would stop running in 20 minutes. “If you need a ride, see us,” said Hexter. “We want to make sure you don’t have to sleep in the auditorium.”

Similar meetings have been scheduled in the coming weeks in the other Bay Area counties:

Regional Advisory Working Group
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
9:30 a.m.

Housing Methodology Committee
Thursday, February 23, 2012
10:00 a.m.
The Housing Methodology Committee meets on the fourth Thursdays of the month at 10:00 a.m.

By WAYNE LUSVARDI

Like Disneyland, Hollywood and Silicon Valley, the Tournament of Roses Parade is a symbol of California’s sun-blessed creativity. It crests with the crowning of the Rose Queen and her Royal Court, a bit of monarchism even die-hard democracy lovers won’t object to.

Countless Americans back East, watching TV as it snowed outside, have envied parade participants and spectators clothed in shorts and floppies.  The Easterners then started working to make their California Dream come true by moving here.

But it isn’t coming up roses for this year’s Rose Parade, as it’s commonly called, which will roll this year on Jan. 2, 2012

One reason is the element of politics that has crept into the celebrations. The Occupy movement plans to march behind the parade with the “crazies” as the 44^th “human float.”

And who knows what else could happen. In 1992, then-Pasadena mayor Rick Cole rode in the parade wearing a T-shirt stamped with the slogan, “Tournament of Racists.” That year, a direct descendant of Christopher Columbus was appointed grand marshal of the parade during the 500^th aniversary of the voyage to America of the Admiral of the Ocean Seas. Cole branded the descendant a reminder of European America’s heritage of “greed, slavery, rape and genocide.”

Which hasn’t prevented Cole from taking lucrative government jobs paid for by the taxpayer-descentants of those he attacked. He’s currently city manager of Ventura, where he has been promoting “smart growth” — a policy that raises home prices and suppresses home ownership by blacks, Latinos and others he claims to be helping with his politically correct positions. His total 2010 taxable compensation is $191,940. And what a pension that will bring.

Fortunately, the  local branch of the Tea Party — known as the Pasadena Patriots — has decided to back off its earlier decision to also appear at the end of the parade.  Tea Party spokesman Michael Alexander said, “We have decided to not be a part of this piece of drama and exercise in street theater.  Pasadena is entitled to one day without politics.”

Aside from political protests, there are deeper economic reasons why it’s raining on the routes the Rose Parade will wind through in Pasadena.

Corporate Parade Sponsors

The Rose Parade has been officially renamed, “The Rose Parade by Honda.” And the Rose Bowl Game is now named, “The Rose Bowl by Visio.” These corporations have banned the city of Pasadena and the media from using the old names without the corporate identities.

Banks and big corporations mainly make the Pasadena Rose Parade possible today.  Nineteen floats will be sponsored by corporations: American Honda, Bayer Advanced, California Clock Company, China Airlines, Dick Van Patten’s Natural Balance Pet Foods, Discover Card, Dole, Farmers Insurance, HGTV, Macy’s, Microsoft Kinect for XBOX 360, Paramount Pictures, NAMCO Bandai Games America, Paramount Pictures, RFD-TV, Trader Joe’s, Kaiser Permanente, U.S. Bank and Wells Fargo Bank.

Other nonprofit and service organizations with floats include: AIDS Healthcare Foundation, City of Hope, Donate Life, Girl Scouts of Greater Los Angeles, Kiwanis International, Odd Fellows and Rebekahs, Rotary International, Shriners Hospitals for Children and three schools and religious organizations. Plus two floats for each of the teams playing in the Rose Bowl football game the same day, the Wisconsin Badgers and the Oregon Ducks.

Interestingly, the Ministry of Tourism and Creative Economies of the Republic of Indonesia is sponsoring a float.  But the local Chamber of Commerce, the San Gabriel Valley Economic Partnership, the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation and other local pro-business organizations do not have floats.  It’s telling that a float touting capitalism is now sponsored by Asia, not the United States or California.

Many of the local cities that entered floats in past parades have dropped out due to financial pressures.  Absent will be a float from the small city of Duarte that teamed with the City of Hope cancer treatment center for decades.  The City of Hope will continue a solo entry for 2012.

The neighboring cities of Alhambra, Burbank and Glendale all pulled out, but private donations rescued them.  West Covina won’t make it, however.  Even wealthy Beverly Hills has dropped out.

Surprisingly, the Anheuser-Busch brewery, which had entered a team of famous Clydesdales horses for 58 years, decided to spend its money elsewhere.

Behind the Corporate Façade — Non-Profit Parasites

Years ago, current Pasadena Mayor Bill Bogaard, a Democrat, pressured the parade sponsoring organization — the Pasadena Tournament of Roses — to accept non-profit agency members on their governing board.  He also forced a sort of coup of the governing board of the local Chamber of Commerce.  So today unions and non-profits, not corporations or small businesses, actually control the Chamber.

The image of the corporation-dominated Rose Parade and Rose Bowl may be what is conveyed to the public through the mass media. But behind the facade, Pasadena is a postmodern, anti-corporation community controlled by unions and with 1,000 non-profit agencies. That’s one nonprofit for every 54 households in Pasadena.

Nobody addresses the hole that nonprofits create in municipal budgets. The Occupy movement has urged bank customers to withdraw their funds and put them in nonprofit credit unions. But Pasadena has so many nonprofits that they are an invisible drain on the community that defies their glorification by the Occupiers.

Local conservative activist Mary Dee Romney wrote in an email, “There is growing acceptance by well-heeled folks in the Pasadena area that their income-producing endeavors are of such essential ‘virtue’ as to be entitled to non-profit status, thereby exempt from taxation.”

Romney provided an example. She said, “On Sept. 9, 2009, a Pasadena Star News editorial revealed that ‘insiders’ from the Thoroughbred Racing Association of California would bid for the Santa Anita Race Track (303-acres in nearby Arcadia) and run it as a ‘nonprofit arm of the Thoroughbred Owners of California’.”

The Chairman of TRAC, Arnold Zetcher, said, “We’re putting together a ‘not-for-profit,” which doesn’t mean we don’t want to make a profit — we do. We take the money and put it into the purse structure.”

Romney concluded, “Who in the Pasadena area needs a Swiss bank account when they can avoid taxes through phony non-profits? The very same folks who hide their income from taxes through non-profits are the first to call for taxes on the rest of us.”

Auto Dealers Crash Along the Rose Parade Route

Today, “the Little Old Lady from Pasadena,” who became the “terror of Colorado Boulevard” in the old Jan & Dean song, wouldn’t be buying her Super Stock Dodge in Pasadena. It doesn’t have any Dodge dealers.

There is probably no greater marker in Pasadena of the economic downturn than the closure of nearly all the major new auto dealers along Colorado Boulevard, the route of the Rose Parade.

John Martin, a boutique auto broker in Pasadena, explained why the dealerships died.  It wasn’t only because of the real estate meltdown or bank fraud.  Martin said, “Pasadena auto dealers set up shop on Colorado Boulevard in the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s. The unfortunate fact is hundreds of thousands drive down the 210 Freeway since it was built in 1970. Out of site out of mind.

“Dealerships expanded to many communities in the 70’s. Alhambra has four strong markets to draw from North, South, East and West. Pasadena loses.

“Thinning of the herd is important. Land Rover strategically places dealerships 50 to 60 miles apart. Chevy, Ford, GM and Chrysler have dealers 10 to 15 miles apart.

“With the saturation, dealers pull folks from all over,” Martin said. “And many times it is the last contact with the client after the sale or lease. Not to say that a salesman at the dealership does not have a repeat clientele. But many salespeople do move from place to place. The Rusnak luxury auto dealerships of the world do compete with a location on Colorado Boulevard. But they are specialty cars: Porsche, Bentley and so forth.

“Your dealers in Glendora are on the freeway route.  All of the old U.S. Route 66 new car dealers made the jump 30 to 35 years ago. A good example is Person Ford in the city of La Verne.  The city subsidized the dealership for 15 years with free loans not to move from Foothill Boulevard, which is two miles from the freeway.  Person closed four years ago. Out of site from the masses on the freeway.

“There are no guarantees of success for a dealer with a spot on the freeway, but the odds are better. Good service backed by good management, with helpful sales staff, is part of the equation. Auto brokers are relationship-built organizations. Many consumers are afraid of the dealership process. Thus there is a niche for the boutique auto broker.”

Fools Gold

Also contributing to the decline of auto sales and dealerships in Pasadena that Martin speaks about is the construction of the Gold Line light-rail project.  The Gold Line runs down the median of the 210-Foothill freeway that cuts through Pasadena.

It is being extended to the easterly portion of the San Gabriel Valley, heavily subsidized with $700 million in federal transportation funds championed by Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Pasadena. Local politicians brag that the Gold Line created 6,900 jobs.  They don’t calculate how many jobs it unintentionally wiped out.

The Gold Line is a highly inefficient and costly form of public transportation. Its main economic benefit is the many transit-oriented housing projects created along the light-rail route.  The Gold Line is just another form of mixed-use redevelopment with inclusionary housing masquerading as a public-transit project.  But after the real-estate bubble burst,  California has overdosed on luxury housing located on expensive commercial land, built at the expense of business creation.

The real-estate bubble may have masked the economic downturn in Pasadena for a couple of decades. But when the bubble popped, the auto dealerships that remained located along old Route 66 abruptly died because they weren’t by the freeway.  The regional and municipal land planners had failed to rezone enough large land tracts along the new freeways for new auto dealerships. In some cases, redevelopment actually relocated dealerships away from the freeway; those dealerships predictably died.  Those communities that relocated auto dealers along the freeways captured customers away from nearby cities such as Pasadena.

But will the extension of the Gold Line light rail wipe out their gains in order to create transit-oriented retail and affordable housing?

