[env-trinity] Tunnel critics urge Brown to inaugurate a new water solution

[Dan Bacher]

https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2015/01/05/18766455.php
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/01/06/1355876/-Tunnel-critics-urge-Brown-to-inaugurate-a-new-water-solution
Photo of Governor Jerry Brown at the State Capitol at the inauguration  
on January 5 by Dan Bacher.

jerry_brown_1_5_15_.jpg

Tunnel critics urge Brown to inaugurate a new water solution

Bay Delta Conservation Plan is doomed!

by Dan Bacher

In his inaugural address January 5 at the State Capitol in Sacramento,  
Governor Jerry Brown made two references to California water as he  
discussed an array of issues. These included repaying the state's  
debt, funding education, promoting renewable energy and efficiency,  
addressing climate change, expanding health care, and dealing with  
changes in the criminal justice system.

He didn't specifically mention the peripheral tunnels proposed under  
the Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) during his talk, but he did  
tout the water bond and California Water Action Plan as "solutions" to  
California's water problems.

"We also have the people to thank for Propositions 1 and 2, which save  
water and money and prepare us for an uncertain future," he stated.  
"These are measures that nearly every Democrat and Republican voted to  
put on the ballot and nearly 70 percent of voters ultimately approved.  
And I’m proud to report that as a result, by the end of the year, we  
will be investing in long overdue water projects and saving $2.8  
billion in the state’s new constitutionally protected Rainy Day Fund."

"We must also deal with longstanding infrastructure challenges. We are  
finally grappling with the long-term sustainability of our water  
supply through the recently passed Proposition 1 and our California  
Water Action Plan," Brown said.

Restore the Delta (RTD), opponents of Gov. Brown’s rush to build giant  
water export Tunnels that would drain the Delta and doom sustainable  
farms, salmon and other Pacific fisheries, used the inauguration as an  
opportunity to call on Brown to “inaugurate a new, sustainable water  
solution, and abandon the doomed BDCP tunnels, which violate the Clean  
Water Act, degrade Delta families’ drinking water, and threaten salmon  
extinction,” said Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, executive director of RTD.

“For $67 billion, Californians get no new water, lose our fisheries  
and spend generations paying to subsidize huge, unsustainable  
industrial agriculture on unsuitable, drainage impaired Westside San  
Joaquin Valley lands," said Barrigan-Parrilla. "That money would be  
better spent on alternatives that will make more water available to  
all Californians: recycling, storm water capture, conservation,  
groundwater cleanup and recharge etc. It’s time for a new, sustainable  
solution that makes new water, creates long-term jobs, promotes  
regional water independence and preserves fisheries and sustainable  
farms.”

The tunnels’ opponents called upon Gov. Brown to “abandon the doomed  
project” and instead embrace a sustainable water solution that is fair  
to all Californians. That solution includes reducing Delta water  
exports, strengthening Delta levees, and investing in regional water  
independence through sustainable programs.

“Gov. Brown is offering us the same old worn out ideas regarding water  
management – taking too much water from one part of the state, causing  
great harm to communities and fisheries, to ‘fix’ the problems for big  
agriculture on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley. The tunnels  
will provide water only for big agribusiness growers on the west side  
of the San Joaquin Valley who farm unsustainable crops like almonds  
for export. The recent BDCP redesign of the pumps means absolutely  
nothing. It still violates the Endangered Species and Clean Water Acts  
and dooms our fisheries,” said Barrigan-Parrilla.

Compare:
Gov. Brown’s Tunnels
Cost: $67 billion
New Water: None
Jobs: 10,000 short-term construction jobs, Destroys thousands of Delta  
farming, Destroys Pacific fisheries-related jobs
Who benefits? Mainly huge west San Joaquin growers

Sustainable Water Solution
Cost: $12 billion
New Water: 5-10 million acre feet
Jobs: Thousands of long-term jobs installing water-saving devices,  
replacing infrastructure
Who benefits? All Californians

Below is the news release from the Governor's Office with the  
transcript of Brown's inaugural address:

Governor Brown Sworn In, Delivers Inaugural Address

SACRAMENTO – Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. today took the oath of  
office as Governor of California and delivered his inaugural address  
in the Assembly Chamber. The address serves as the Governor's  
constitutionally required annual report to the Legislature.

Edmund G. Brown Jr.
Inaugural Address
Remarks as Prepared
January 5, 2015

Members of the Legislature, the Judiciary, Constitutional Officers,  
the extended family of my pioneering ancestors and fellow Californians:

An inauguration is always a special occasion but today it is  
particularly special as I think about that day 40 years ago when my  
father and mother watched me take the oath as California’s 34th  
governor. It is also special because of how far we have come in the  
last four years. Then, the state was deep in debt – $26 billion – and  
our unemployment rate was 12.1 percent. Now, the state budget, after a  
decade of fiscal turbulence, is finally balanced – more precariously  
than I would like – but balanced. California has seen more than 1.3  
million new jobs created in just four years and the unemployment rate  
has dropped to 7.2 percent. Thanks goes to the Legislature for cutting  
spending, the economy for recovering and the people for voting for  
temporary taxes.