In-N-Out University

One of the few unheralded bright spots in the local economy is the In-N-Out Burger chain.  In-N-Out hires many young people out of high school.  It also has a management training program called “In-N-Out University,” which it has run since 1984 in Baldwin Park, where the chain was started.

In contrast with In-N-Out’s success is Mama’s Small Business Kitchen Incubator.  Mama’s is a nonprofit funded with a $2.6 million grant and a land loan by the city of Pasadena.  Mama’s cost $9,000 a week to operate.  Its extensive marketing campaigns brag about allowing more than 100 people to “rent” its kitchens to make food to load onto “roach coaches.” Many of these mobile restaurants compete with local, for-profit restaurants that are already hurting for business.  Despite the hype, government-sponsored restaurant incubators are a costly failure.

Green Paint from Red Arizona

If one read the local newspapers in Pasadena, one would get the impression that only government created new jobs or job training.  An example of a private program that doesn’t get any media attention is Dunn-Edwards Paint Company’s jobs and training program.

Dunn-Edwards Paint is jointly owned by the Edwards family and its employees.  It has been in business since 1925.  The company has about 100 retail outlets.  Professional architects, homebuilders and property managers account for about 90 percent of its sales.

In July 2011, Dunn-Edwards announced it was building the “world’s first” LEED-certified paint manufacturing facility. LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.

But the 336,000 square feet facility was being built in Arizona, not California.  The obvious market for “green” paints and coatings is California.

The city of Pasadena provides financial incentives for LEED certification on all new buildings.

Pasadena may have been able to assemble land to accommodate the Dunn-Edwards new paint production facility. It could have used the former site of Stuart Pharmaceuticals, previously owned by Johnson and Johnson. Instead, that freeway-adjacent site was downzoned for transit-oriented housing and historic preservation.

Pasadena Wilts Roses

The coincidental theme of the Occupy the Rose Parade Movement is: “It’s Not Coming Up Roses.”

Pasadena is a fitting location for its demonstration. Not only is Pasadena the location of the corporation-sponsored Rose Parade. It was also the epicenter of the Mortgage Money Bubble.  Pasadena headquartered Fannie Mae, IndyMac Bank and Countrywide Savings.  Even Pasadena’s mayor is a former banker who helped merge Security Pacific National Bank and the Bank of America.

Pasadena is a wealthy city that had about $666 million in reserves, investments and cash in 2008.  But it is not immune to economic stagnation.  Pasadena recently rolled $74 million of its public pension obligations into a 20-year bond to be financed with pension obligation bonds that will double the cost of paying for pensions.  Paying for public pensions with bonds will double their cost to the taxpayers and suck more money out of the community that could have been used for business development.

Pasadena is also running a $20 million deficit in its $160 million renovation of the Rose Bowl, financed with federal Build America Bonds.

But the Occupy Movement will have to look beyond its anti-corporatist ideology if it is going to have anything more than symbolic political influence on the economy.

Local Problems

Most of the economic problems of Pasadena are local, not global.

Pasadena over-zoned and overbuilt transit-oriented mixed-use developments and inclusionary housing on pricey commercial land next to freeways.  Such freeway-close developments gobbled up sites that could have been used to relocate auto dealerships from obsolescent locations along the old historic Route 66.  They also crowded out any chance of new facilities for contrived green industries being built in the suburbs.  Such facilities are now being built out of state.

Over the last few decades, Pasadena grew non-profit agencies instead of small businesses.

Its attempt to “incubate” start-up restaurants is not only a failure and redundant but mostly politically motivated.  Private businesses starved for start-up financing after the collapse of the Mortgage Money Bubble.  Many restaurants closed or have struggled to stay open.  But government and local churches have collaborated to fund a “restaurant business incubator” project that only serves to put other restaurants out of business.  Those who cannot afford up-front capital needed to start restaurants should not be in that business.

But not according to local politically correct local government and churches that want to transfer money from the 1 percent to the so-called 99 percent no matter the result.

Pasadena’s, and California’s, economic stagnation has little to do with Wall Street.  It has more to do with an anti-business culture.

An overwhelming percentage of voters still believes that pro-growth policies for the economy are better than reducing inequality. That doesn’t mean restaurant business incubators, luxury affordable housing, or counterproductive redevelopment and public transit projects.

As you watch the pictures of whatever demonstration marches at the Rose Parade on New Year’s Day in Pasadena, be aware that things are not what they are portrayed to be.

It’s not coming up Roses in Pasadena because Pasadenans no longer want to grow roses.

By DAVE ROBERTS

The hammering fist of government has the nuance and delicacy of someone playing the piano while wearing boxing gloves. California’s $500 million water softening industry has been a punching bag for state politicians for several years, and it’s trying to fight back before it goes down for the count.

The current battleground is the Inland Empire Utilities Agency, a 242-square-mile district in the southwest corner of San Bernardino County, approximately 35 miles east of Los Angeles. It treats sewage and provides recycled water for 850,000 residents in the cities of Chino, Chino Hills, Fontana, Montclair, Ontario and Upland, along with the Cucamonga and Monte Vista water districts.

Salt intrusion has been a problem in the Inland Empire, polluting the recycled water supply. In 2001, the IEUA adopted a Salinity Action Management Plan, spending more than $200 million over the next decade to remove 34,000 tons of salt per year from the region.

In 2008, the IEUA implemented a voluntary rebate program, paying up to $2,000 for the removal of residential automatic water softeners, each of which discharge about 30 pounds of salt per month into the sewer system. The money could help pay for a portable exchange tank softener, which uses salt, but doesn’t discharge into the sewer system, instead requiring the extra expense of periodic pickup and disposal. Nearly 400 homeowners took advantage of the program over the next three years, preventing 70 tons of salt intrusion annually.

In 2009, the IEUA sponsored AB 1366, by Assemblyman Mike Feuer, D-Los Angeles, which enabled areas threatened by salt intrusion (the Central Valley and South and Central coasts) to ban the installation of automatic softeners.

“We have been working to reduce salts and protect our water supplies in the Chino Basin for decades,” said IEUA Board Member Gene Koopman. “Our cities and water agencies have invested hundreds of millions of dollars over the past ten years to protect the quality of our water. If the water becomes too salty, it is tremendously expensive to remove enough salt to make it useable — it would be 10 to 20 times more than the five bucks per bag of water softening salt that a homeowner may be paying today. That’s why we are considering all options for reducing the salty discharge that comes from automatic water softeners.”

Board Hearing

On June 15, 2011 the board held a hearing to authorize a ban on the installation, replacement or enlargement of automatic water softeners in the district. It’s up to the member agencies to adopt ordinances to enact and enforce the ban if they wish. Existing automatic softeners — which are in at least 18,000 homes and discharge more than 3,000 tons of salt each year, accounting for 10 percent of the district’s salinity problem — are allowed to remain in place.

General Manager Thomas Love gave a PowerPoint presentation in which he said that automatic, self-regenerating water softeners are the single most important constraint to the recycled water and groundwater supplies. Failure to rein in the problem could lead to increased dependence on unreliable imported water, costing perhaps $800 million, and the need to construct desalination systems costing more than $435 million.

To drive the point home, a self-regenerating water softener surrounded by nine 40-pound bags of salt was on display, representing the 360 pounds of salt that the unit releases into the sewer system every year.

Seventeen people spoke in favor of the installation ban, most of them officials of water districts. In addition, the IEUA received more than 100 letters of support from residents and more than 25 letters from water agencies, environmental groups and businesses. Most were form letters. The ban was unanimously approved on July 20 after it was noted that no one spoke against the installation ban at the June hearing.

Inside Plumbing Job

Although the Pacific Water Quality Association, which represents the water-conditioning industry in California, had been in contact with IEUA officials, providing input as the planning for the crackdown on automatic softeners proceeded, the association was not given a heads up on the June hearing, failed to check the agenda and didn’t show up.

“It clearly slipped through the cracks for us,” said PWQA President Marty Jessen. The PWQA, many of whose members are small, family-owned businesses, is not one of the powerhouse lobbying groups in the state; for example, there are no staff members listed on its website.

But Jessen is angry that the IEUA failed to give his association a heads up about the hearing.

“We were meeting with the Inland Empire guys and thinking we were understanding each others’ positions,” he said. “Then they passed the ordinance, which urges cities to ban them. Lo and behold, they forget to invite us to it. That’s the part that outrages me. That’s not the way government is supposed to work. It’s supposed to be by, of and for the people, instead of being done inside a phone booth. They met the letter of the law, but not the spirit at all. We are trying to get them to take a deep breath here and talk about it.”

The Water Quality Association, which represents the water-conditioning industry nationwide, sought to put some muscle into its effort to get a re-hearing by the IEUA and a temporary halt to the installation ban, hiring the Jones Day law firm to send a letter. It refuted IEUA officials’ assertion that the ban had received unanimous support.

“A ban on the installation of self-regenerating water softeners was, and is, neither unopposed nor non-controversial,” the letter written by Marc Callahan argues. “The WQA opposes such a ban, and members of the group expressed considerable opposition about such a proposed ban during a summer 2010 meeting with the IEUA. In addition, over 500 Inland Empire residents voiced opposition to the underlying state legislation, and could reasonably be expected to have opposed the ban here. We note this is more than three times greater than the approximately 150 letters and cards of support the IEUA received in support of the ban.”

Measure S

Callahan cited a similar but tougher measure from 2008 for the the Santa Clarita Valley Sanitation District, Measure S. It was not just a ban on the installation, but the removal of existing automatic water softeners that was opposed by 31,192 voters. (The letter did not note that Measure S passed with 55,502 votes, or 64 percent.)

On the lack of notification to the association about the hearing, Callahan notes that “in the summer of 2010, members of the WQA and PWQA discussed the benefits of self-regenerating water softeners with IEUA staff, and voiced opposition to any ban on such equipment. The IEUA promised to involve the WQA and the PWQA in discussion on salinity and water softeners in the Inland Empire. Rather than include the WQA in the most meaningful discussion — the public hearing on the proposed ban — members of the WQA were neither informed of the hearing nor invited to testify at it.”

But IEUA officials did notify supporters of the installation ban about the hearing, according to Callahan.

“The WQA strongly believes that it, and other opponents of the ban, should have been treated in the same manner as proponents of the ban,” his letter states. “The process was undemocratic and violates the spirit of open hearing laws. It is particularly inappropriate since … Ordinance No. 87 authorizes the issuance of search warrants, fines and incarceration of Inland Empire residents who install or replace their self-regenerating water softeners.

“Had opposing viewpoints been solicited, the Board would have heard testimony calling into question the efficacy of a ban and that similar bans, such as in the Santa Clarita Valley Sanitation District, have not achieved the results its proponents promised. Further, by banning the installation and replacement of self regenerating water softeners, the Ordinance prevents residents from replacing older water softeners with more modern devices that discharge far less salt.

“The Ordinance authorizes the IEUA to enter the homes of Inland Empire residents to check for water softeners and even allows the IEUA to seek a warrant from a court if a resident refuses to allow an inspection. These provisions are even more troubling considering that the Ordinance bans the installation of self-regenerating water softeners, not their use, and raises the prospect that the residents will have to supply inspectors with documentation that the equipment was installed before the ban took effect, or risk searches of their homes, fines and imprisonment.”

IEUA General Manager Thomas Love was not feeling WQA’s pain or sharing the love in his response letter, saying that the public hearing was properly noticed as was the follow-up regular meeting when the ban authorization was adopted. “As a result, no additional public hearing is needed,” Love wrote.

He noted that existing automatic softeners aren’t affected, mentioned the rebate and reminded that the WQA and the PWQA have been involved in the planning for the ordinance, including a half-day briefing in July 2010 and with a representative on the Regional Water Softener Task Force.

Draconian Punishment 

Love addressed the concerns about punishment: “While, from a legal standpoint, Ordinance No. 87 does authorize the issue of search warrants and fines, it is not the intent, nor the practice of the IEUA to go to this extreme for minor infractions of the Ordinance. You are very much aware that the sections of the Ordinance you reference are in place to be used as a last resort when it is necessary to protect public health, the safety and welfare of the community and environment.”

Callahan, on behalf of the WQA, pressed its case with a follow-up letter, noting that Love did not respond to the charge of IEUA stacking the deck at the hearing in favor of supporters of the installation ban: “In enacting AB 1366, the Legislature directed local water and wastewater agencies to ‘engage in a collaborative process that is open to all stakeholders to prepare salt management plans.’”

Callahan also argued that if the IEUA doesn’t intend to issue search warrants and impose fines, then it should rescind that authority from the ordinance. “Indeed, your assurance that public authorities will seek search warrants and fines only ‘as a last resort’ rings hollow, given the threats of home inspections and fines recently mailed out by the Santa Clarita Valley Sanitation District to over 2,500 of its residents,” he wrote.

Love declined to respond to those arguments and merely offered the WQA the opportunity to address the board during the “public comments” portion of meetings.

The one thing that both sides can agree on, however, is that the writing is on the wall for automatic water softeners, and new solutions must be found.

“Frankly there’s a significant number in the industry today who believe we have got to find something better than the old way of doing this,” said Jessen. “It’s kind like catalytic converters in cars. Remember the bitching and moaning about that — we were killing people with bad air. But now cars get better gas mileage and don’t pollute. That’s what we have to do in the industry. We are working hard to get that down.”

Higher Efficiency

The efficiency of softeners has improved dramatically over the years. Units with sensors can determine the hardness of the water and reduce the frequency of regeneration if the water doesn’t require it — for example, when softer Delta water is blended into the harder Colorado River water. This can potentially cut in half the amount of salt discharged into the sewer system. An electro-chemical softener that uses no salt at all is now under development.

“The amount of money being spent in the industry to improve what we do is dramatic, and has increased exponentially in the last three years,” said Jessen.

“It’s clear we have to do something about this problem.”

As noted in the WGA letter, banning the installation or upgrade of softeners ensures that the older, less efficient, saltier units remain in place — the exact opposite of what the IEUA wants. In addition, if the Santa Clarita and the IEUA bans spread to other areas, it will reduce the incentive for the industry to develop newer technologies that are not allowed to be installed.

“The industry has responded, and then we get this kind of treatment — not very good,” said Jessen. “We would like all of those water agencies to slow down for a little bit and give the industry a year or two to finish the development of these new products. And I think these bans would be unnecessary. There does need to be regulations in the future to limit the amount of salt used, but they should set standards. 

“We have to get the policy makers to understand the technology before they do rash things. It will cost the home owners $1,000 (extra for the newer, more efficient units). Instead of paying $2,800, you will pay $3,700. But over the long haul you will buy a lot less salt and use less water regeneration. We think we are going fast and working hard on this, but don’t seem to be getting much credit at the moment.”

While hard water is not unique to California, the state has adopted the toughest measures against automatic softeners, according to David Loveday, WQA Director of Government Affairs and Communications.

California Attacks

Other states “haven’t attacked our industry like California,” he said. “Most everywhere else they are willing to sit down and talk and work with us. We are an easy target. We are the low-hanging fruit. Most of these people are small business people, the majority of them. The economy is putting a strain on them or possibly causing them to go out of business or lay some people off.”

Illustrating how intransigent California politicians can be, Gene Erbin, who represented Culligan in the unsuccessful fight against AB 1366, said he asked its author, Feuer, if he would be willing to provide an exemption for a softener now under development that reduces salinity by as much as 85-90 percent. “He said no,” said Erbin.

So, politicians and agency officials in order to reduce salinity are forbidding homeowners from upgrading to a more efficient unit that would reduce salinity. Another knockout blow from the clumsy fist of government.

This is the second in a series by Dave Roberts on water-softening regulations. The first was “Hard Battle Over Water Softeners.”

By WAYNE LUSVARDI

Over the past three years, the approval rate of new permits for oil and gas “fracking” wells in California has fallen by 90 percent — from 71 to 7 out of every 100 permit applications. “Fracking” involves the high-power injection of water, sand and proprietary chemicals into wells. According to a fracking documentary Web site, “The pressure fractures the shale and props open fissures that enable natural gas to flow more freely out of the well.”

The California permit falloff is mainly due to tighter rules requested by the U.S. Congress when Democrats ran both houses under House Speaker (now Democrat Leader) Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

The rules have enforced by the Obama Environmental Protection Agency since spring 2010. The rule enforcement was not altered after Republicans took over the U.S. House of Representatives in January 2011, while Democrats kept control of the U.S. Senate, maintaining Reid as majority leader.

The Oct. 19 issue of Bloomberg business news online reported that the State Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources approved 37 of 52 permit applications in 2009 (71 percent). It then approved 27 out of 100 applications in 2010 (27 percent). But it approved only 14 out of 199 applications thus far in 2011 (7 percent).

California Oil & Gas Permits Approved

** Obama admin. EPA began crackdown on fracking permits

The massive rejection drop in the permit approval rate since the Obama EPA clampdown has purportedly been to protect groundwater basins.  But even Lisa Jackson, President Obama’s EPA administrator, admitted the environmental risk of fracking is practically nonexistent. A recent Duke University study confirms fracking fluids don’t contaminate underground water basins.

The EPA rule-tightening came after a March 2010 request from the Pelosi-Reid-led Congress.

According to the Oct. 21, 2011 issue of Scientific American, the Obama-led EPA plans an even greater expansion of enforcement rules on fracking in 2012.

The Obama EPA’s Economic ‘Frackicide’

The permit delays have stalled $1.04 billion in investments, the creation of 6,040 jobs, $425.4 million in labor income and $49 million in state and local taxes, according to a report published by the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation.

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It is estimated that $1 billion in oil and gas investment would generate 13,000 additional barrels of oil per day, or enough to provide gasoline for 16,514 vehicles per year. By comparison, the state of California owns about 11,000 vehicles, excluding police and fire-fighting vehicles.

Brown Fires Oil & Gas Permitters

In response to pressure from the oil and gas industry, the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation and Bloomberg business news, Gov. Jerry Brown fired two energy regulators. They were Elena Miller, the head of the State Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources, and Derek Chernow, the acting director of the California Department of Conservation, both of whose agencies oversaw the permitting process. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger previously appointed Miller and Chernow.

The firings were praised by state Sen. Michael Rubio, D-Shafter, whose political district is in the Monterey Shale oil and gas field. But there is no known report of whether the EPA would consider sanctions against California for noncompliance with its stringent fracking rules.

Les Clark, spokesperson for the Independent Oil Producers Agency, praised the governor’s firings. He said Elena Miller could not streamline the permit process, couldn’t forge a relationship with the oil and gas industry and declined to attend their annual meetings. Miller previously was an employment litigation attorney for the Department of Corrections and once worked as a paralegal for Atlantic Richfield. 

Brown Commits Frackicide with Replacement Regulator?

Glossed over in the mainstream media was Miller’s replacement, Clifford Rechtschaffen, the director of the Environmental Law Program at Golden Gate University.

Rechtschaffen may be viewed as an odd pick to expedite oil and gas permits, given that he served as a special assistant on climate change to Gov. Brown when Brown was California’s attorney general from 2006 to 2009. Rechtshaffen also is a member of the Center for Progressive Reform, co-founded an environmental justice clinic serving low income communities and drafted lead-based paint regulations.

How is someone who has such a profound bias favoring green energy and climate change policies going to instantly become the expediter of fracking permits? Unless Brown plans to sue the federal EPA’s fracking rules, that’s an unlikely political possibility.