We also have the people to thank for Propositions 1 and 2, which save  
water and money and prepare us for an uncertain future. These are  
measures that nearly every Democrat and Republican voted to put on the  
ballot and nearly 70 percent of voters ultimately approved. And I’m  
proud to report that as a result, by the end of the year, we will be  
investing in long overdue water projects and saving $2.8 billion in  
the state’s new constitutionally protected Rainy Day Fund.

And we’re not stopping there. Soon we will make the last payment on  
the $15 billion of borrowing made to cover budget deficits dating back  
to 2002. We will also repay a billion dollars borrowed from schools  
and community colleges and another $533 million owed to local  
governments.

California has made bold commitments to sustain our environment, help  
the neediest and build for our future. We are leaders in renewable  
energy and efficiency; we have extended health care to millions; we  
are transforming our educational and criminal justice systems; we are  
building the nation’s only high-speed rail system; we raised the  
minimum wage; we are confronting the drought and longer-term water  
issues; and last, but not least, we have enacted real protections for  
our hardworking immigrants, including the issuance of long-awaited  
driver’s licenses.

In 2011, we were handed a mess and through solid, steady work, we  
turned it around. While we have not reached the Promised Land, we have  
much to be proud of.

As I embark upon this unprecedented fourth term as governor, my  
thoughts turn to a time long ago when I first entered this chamber,  
January 5, 1959, for my father’s inauguration. I sat there in front of  
the rostrum, next to my 81-year-old grandmother, Ida Schuckman Brown,  
feeling awkward in my priestly black suit and Roman collar. My  
perspective was different then. The previous August, as a young Jesuit  
living in what was then a pre-Vatican II seminary, I had taken vows of  
poverty, chastity and obedience. To me, the boisterous crowd, the  
applause, the worldliness of it all was jarring.

That was 56 years ago, yet the issues that my father raised at his  
inauguration bear eerie resemblance to those we still grapple with  
today: discrimination; the quality of education and the challenge of  
recruiting and training teachers; the menace of air pollution, and its  
danger to our health; a realistic water program; economic development;  
consumer protection; and overcrowded prisons.

So you see, these problems, they never completely go away. They remain  
to challenge and elicit the best from us.

To that end, over the next four years – and beyond – we must dedicate  
ourselves to making what we have done work, to seeing that the massive  
changes in education, health care and public safety are actually  
carried out and endure. The financial promises we have already made  
must be confronted honestly so that they are properly funded. The  
health of our state depends on it.

Educating the next generation is fundamental to our collective well- 
being. An issue that has plagued our schools for decades is the  
enormous barrier facing children from low-income families. When my  
father was governor, he sought to remedy the wide inequities among  
different school districts by calling for equalization of funding. His  
efforts were not successful.

Now – decades later – we have finally created a much fairer system of  
school funding, called the Local Control Funding Formula. Under the  
provisions of this law, state funds are directed to school districts  
based on the needs of their students. Districts will get significantly  
more funds based on the number of students from foster care, low- 
income families and non-English-speaking parents. This program also  
breaks with decades of increasing centralization by reducing state  
control in favor of local flexibility. Clear goals are set, and their  
enforcement is entrusted to parents and local officials. This puts  
California in the forefront of educational reform.

After years of underfunding and even borrowing from our local schools,  
the state now has significantly increased its financial support for  
education. Next year schools will receive $65.7 billion, a 39 percent  
increase in four years.

The tasks ahead are daunting: making sure that the new system of local  
control works; recruiting and training tens of thousands of teachers;  
mastering the Common Core Curriculum; and fostering the creativity  
needed to inspire students. Teachers need to be held accountable but  
never forget: they have a tough job to do. They need our  
encouragement, not endless regulations and micro-management from afar.

With respect to education beyond high school, California is blessed  
with a rich and diverse system. Its many elements serve a vast  
diversity of talents and interests. While excellence is their  
business, affordability and timely completion is their imperative. As  
I’ve said before, I will not make the students of California the  
default financiers of our colleges and universities. To meet our  
goals, everyone has to do their part: the state, the students and the  
professors. Each separate institution cannot be all things to all  
people, but the system in its breadth and diversity, through real  
cooperation among its segments, can well provide what Californians  
need and desire.

Along with education, health and human services constitute a major  
part of what state government does. And in the past few years we have  
made massive commitments in this area, which will require increasing  
levels of spending, the full extent of which is not yet known. For  
example, two years ago California embraced the Affordable Care Act,  
dramatically increasing its health insurance coverage under the Medi- 
Cal program. The state will enroll 12.2 million people during this new  
budget year, a more than 50 percent increase.