Sacrificing Fracking Jobs for Artificial Green Jobs is Political Suicide

Many states are rapidly turning their energy policies to natural gas production. Their model comes from George P. Mitchell, a geologist, engineer and environmentalist who built a town of 100,000 population in Texas using cutting-edge green technology following the ideas of inventor Buckminster Fuller.

Cognitive elites such as eminent British science writer Matt Ridley and New York Times columnist David Brooks have recently come out as “frackers.” 

There is so much natural gas being extracted in the Marcellus field in Pennsylvania that Kinder Morgan Energy Partners plans to reverse the flow in its Rockies Express Pipeline. It originally delivered gas from Colorado to the East Coast. Now it will deliver natural gas to the California market.   This play in the gas markets may change the gas-pricing structure in the entire United States to a one-price market. 

Should such a one-price market be created in the United States, it may pose a serious challenge to California’s Cap and Trade program, which is designed to embargo imported gas or electricity from California markets in order to puff up the price of expensive Green Power.  An Interstate Commerce Clause challenge to California’s Cap and Trade program may be looming in the future.

California no longer can claim environmental superiority for so-called clean wind and solar power because both require backup natural gas fired power peaker plants and indirectly generate more air pollution by requiring such gas power plants to “cycle” up and down to meet the unpredictability of wind and sun power.

With the EPA’s fracking regulatory crackdown and the uncertain direction for permitting fracking well permits in California, and as the natural gas market elsewhere lights up with real jobs, both President Obama and Gov. Jerry Brown may be poised to commit political suicide with voters.

By WAYNE LUSVARDI

Having just passed Halloween, our minds think of ghosts, ghouls and goblins.  One such goblin that will undoubtedly be overlooked is that wind power turbines gobble up energy from the electric grid even when they are not spinning.

During the winter months, this can be as much as 20 percent of the output of wind turbines.

All the deceptive advertising claims that wind power:

* Reduces C02;

* Generates clean power;

* Is renewable because the force of the wind is from nature:

* Will create independence from oil and reduce world conflict;

* Will soon generate so much electricity that wind farm operators will soon pay customers just to take it off the grid.

But to cover up the corrupt system of wind energy subsidies to politicians, wind energy operators, unions and venture funds ignore:

* The increasing pain from higher electricity and water rates;

* The visual impacts on nature and property values;

* The the diminishment of the quality of life from noise, ill health, bird kills;

* The crowding out of resources for fighting such diseases as cancer.

Parasitic Power

Despite all the claims of renewable power proponents about the advantages of clean wind energy, a little known secret is that wind turbines are power parasites.

Power engineer Willem Post, writing online at TheEnergyCollective.com, defines parasitic power as “the power used by a wind turbine itself.”  In other words, wind turbines don’t just generate power, they also require power whether the turbine is operating or not.

When Southern Californians drive along Interstate 10 through the San Gorgonio Pass near Palm Springs, they may see wind turbine blades revolving at low speeds (instead of high speeds when the wind picks up).  When that happens, the turbine may actually be drawing power from the grid.

Post says that, during the spring and summer, the parasitism of wind turbines may be less likely. But during winter it “may be 10-20 percent of the wind turbine output.”  In winter, the wind speed needs to be well above 10.7 miles per hour to offset parasitic power drawn out of the grid.  More than 10.7 mph and a wind turbine will supply the grid; lower than 10.7 MPH and it will rob from the grid.

Parasitic Power Components

Post has compiled a list of the systems and equipment that require electric power associated with a wind turbine:

* Rotor yaw mechanism to turn the rotor into the wind;

* Blade pitch mechanism to adjust the blade angle to the wind;

* Lights, controllers, communication, sensors, metering, data collection, etc.;

* Heating the blades during winter. This may require 10-20 percent of the turbine’s power;

* Heating and dehumidifying the nacelle (large utility scale turbines); this load will be less if the nacelle is well-insulated;

* Oil heater, pump, cooler and filtering system of the gearbox;

* Hydraulic brake to lock the blades when the wind is too strong;

* Thyristors, which graduate the connection and disconnection between turbine generator and grid;

* Magnetizing the stator; the induction generators used to actively power the magnetic coils. This helps keep the rotor speed constant, and as the wind starts blowing it helps start the rotor turning (see next item);

* Using the generator as a motor to help the blades start to turn when the wind speed is low or, as many suspect, to create the illusion the facility is producing electricity when it is not, particularly during important site tours. It also spins the rotor shaft and blades to prevent warping when there is no wind.

Is Parasitic Wind Power Subsidized?

Willem Post asks whether wind farm owners pay for electricity drawn from the grid, or is this just another subsidy?  Are wind farm operators getting free electricity at ratepayers expense to keep their turbines and ancillary systems operating when they are dormant or underperforming?

I contacted the California Energy Commission. They replied that large wind farms have backup energy storage rather than drawing energy from the grid.  But this must mean that up to 20 percent of a wind farm’s output must go into batteries during the winter, which cuts the overall efficiency and output of each wind-power plant.

The California Energy Commission directed me to contact private electric utility companies to find out if they provide internal subsidies to wind farms.  Southern California Edison did not provide an answer to repeated questions about windmills using parasitic power to wind farms and shifting that extra cost on to customers’ electric bills.

Three Better Alternatives to Wind Power

Willem Post has offered three better alternatives to wind energy:

First Alternative: Gas Turbines

1. 60 percent Efficient Combined Cycle Gas Turbines.

The rotors on the gargantuan Danish Vesta V-112 three-megawatt wind turbines have a diameter or 373-feet. (Video explaining them here.) The housings — called nacelles — are as big as a Greyhound bus perched atop a 280-foot high monopole tower.  They can produce about 176 gigawatt hours of energy per year.

Although the useful life of a wind turbine is quoted as 25 years, the gearboxes and blades fail within 5 to 10 years.  The Vesta turbines would provide power at about 9.2 cents per kilowatt hour, which would be competitive with conventional power sources, but does not include the extra costs of transmission, increased cost of gas-fired backup power and gas pipelines, and all the tweaking of the electric grid — called “smart power” — needed to accommodate highly variable wind power.  The problem with wind power is that the wind gusts.

For about the same installation cost of the Vesta turbines, a new 60 percent efficient combined-cycle gas turbine engine (CCGT) would produce 5.6 times the electrical energy per invested dollar. And a gas-turbine energy facility would have a 35-to-40-year useful service life and deliver energy at about 6 cents per kilowatt-hour, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Some of the advantages of a gas-fired CCGT facility are:

* No grid modifications would be required;

* No inefficient operation of gas-fired wind energy balancing facilities would be required;

* Impacts on quality of life (noise, visual, psychological and health), property values and the environment would be minimal;

* The facility would take up only a few acres;

* The electrical energy would be low-cost, steady 24/7/365, reliable and dispatchable;

* Low CO2 emissions/kWh (killowatt hour); about 1/3 the CO2 emissions/kWh of coal plants;

* No particulate emissions;

* Domestic energy supply, good for energy independence, national security.

While conventional efficient gas turbine engines are vastly superior to wind farms, they don’t produce the political symbolism and the vast system of union jobs and patronage and subsidies to green energy developers that politicians crave.

Second Alternative: Energy-Efficient Buildings

2. Increasing Energy-Efficient Buildings

Energy engineer Willem Post states that there is another alternative to renewable energy:

“The real issue regarding CO2 reduction is energy intensity, Btu/$ of GDP [British thermal units per dollar of Gross Domestic Product]; it must be declining to offset GDP and population growth. To accomplish this, energy efficiency needs to be at the top of the list, followed by the most efficient renewables of which hydro power is the best and residential small wind is the worst, in fact, it is atrocious. Energy efficiency is so good that it should be subsidized before any and all renewables, because it is much more effective per invested dollar.”

Current renewable energy subsidies only reach the top 5 percent of households that can afford to take advantage of tax credits; and only those politically connected large-scale green energy companies that can do the same. This results in cost-shifting the extraordinarily high electric rates of green power onto everyone else in parasitic fashion.

Post says there is a “massive energy source right at our fingertips” that remains mostly untapped, does not require ugly power plants in the desert, is not noisy, in fact is invisible and doesn’t harm birds or wildlife: building energy efficiency.

While California has been the leader in energy efficient new building standards and there have been many weatherization programs funded by local natural gas suppliers or HUD Community Development Block Grant funds, such programs mostly have been focused on commercial and industrial buildings and building owners who qualify for rebates or live in CDBG-eligible target areas.

According to Post, building energy efficiency projects:

* Will make the US more competitive, increase exports and reduce the trade balance;

* Usually have simple payback periods of six months to five years;

* Reduce the need for expensive and highly visible transmission and distribution systems;

* Reduce two to five times the energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions and create two to three times more jobs than renewables per dollar invested; no studies, research, demonstration and pilot plants will be required;

* Have minimal or no pollution, are invisible and quiet, are peaceful; no opposition groups demonstrating against them, something people really like.

* Are by far the cleanest energy development anyone can engage in; they often are quick, cheap and easy.

* Have a capacity factor = 1.0 and are available 24/7/365.

* Use materials — taping, sealing, caulking, insulation, windows, doors, refrigerators, water heaters, furnaces, fans, air conditioners, etc. — that are almost entirely made in the United States. Matrials represent about 30 percent of a project’s cost; the rest is mostly labor. By contrast, about 70 percent of the materials cost of expensive renewables, such as photovoltaic solar, is imported (panels from China, inverters from Germany); the rest of the renewables materials cost is miscellaneous electrical items and brackets;

* Will quickly reduce CO2 at the lowest cost per dollar invested and make the economy more efficient in many areas which will raise living standards, or prevent them from falling further;

* If done before renewables, will reduce the future capacities and capital costs of renewables.

So, if environmental policy were properly focused, it would target cities with neighborhoods with old building stock. And it would put a particular emphasis on multi-family housing that can lower the utility bills of low and moderate-income households.

Instead, California’s environmental policies of green power mandates and Cap and Trade emissions trading can only increase energy and water bills to recirculate subsidies to green energy providers in a vicious circle.

Third Alternative: Motor Vehicles

3.  Motor Vehicles

Willem Post also says that continuing with the utopian effort to get more electric vehicles on the roads, charged by wind turbines mostly at night when the wind typically blows, isn’t as good as high-efficiency diesel engines along with hybrid vehicles.

Unmasking the Energy Goblin

Knowledge is emerging that wind and solar power plants require backup gas-fired power plants to cycle — ramp up and down like turning the thermostat up and down in your home — because the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine, causing waste of energy and increased pollution.

Coupled with this newer knowledge is the recognition that wind turbines draw up to 20 percent of energy out of the grid in order to operate.  This 20 percent is parasitic power and it is plausible that this is being indirectly subsidized in customers’ electric bills as a hidden subsidy. Although this is not verifiable, given the secrecy of the green power industry and the disincentives of electric utilities to divulge whether green power boosts their energy sales.

The picture that is emerging is that renewable energy has nothing to do with energy savings or pollution reduction. It is mainly a Halloween mask that makes the goblin monster of green power look like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Wind and solar power are political symbols used to legitimate the takeover of 33 percent of the private sector energy industry for patronage union jobs to keep The Party of Government in political power.  Green advocates can always self-righteously point to wind turbines and solar panels that don’t pollute replacing the smoke stacks of coal power plants as justification as to why green power is morally and politically legitimate.

What is Unseen

But as French economist Friedrich Bastiat once observed, one must look beyond “what is seen” to “what is unseen.” In the case of green power, what is unseen is the increase in energy usage and pollution from the cycling of gas and coal power plants to adjust to the variability of wind and solar power.  Economist Thomas Sowell calls this Stage 1 thinking — looking at only the initial feel good policies and not the Stage 2 consequences.

For example, back in the early 1970’s, real estate developer Robert Klein influenced the state legislature to pass laws for the takeover of the low-income housing industry via tax-exempt bond financing.  The long-term consequences of this takeover were the collapse of the entire finance system of the United States with the Mortgage Meltdown and Bank Panic of 2008.

The future is hard to predict.  But if history is a guide, we will eventually see a collapse of the energy system in California or continued energy crises with blackouts.  Green power is a Halloween mask of a fairy princess who with a magic wand can provide clean power and jobs to California.  It is time to take the mask off of green power to reveal the grotesque goblin that is underneath.

By WAYNE LUSVARDI

Electricity: the peril the wind sings to in the wires on a gray day.

– novelist Janet Frame

Windmill-Gate is blowing across the trendy new resource of wind-generated electricity. New new studies look at “cycling”: the ramping up and down of gas power plants to adjust to the variability of wind energy coming into the electric grid. The studies show cycling causes conventional power plants to emit significantly more air pollution than if wind farms were not connected to the grid.

Even in Holland, home of windmills for centuries, the Dutch government is reported to have shifted to a new systemic model of energy sustainability. The new model considers how much pollution is generated when wind power interacts with conventional gas-power plants. They have discarded the “Old Model” of presuming that wind-power plants have no effects on the efficiency and emissions of conventional power plants.

Wind Power Lowers “Miles Per Gallon” of Gas-Power Plants

It is self-evident that wind turbines don’t directly emit any carbon dioxide or other pollution in to the air.  But when wind, coal and natural gas power interact in the electricity grid, is wind still a clean source of energy?  A Dutch study, an American study in the State of Colorado and a study of wind farm data in Ireland have all found this: Connecting wind power to the grid produces more carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions because backup conventional power plants have to ramp up and down — called cycling — to adjust to the high variability of wind power when the wind doesn’t blow, or blows at variable speeds.

This is analogous to the gas mileage you get on your car.  When driving on the uncongested freeway, you can get, say, 30 miles per gallon of gasoline.  But when driving in stop-and-go street traffic, your mileage may drop to 10 miles per gallon, depending on traffic conditions and if drivers race between traffic signals.  This is because gasoline engines burn more fuel and emit more pollution when constantly accelerating and decelerating than when running at a constant speed.

When the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, renewable energy requires the backup capacity of conventional power plants. Wind energy can never be relied upon for what is called “base load” power because it is too unreliable.

However, renewable power has “must take” status for 33 percent of power demands, under state legislation in California signed last April by Gov. Jerry Brown.  When we are talking about “cycling” of power plants up and down, we mainly refer to gas-fired power plants. That’s because coal plants can’t be ramped up fast and nuclear power plants cannot be ramped up or down at all to accommodate the variation of wind.

In any event, nuclear power plants do not produce C02 and have inexhaustible fuel.  California mainly shifted to natural gas-powered plants after the federal Environmental Protection Agency mandated the mothballing of old, polluting fossil-fuel power plants, which resulted in the California electricity crisis of 2000-01.

Dutch Study 

The 2009 Dutch pilot study is, “Electricity in the Netherlands: Wind Turbines Increase Fossil Fuel Consumption and C02 Emission,” updated in October 2011 by C. le Pair in collaboration with J. K. de Groot, formerly with the Dutch Technology Institute (STW) and Dutch Shell, respectively. It  concluded: “The wind projects do not fulfill ‘sustainable’ objectives. They cost more fuel than they save and they cause no CO2 saving, in the contrary they increase our environmental ‘foot print’.”

De Groot and le Pair reported that a 300-megawatt wind farm near Schiphol, Netherlands would have emitted an extra 117.9 tons of C02 on one day alone, August 28, 2011.

The authors of the study also found that wind-power turbines have an estimated physical life of about 15 years, instead of the 30-year life claimed by wind energy advocates.

The Dutch study pointed out that fuel efficiency and C02 emissions from power plants vary when they interact with wind power, depending on the following factors:

1. Whether the  “Old Model” of assuming wind power plants have no effects on the performance or emissions of gas fired power plants, or the “Current Model” now used by the Dutch that considers “cycling.”
2. Whether the wind plant has a 15-year or 30-year lifetime.
3. Whether a typical 500-megawatt capacity power plant is producing 100, 200 or 300 megawatts on a normal day.
4. What type of power plant is needed to backup variable wind power: a Combined Cycle Gas Turbine or an Open Cycle Gas Turbine.

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As shown above, when wind energy comes into the grid, it must be backed up by less efficient gas power plants that can be started up fast due to the vacillations of wind power.  The authors of the Dutch study cite the CEO of The Gas Union, the main gas supplier in the Netherlands, who explained why new gas pipelines had to be constructed and the price of electricity thus had to be increased; “It is because all that wind takes up so much gas.”

The results of the Dutch study are summarized in the excerpted table below:

Table 4: Fuel and C02 Emission Saving for a 500 Megawatt modern gas fired plant with design capacity of 500 MW together with a wind project — V — near Schiphol, Netherlands on a normal windy day.

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Emitting More Fuel

The percentages in the green print area indicate energy and pollution savings from wind power interacting with gas power plants.

The percentages in the red print area indicate that gas power plants with a 15-year physical life are burning more fuel and thus emitting more pollutants when they have to “cycle” to accommodate the variability of wind power coming into the grid.

Consider the last line of the green print. When cycling is factored into the calculations and a 30-year life is presumed for wind turbines, according to wind energy proponents, the energy and pollution savings are slight (0.6 to 1.9 percent).  At best, apparently, we’re spending billions of dollars on wind-farm subsidies for marginal improvements in fuel savings.

Next, consider the red print. At worst, when cycling is factored into the calculations and assuming only a 15-year life for wind turbines based on real-world data, the energy savings turn into negative percentages.  In other words, wind power causes gas-fired power plants to burn more fuel and emit more pollution.

Bentek Study — Colorado and Texas

Most of the claims of the advantages of wind power come from computer models.  An exception is the April 2011 study by Bentek Energy, a firm that does energy analysis, ironically headquartered in Evergreen, Colo. The Bentek study only became available due to the Freedom of Information Act.

The Bentek study, “How Less Became More: Wind, Power and Unintended Consequences in the Colorado Energy Market,” was prepared for the Independent Petroleum Association of Mountain States. It used actual emission data from power plants in Texas and Colorado. Bentek’s conclusion: “Wind has no visible influence on fuel consumption for electricity production and the emission of C02 in the atmosphere is not reduced.”

Bentek also found that four of five coal-fired power plants that are now forced to cycle their power output are located near Denver, adding to the urban air problem near major urban centers.

Bentek additionally concluded that adding more than 5 to 10 percent of wind energy to the electric grid “will significantly add to emissions unless more flexible natural gas generation is utilized” — which is less efficient and burns relatively more fuel and generates more emissions.

In April 2011, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law SBX1 2, by state Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, to increase the percentage of green power in the state from 20 to 33 percent.

Ireland Study 

Dr. Fred Udo posted an Internet article on his Web page that was termed by colleagues, “The Smoking Gun of the Windmill Fraud.” Udo showed that more wind power coming into the grid in Ireland resulted in increased C02 emissions, along with small energy savings. Reviewing Udo’s work, C. le Pair has commented that “there is evidence that the overall C02 emission in Ireland can be [approximately] 20 percent higher than the emission calculated in the EirGrid tables….”

Dr. Udo’s article set off rebuttals on many wind industry websites.

Whatever the merits or pitfalls of Udo’s article may be, the science behind the assertion that variable wind power increases fuel consumption and thus pollution requires no more than high-school-level science and common sense.  The wind energy industry’s counter-assertion, that “cycling” gas-fired plants are not wasteful and do not produce more pollution, defies common sense experience that everyone has with gas mileage for their own cars.

The wind industry’s assertion of a 30-year life for wind turbines isn’t borne out in the California experience, where many ugly wind farms have been abandoned in place after the 15-year tax depreciation schedule was exhausted.

Consulting energy engineer Willem Post has conducted a thorough online analysis of all the above studies and has concluded that it would be better to invest in energy-efficiency measures than in unproven and costly renewable energy.

Windmill-Gate?

The above described studies raise a question: Can environmental protection laws now be used to bring legal action to shut down California’s frenzy to comply with AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, by erecting massive wind farms in the desert, resulting in the destruction of the visual landscape as well as thousands of innocent birds?

Gov. Jerry Brown recently signed new legislation — SB 16, SB 267 and AB X1-13 — to streamline the permit process for large-scale renewable energy projects.

Why are we spending so much in welfare subsidies for unproven wind energy technologies? Dr. Robert B. Laughlin, Nobel Laureate in Physics at Stanford University states in his new book,  “Powering the Future”:

“Unfortunately, all forms of solar energy, but especially the wind, are capricious. After all, they amount to harnessing the weather. This is not a small problem but an enormous one.  Energy is most valuable when it is dear, and people simply won’t tolerate energy that blacks out at random moments.  Exactly what fraction of the time — and for what reasons — the world’s wind farms stand idle is politically sensitive, but the amount of energy they actually produce averages about 25 percent of their full capacity very generally.  Right now it’s possible to paper over this problem by having natural gas peaking plants standing by ready to power up whenever the wind stops blowing — as it does from time to time.  However, this strategy won’t work when amounts of wind or solar power become large, because correspondingly large backup generating capacity then will become too expensive. The people capitalizing this capacity don’t like getting stuck with interest payments on machinery and gas tanks that generate no revenue on account of being idle most of the time, and they’ll eventually just stop investing.”

Californians may regret the day that Gov. Jerry Brown signed SBX1 2.

Increasing Pollution

In what energy journalist Robert Bryce calls “America’s Worst Wind Energy Project,” the federal government is in the process of approving loan guarantees for General Electric’s $1.9 billion Shepherd’s Flat solar farm project in Oregon that will generate 845 megawatts of electricity for customers in California.

The Shepherd’s Flat Wind Project is to replace the planned removal of four hydroelectric dams along the Klamath River in Oregon that generate 155 megawatts of power.  The problem is that hydroelectric power can be ramped up fast to back up wind power plants.  A new gas power plant will now have to be built to back up the new wind farm, but it will have to be a less efficient peaker plant.

While the federal government and the State of California are busy removing hydroelectric dams, physicist Laughlin, in “Powering the Future,” informs us that the amount of hydro-pump energy storage required to store the world’s daily electrical surge is equal to only eight times the volume of water in Lake Mead on the Colorado River.  And hydroelectric power is a clean source of energy.

The de facto energy policy of both the federal government and California appears to be to remove clean hydroelectric power plants and replace them with gas-fired peaker-power plants that will be less efficient and emit more pollution.

Will the issue of increased emissions and energy wasted by conventional gas power plants caused by wind farms become a scandal?  No one knows.

But to paraphrase Bob Dylan, “The answer, my friend, is blowing in Windmill-Gate.”

By DAVE ROBERTS

The battle over water softeners is boiling over in California. On the one side is the water-softener industry. It’s joined by homeowners and businesses whose municipal water suppliers deliver them “hard” water — which has high concentrations of corrosive minerals, especially magnesium and calcium ions. The deposits are most visible when they cake on faucets, as shown in the second picture.

These people, about one in 10 Californians, insist that there really is no alternative to installing water softener devices to prevent “hard” water from rapidly corroding their appliances and fixtures.

On the other side are environmentalists who oppose water softening and even want to invade people’s homes to seize the devices. They insist that water-softening devices release salt into in the water, which ruins the environment, especially recycled water.

This is the first of a series of articles CalWatchDog.com will run on government crackdowns on water softeners in California.

Water Fight in the Legislature

“I’m very conflicted,” said Assemblywoman Jean Fuller, R-Bakersfield, in 2009. She was discussing a bill by Assemblyman Mike Feuer, D-Los Angeles, that would increase the regulation of water softeners to control salinity. “So I’m just going to hope that there are amendments you will take that won’t make me look like a communist if I vote for your bill.

“Especially, considering the fact that I’m going against the grain, some of the things that would ease the pain of the consumers would be appreciated. And certainly not to criminalize the consumers would be good. I have never used a water softener, but in some areas it’s unlivable without one. So I like the idea of local control. I hope that you will work to minimize the roar, so that when it gets to the governor’s office it will be smooth sailing.”

AB 1366 did sail smoothly through the Democratic-controlled Legislature and gained Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s signature, although he had vetoed AB 2270, a similar but broader bill, the previous year.

Criminalizing Consumers

But Fuller was justified in her concern about the potential criminalization of consumers in the regulation of water softeners. In August the Santa Clarita Valley Sanitation District, which has banned softeners, announced that it will be conducting home inspections and may slap violators with a $1,000 fine.

For the past two decades, a war has been waged between a coalition of environmentalists, water and sanitation districts and farmers who have sought to reduce salinity in recycled water by targeting salt-based water softeners, and the $500 million California water softener industry, which believes it’s being unfairly targeted because water softeners account for only 10 percent of the salinity problem. The industry argues that there are no sufficient alternatives to salt-based systems.

In the 1990s, the ordinances passed by California municipalities restricting water softeners were invalidated by lawsuits brought by the water softener industry. The anti-softener coalition fought back and has gained the upper hand in the past decade. The opening salvo was launched by the California Recycled Water Task Force report in 2003, which called for renewed regulation of water softeners in order to increase the recycled water supply.

Recycled water is used for a variety of purposes, including landscape irrigation in highway medians, golf courses, parks and schoolyards. Industrial uses include power station cooling towers, oil refinery boilers, carpet dyeing, recycled newspaper processing and laundries. Agricultural uses include the irrigation of produce, pastures for animal feed and nursery plants. Recycled water has even made its way into office buildings for toilet flushing.

“California has the potential to recycle up to 1.5 million acre-feet per year of water by the year 2030,” the task force report noted. “This could free up freshwater supplies to meet approximately 30 percent of the household water needs associated with projected population growth.”

Excluding Salt

But one of the challenges, in addition to the $11 billion infrastructure cost to produce and deliver recycled water, is keeping out salt.

“Over the last few decades, increasing numbers of residents in California have installed water softeners in their homes to reduce problems caused by hard water,” the report stated. “Unfortunately, the use of softeners, particularly onsite, self-regenerative water softeners, has led to increased salt in the water that is recycled from municipal wastewater. Any salt added to recycled water can push recycled water agencies into non-compliance with their water quality permits and make the recycled water unmarketable for irrigation use, currently the primary use throughout the state, and for some industrial uses.”

In 2006 state Sen. George Runner, R-Antelope Valley, authored SB 475, which enabled the Santa Clarita Valley Sanitation District, after voter approval (Measure S), to require the removal of all residential water softeners in order to reduce chlorides discharged into the Santa Clara River. It also required water-softener providers to turn over to the district their records of purchases by district residents. Nearly two-thirds of district voters approved Measure S. And in the last three years, the district has removed about 7,300 units.

“This has led to a very substantial decrease in the salt levels in the water leaving the district’s water reclamation plants,” said Steve Maguin, chief engineer and general manager for the district. “Unfortunately, there are many illegal automatic water softeners still in the community, with an estimated 500 of them discharging to the sewer system.”

In August the district sent out 2,500 letters to residents suspected of having illegal automatic water softeners, notifying them that they have 30 days to apply for compensation of $206 to $2,000 (depending on the unit), and an additional 30 days to remove the unit. Those who fail to respond can expect a knock on the door by a district inspector and a possible $1,000 fine.

“This enforcement program will help remove the remaining automatic water softeners in the community,” said Santa Clarita Mayor Marsha McLean. “It will further lower the salt concentration in the water going to the river and ultimately save Santa Clarita Valley residents and businesses a substantial sum of money.”

Letters for Freedom

When Feuer’s AB 1366 came to the Senate floor in September 2009, Runner spoke in opposition. First he responded to a comment by Sen. Gloria Negrete McLeod, D-Chino, who had said, “When we cut services for the needy, for the helpless, the children, we get very few letters. However, take away somebody’s water softener, and we got tons of letters.”

Runner said, “Let me illustrate why it is that people respond to this. And that is, people enjoy their liberties and freedoms. And when you take liberties and freedom away from people, people respond. So, that’s why people write letters and make phone calls.”

He criticized expanding the water softener crackdown.

“There’s some technologies out there that may not take out 100 percent, but they take out 90 percent,” said Runner. “But yet under this particular bill that’s not good enough. And so I think we’re going to end up coming back. We’re going to end up looking at other kinds of programs and technologies, and we’re going to end up with a series of bills that try to leverage one program or one kind of technology over another, instead of just letting that be done on the local level like (my) previous bill did.”

The other senator concerned about the bill was Roderick Wright, D-Los Angeles, who owns several apartment buildings, and said that eliminating water softeners would cost him $8,000-$10,000 each year to replace the pipes damaged by the area’s alkaline water.

“The water softener that I put on the system not only has protected my pipes, but in addition the water in the South Bay also eats up water heaters at the rate of two or three years,” said Wright. “In a normal setting, a water heater should last you 10 years. So the difficulty for me is that you’re asking me again to have to replace the pipes in my building. You’re asking me to vote to take eight grand a year out of my pocket.” Wright ended up not voting on the bill.

Targeted Bill

The strongest debate on AB 1366 took place at the Assembly Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee meeting in April 2009 in which Fuller made her comment about not wanting to look like a communist by supporting it.

Feuer pointed out that his bill is more targeted than the previous year’s AB 2270 because it applies only to areas facing salinity problems. But those are large areas: the South Coast, Central Coast, San Joaquin Valley and half of the Sacramento Valley. Feuer said that, unlike AB 2270, his bill doesn’t allow regulation of portable exchange water softeners, which don’t discharge into sewers.

And he pointed out that the state was on track to fall more than two-thirds short of its goal of providing one million acre-feet of recycled water by 2010.

“So we are woefully short of where we need to go,” said Feuer. “That’s what this bill is designed to address. One of the goals of this bill is to deal with an issue of salt concentration in wastewater and enable us to use recycled water more readily. The major source of residential salt is the typical water softener. These automatic timer-controlled softeners use about 50 pounds (of salt) a month. This salt is a pollution source that impedes cost-effective recycling in our state.”

Feuer said that since the task force’s recommendation six years earlier to increase regulation of water softeners, “there have been very modest efforts in that regard so far. This is the next step. This says just in areas threatened by excess salinity, local agencies could bypass burdensome existing laws that give water softeners exalted protection above all else in the state right now, and they can pass ordinances that limit the contribution of self-regulating water softeners to salinity.”

Strickland Support

Assemblywoman Audra Strickland, R-Thousand Oaks, crossed party lines to support the bill.

“Many of you who have had the opportunity to travel through the San Fernando Valley and Oxnard plains know that agriculture is a vital part of Ventura County and the 37th Assembly District,” said Strickland. “In fact, agriculture is a big part of our state’s economy. Additionally, as many of you know who represent rural areas, the crops that farmers grow are quite vulnerable to the contaminants in our water supply. With increased salinity levels beginning to impair both ground and surface water, our agricultural industry is being threatened. It’s important that we do all we can to prevent salts from all sources from entering our state’s water system.

“Anyone who owns a water softener device has an obligation to ensure that any discharge from their appliance is completely contained within their property. There should be no right for anyone to leach contaminants to their neighbor’s property. Please do not listen to those who might fear-monger or warn of house-to-house searches for contraband water softeners. We all know better that AB 1366 does not exceed the U.S. Constitution. In fact, AB 1366 does not require the removal of water softeners at all, but provides local government the tools to limit salinity from self-regenerating water softeners.”

One of the opponents of AB 1366 was Culligan, a leading water softener company. It was represented by Gene Erbin, who told the committee, “Some of what you heard almost dumbfounds me and it’s not entirely accurate.”

He said that current law already allows municipalities to prohibit the installation of water softeners, as has occurred in Dixon and Santa Clarita. The difference is that each municipality has been required to make its own findings on the necessity of regulation. Whereas AB 1366 allows a regional board, perhaps encompassing hundreds of miles in area, to make a finding, which any jurisdiction in that region could use to step up its regulations.

Compromise Suggested

Erbin suggested a compromise that would require an increase in the efficiency of water softeners. “The notion that people who now use water softeners do it lawlessly and without any sensitivity to the environment is simply wrong,” he said. “There are efficiency standards in state law that have to be met. We are proposing increasing those. We also would relax the findings that local government has to make to prohibit the installation of water softeners.”

He also offered to provide matching contributions to the rebate programs encouraging replacement of old, inefficient units for new ones.

“And lastly, if it’s important to people, we would take the Santa Clarita Model, which was negotiated with Sen. Runner a few years ago, and extend it to all jurisdictions so that they could compel the removal of machines,” said Erbin. “Just so you know, previously very few if any local officials ever expressed interest in that. When that was put on the table years ago when negotiating existing law, they said, ‘No way in hell we are ever going into people’s homes and removing machines.’ So they didn’t want that authority.”

Also speaking against the bill was Pete Conaty, representing the Water Quality Association, which represents the water softener industry nationwide. He argued that it’s unfair to treat home water softeners the same as industrial, commercial and governmental units. He warned that districts like Santa Clarita may end up  raising rates to upgrade treatment facilities, despite banning home water softeners. And he argued that the state should first clean up its own house.

“We don’t deny that California has great salinity problems,” said Conaty. “But why isn’t the state taking the lead in this? Why isn’t the state reducing its salinity output? The state is the largest issuer of salt in the state. They get salt in truckloads at prisons, hospitals and a few other places. All of their equipment is pretty darn old. The University of California at Davis was recently fined $27,000 for too much salinity.”

But Erbin and Conaty’s concerns were pretty much brushed off by most of the committee.

Assemblywoman Mary Salas, D-Chula Vista, noted that water softeners are important to have in areas with very hard water such as San Diego, but argued that the potential environmental damage outweighs the benefits.

“Yes, softened water in some areas does really make a difference in how your hair feels, how your clothes are washed,” said Salas. “But I think that the responsibility is with all of us to ensure that we protect our water supply in any way that we can. Water softeners only affect 10 percent of the water supply. To me, 10 percent of the water supply is huge. If there’s any way that we can reduce the damage or pollution to the quality of our water, we need to do it as responsible citizens of the state of California.”

As for Fuller’s concern about looking like a communist? Feuer smiled as he assured her, “I will come to your district, any time you want, to testify that you are not in fact a communist.”

In 2010, Fuller won election to the state Senate representing the 18th District.

This is the first of two articles on the California battle over water softeners. The second is, “Punch Hits CA Water Softening Industry.”

By WAYNE LUSVARDI

On Sept. 16, U.S. District Court Judge Oliver Wanger threw the Delta smelt minnow back into the waters of the Sacramento Delta.

He ruled the federal government’s case was too small to grant a stay — a court-ordered continuation — of the man-made “X2’” line where fresh water and ocean water currently mix in the Sacramento Delta at 74 kilometers (46 miles) from the Golden Gate Bridge near a spot between the cities of Pittsburg and Antioch.

However, due to the current flow of freshwater into the Delta from winter and spring rains and snowpack in the High Sierra mountain range, the judge held off until October changing the existing X2 location at 74 kilometers.  This may give time for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, along with the Natural Resources Defense Council, to file an expected appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court, according to Brandon Middleton of the Pacific Legal Foundation, a free-market public-interest law firm in Sacramento.

Small Fish, Big News

The court’s denial of a stay was an extension his 140-page ruling on August 31. It found no scientific merit in the federal government’s case to artificially set Delta X2 at the 74-kilometer spot, purportedly to protect the Delta smelt. In that decision, Wanger found that it made sense to establish the X2 line westerly of where the freshwater San Joaquin and Sacramento Rivers meet. But there was no scientific basis to the claims of the so-called experts hired by the government and NRDC that moving the line to the East would threaten the extinction of the smelt.

According to a report by Brandon Middleton of the Pacific Legal Foundation, “Judge Wanger found further that the testimony from the manager in charge of federal delta smelt regulatory measures was ‘that of a zealot,’ making her ‘unworthy of belief.’  He expressed sadness and ‘remorse for our justice system for what has been placed before the Court.’ The court concluded its hearing by finding that, as a whole, the federal agencies in this case are ‘unworthy of the public trust’.”

The brackish water zone where fresh water and salt water mix — called X2 — is no longer controlled by nature alone, but also by how much water is pumped out of the Delta at the Harvey O. Banks Pumping Plant about 11 miles northeast of Livermore.  The plant is the intake and initial pumping system for the California Aqueduct and the South Bay Aqueduct.

One hundred years ago or so the spot where fresh water and salt water mixed in the Bay-Delta was set by nature. During peak floods, the spot extended half way across the state to Stockton, in the process wiping out freshwater habitats of fish and other wildlife and entire towns. The process is documented in the book, “Battling the Inland Sea: Floods, Public Policy and the Sacramento Valley,” by Robert Kelley (1989).

Think of Japan’s Tohoku earthquake and tsunami of 2011 occurring on an occasional basis in the Delta, but without the Tsunami wave.

Without the giant water hydraulic system of the California Aqueduct and the Delta dike system in place, the Delta would return to a danger zone of flooding that decimated both man-made and natural habitats indiscriminately.

Water War is a Fish War

What the tug of war over the X2 line means is a struggle for 300,000 to 670,000 acre-feet of water in the Delta, depending on whether it is a wet of dry year, to purportedly push a few minnows called Delta smelt a few miles westerly within the Delta Bay.

At the lower figure, this would be enough water to supply the city of San Diego for one year; or at the higher number, enough for the entire city of Los Angeles for one year.

Alternatively, it would irrigate 300,000 to 670,000 acres of farmland. It would at minimum lock up water storage equivalent to Lake Castaic or Clear Lake, or at maximum Lake Havasu on the Colorado River, to hypothetically preserve a fictional brackish mixing zone for a few minnow.

But that water also supplies jobs, bureaucratic turf and funding for numerous government technocrats, environmental consultants, academics, green lawyers and environmental advocacy organizations, many of whose representatives testified during both the X2 issue and the larger court case on the Delta, which will continue.

Delta is Political Mixing Zone

The Delta Smelt issue is a water gauge that determines how much government and how much economy we have.  Just as a fisherman’s ruler measures which are “keeper fish” and which to throw back, the Smelt is an ersatz symbol and measure of what mix of a water political economy we have.

If we dedicate enough Delta Bay water to supply the entire city of Los Angeles for one year, in order to protect a few smelt that also exist outside the Delta X2 zone, then urban water rates will rise to offset fixed costs. And farmers and urban development, landscapers and even urban wildlife will suffer.  But natural resource bureaucracies and the entire food chain of jobs that feed off of them will thrive.

Liberal California politicians are currently possessed with the notion of redistricting so that a one-third majority cannot control unrestrained taxation.  But the same crowd of politicians is not concerned that a very small minority of cognitive elites who benefit from regulation of the Delta smelt are able to shut off the water spigot on farming and the larger economy if their “entitled” jobs are threatened.

When we say California is dysfunctional, what we mean is that it is bureaucratic to the point that bureaucracies are now able to use environmental regulation to trump the larger economy, and even the habitats for wildlife in agricultural and urban areas, to protect bureaucratic habitats.  The role of government serving the citizens has been reversed.

Gov. Jerry Brown shrewdly keeps the media’s attention on his government “austerity” program of low-budget inaugurations, cutting back buying new government cars, stopping the practice of state agencies making personal loans to employees and curtailing the purchase of paper clips while people send documents electronically — all in order to gain moral legitimacy for his policies and programs.  But he dares not touch any of the protected bureaucracies that are strangling the economy.

In California, austerity and the Delta smelt are the small stories; government bureaucracies are the big story.

By PATRICK MELARKEY and RICHARD TRAINOR

For the past couple years we have watched our home town struggle to keep the Sacramento Kings basketball team in Sacramento. We have also observed the proposed attempt to build a new $400 million stadium for the team in downtown Sacramento at the old Southern Pacific railroad yards.

We have also followed all the headlines and rumors about how the Kings are “moving to Anaheim.” The NBA and Mayor Kevin Johnson are “trying to keep the Kings in town.” Senate President Pro Tem Darryl Steinberg, D-Sacramento, introduces legislation to keep the Kings in his home town. And developers Ron Burkle and Darius Anderson “pledge to buy the team and keep it in Sacramento.”

It all has a similar ring to when one of us, Patrick Melarkey, was on the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors in the 1970s and the stadium activity began. Back then it was going to be a privately financed baseball stadium put together by a couple of local boys. It was not for a basketball arena.

“It was 1974 when a call came into my office,” Melarkey remembered. “I was president of the Board of Supervisors and two local lads wanted to build a privately-financed baseball stadium. The taxpaying public wouldn’t have to shell out a nickel for it. The two young men, Gregg Lukenbill and Frank McCormack, were both Catholic boys who had met at Sacred Heart Elementary School and they wanted to meet with me because I had been pushing for a new baseball stadium that would cost $1 million. The idea I had for the stadium design was based on the new minor league baseball stadium in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I had made a trip out there, visited the stadium and began thinking about a stadium like it in Sacramento. I thought the new state fair ground at Cal Expo might be appropriate.”

It was in the early stages of this plan when Lukenbill and McCormack came in to see Melarkey. Lukenbill was in his early twenties, McCormack a bit older. They were both dressed in leisure suits, then the current fashion trend, and were eager to outline their stadium dream plan.

“We want to build a state-of-the-art baseball stadium for Sacramento and it won’t cost the public a nickel,” said Lukenbill, by far the more vocal of the duo. “It’s gonna be all privately financed and we’re putting together a team to raise the money. We’re wondering if you might be able to help.”

Melarkey told them he’d do what he could for them and asked them where they wanted to build such a stadium. They had a few ideas, but nothing set in stone. Melarkey waited to see how it would play out.

Baseball in Play

Over the next few years, throughout the rest of Melarkey’s second and final term as a supervisor, he met and consulted with Lukenbill and McCormack a number of times. The baseball stadium idea was still in play. But Lukenbill was interested in any professional sports franchise that would put Sacramento on the map. Gregg said Sacramento was “a world-class city” and deserved such an urban amenity as a professional sports franchise. How the one attribute has anything to do with the other was a mystery.

During these years Lukenbill and McCormack began building their executive and financing team to get a professional sports team. First they hired Greg “Dutch” Van Dusen, the former general manager of the Sacramento Solons baseball team. The Solons were a Pacific Coast League franchise which had broken all attendance records in 1976 playing their home games at Sacramento City College’s Hughes Stadium. “Dutch” came on board the Lukenbill-McCormack vessel in 1978. Then Lukenbill secured the backing of the wealthy Benevenuti family, developers Joe and his son, Richard. Another addition was Frank Cook, a local realtor. The Benvenutis had a large parcel of land in the North Natomas area of Sacramento. Perhaps they could build a stadium there.

The problem was that North Natomas was a political hot potato. Although it had been master-planned as one site for Sacramento expansion in the early 1960s, by the 1970s the local environmental movement wanted to see it preserved. The local No Growth movement had a significant ally in Mayor Phil Isenberg, who was opposed to the development. No way would there be a traffic-generating stadium out in North Natomas, Isenberg vowed.

Now it looked as if there was no way it would even be a baseball stadium. There weren’t any major-league baseball franchises available at that time. But a basketball team could be found. It was the old Rochester Royals franchise, a team that began in the 1920s and won the 1951 NBA championship before it moved to Cincinnati in 1957. Then it moved to Kansas City in 1972, where it was renamed the Kings. This team was now in play and Lukenbill wanted to buy it.

Melarkey was retired from the board when Lukenbill bought the Kansas City Kings franchise in 1983. Lukenbill first vowed to keep the Kings in Kansas City, but only the foolhardy believed it. Lukenbill now had a franchise that could justify the need for a new stadium, and North Natomas was the chosen site.

Melarkey remembers going out there once with Lukenbill and the Benvenutis, standing on the I-880 freeway overpass about a half mile away from the present home of the Kings. Richard Benvenuti pointed from south to north, then west to east, and said, “All this land below us will all be developed as business and office parks if we can get the rezoning through the city council to allow it.” Melarkey thought Lukenbill and the Benvenutis had a king-sized battle on their hands if they intended to take on Phil Isenberg. “The best thing you can do if you intend to try this is to hire Maurice Read,” the Sacramento Public relations wizard, Melarkey told them. “Read and Isenberg are good friends and if anybody can move this stadium forward, it’s Maurice Read.”

Baseball and Development

Then Melarkey stopped following the stadium action. Lukenbill did achieve his plan to build a new basketball arena in North Natomas after a development plan was reached between the developers and the local environmental community in 1987.

Over the next years, Gregg Lukenbill and the Sacramento Kings had a chaotic tenure in Sacramento. The team moved to a different stadium in 1986. Lukenbill sold his part of the franchise in 1992. Frank McCormack, his original partner, was never paid by Lukenbill for his 3 percent share of the franchise. Dutch Van Dusen and Maurice Read moved on. The Benvenutis still had their share of the franchise and the value of property they owned in North Natomas shot through the roof.

The Kings may be in danger of leaving Sacramento, but they have left a lasting mark with the fortune they made for some of their benefactors, such has the Benvenutis.

One beneficiary was Leonard Padilla, the celebrated black-hat bounty hunter most recently seen during the Casey Anthony murder trial. Upon advice from the Benvenutis, in 1979 Padilla bought a 60-acre parcel in North Natomas for $240,000. He received an offer of more than $12,000,000 for the land in 2005, according to a Feb. 25, 2005 story by Sacramento News & Review reporter Cosmo Garvin. Using the same formula provided in the article on Padilla, between 1980-2005, the value for the 4,000-acre North Natomas property held by the Benvenutis increased from $3 million to $400 million.

Two years ago there was an article in the Sacramento Bee about a proposed land swap that involved building a new arena for the Kings at Cal Expo. It seemed that the wheel had come around to where it began.

But the differences were huge. This was no privately-financed stadium; this was a $400 million monster that the city of Sacramento was supposed to finance for the owners. This new plan was called the Convergence Plan and it called for a huge land swap. Cal Expo would be “given” to local developers. The second part of this trifecta called for moving the fair to the site of the present Kings Arena. The final piece in the deal would be a new publicly financed basketball arena in downtown Sacramento adjacent to the old Southern Pacific railway station.

The deal seemed screwy. It was actually proposed by NBA Commissioner David Stern and backed by Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, a former NBA star with the Cleveland Cavaliers and Phoenix Suns.

The questions that came to mind were these: Why should Cal Expo be opened up to developers such as the Lennar Corporation, which would likely make a fortune, while the state fair left town and took with it the revenue that comes annually to Sacramento? Was the Kings basketball arena site too small to accommodate the state fair? And how about the cost of the new stadium, estimated at $400 million. Would local taxpayers approve such an expenditure given the state of the fragile economy? Not likely, and in fact they voted down a proposed 0.25 percent sales tax in 2006.

The Anaheim Royals?

In the interim, a decade ago the Maloof family acquired the Kings. When the Convergence Plan went kerflooey, the Maloofs began looking for greener pastures. They thought they found them in Anaheim. The Maloofs went to Anaheim to showcase their wares. The City of Anaheim was interested and the talks began. They would rename the Kings the Royals and the franchise would have a new home.

But moving the Kings to Anaheim would cost a lot of money. The Maloof family would have to pay off the $67 million they owe the City of Sacramento, plus a $9 million early repayment fee. And according to Wikipedia, “In June of 2011, the Maloof brothers, Joe and Gavin, Sold majority share of the Palms to a lending company, Leonard Green & Partners LP in Los Angeles and TPG Capital in Texas, allowing them to continue building their stadium.” Professional sports leagues frown on owners being associated even with legalized gambling.

David Taylor, the local developer flavor-of-the-month in Sacramento, was deputized by the Sacramento City Council to study the feasibility of a new arena in the city. Taylor hasn’t yet met with the Maloofs. Taylor also is waiting for market studies the Kings have promised him.

Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson said of all the basketball maneuvering, “As a city, we can only control what we can control. If [the Maloofs] decide they don’t want to be in Sacramento, that is a choice they have to make.”

And on it goes, up to the present, with the future of professional basketball in Sacramento uncertain. Will Kevin Johnson and his new allies, billionaire developers Ron Burkle and Darius Anderson, deliver on their promise to keep the Kings in Sacramento? Or will they buy an existing NBA franchise, such as the financially troubled New Orleans Hornets, and bring it here? Maybe they will, but Burkle and Anderson still want a new publicly financed downtown arena if they do that. And while basketball franchises may be the stalking horse, in Sacramento the name of the game is still the same: the insider developers who benefit from voter-approved public projects, whether their names are Benvenuti, Burkle or Angelo Tsakopolous, the local developer of record for the Southern Pacific site.

It was like déjà vu all the way back to the Gregg Lukenbill-Frank McCormack plan for a privately financed baseball stadium. That was the original Field of Dreams, and the only one that still makes sense for Sacramento.