Providing the security of health coverage to so many Californians who  
need it is the right thing to do. But it isn’t free. Although the  
federal government will temporarily foot much of the bill, new state  
costs – now and more so in the future – will run into the billions.

Another major state responsibility is our system of crime and  
punishment. And here too, I will refer to my father’s 1959 address. He  
worried then about California’s “dangerously overcrowded prisons.” He  
talked about identifying “those prisoners who should never be released  
to prey again on an innocent public,” but he also said, “we should  
also determine whether some prisoners are now kept confined after  
punishment has served its purpose.”

We face these same questions today: what purposes should punishment  
serve and for how long should a person be confined to jail or prison –  
for a few days, a few years or for life?

In response to a large increase in crimes beginning in the 1970s, the  
Legislature and the people – through ballot initiatives – dramatically  
lengthened sentences and added a host of new crimes and penalty  
enhancements. Today, California’s legal codes contain more than 5,000  
separate criminal provisions and over 400 penalty enhancements, an  
arcane and complex mix that only the most exquisitely trained  
specialist can fathom. And funding has grown proportionately: during  
the 1970s we had 12 prisons holding fewer than 30,000 prisoners and  
corrections spending was only 3 percent of the budget; our system then  
grew to a peak of 34 prisons, with an inmate population of 173,000,  
eating up more than 10 percent of our budget dollars.

Four years ago, the United States Supreme Court held that our prisons  
were unconstitutionally overcrowded and imposed strict capacity  
limits, far below the number of inmates that were then being held.

Clearly, our system of crime and punishment had to be changed. And  
through the courts, the Legislature and the voters themselves, a  
number of far-reaching reforms have been enacted. The biggest reform  
is our realignment program, which places tens of thousands of lower- 
level offenders under county supervision. More recently, a federal  
three-judge panel ordered further measures to reduce prison  
overcrowding. And the voters, through Propositions 36 and 47, modified  
our criminal laws to reduce the scope of the Three Strikes law and  
change certain felonies into misdemeanors.

All these changes attempt to find less expensive, more compassionate  
and more effective ways to deal with crime. This is work that is as  
profoundly important as it is difficult, yet we must never cease in  
our efforts to assure liberty and justice for all. The task is  
complicated by our diversity and our divisions and, yes, by shocking  
disparities. Since time immemorial, humankind has known covetousness,  
envy and violence. That is why public safety and respect for law are  
both fundamental to a free society.

As we oversee these important changes to education, health care and  
public safety, we must not lose sight of our long-term liabilities. We  
have to face honestly the enormous and ever growing burden of the many  
commitments we have already made. Among these are the costs of  
pensions and retiree health care, the new obligations under the  
Affordable Care Act, the growing government costs of dealing with our  
aging population, bonded indebtedness and the deferred maintenance on  
our roads and other infrastructure. These specific liabilities reach  
into the hundreds of billions of dollars.

My plan has been to take them on one at a time. We have now taken  
steps to deal with the unfunded teachers’ pensions and those of the  
public employees. For the next effort, I intend to ask our state  
employees to help start pre-funding our retiree health obligations  
which are rising rapidly.

We must also deal with longstanding infrastructure challenges. We are  
finally grappling with the long-term sustainability of our water  
supply through the recently passed Proposition 1 and our California  
Water Action Plan.

Equally important is having the roads, highways and bridges in good  
enough shape to get people and commerce to where they need to go. It  
is estimated that our state has accumulated $59 billion in needed  
upkeep and maintenance. Each year, we fall further and further behind  
and we must do something about it.

So I am calling on Republicans and Democrats alike to come together  
and tackle this challenge. We came together on water when many said it  
was impossible. We came together – unanimously – to create a solid  
Rainy Day Fund. We can do it again.

Finally, neither California nor indeed the world itself can ignore the  
growing assault on the very systems of nature on which human beings  
and other forms of life depend. Edward O. Wilson, one of the world’s  
preeminent biologists and naturalists, offered this sobering thought:

“Surely one moral precept we can agree on is to stop destroying our  
birthplace, the only home humanity will ever have. The evidence for  
climate warming, with industrial pollution as the principal cause, is  
now overwhelming. Also evident upon even casual inspection is the  
rapid disappearance of tropical forests and grasslands and other  
habitats where most of the diversity of life exists.” With these  
global changes, he went on to say, “we are needlessly turning the gold  
we inherited from our forebears into straw, and for that we will be  
despised by our descendants.”

California has the most far-reaching environmental laws of any state  
and the most integrated policy to deal with climate change of any  
political jurisdiction in the Western Hemisphere. Under laws that you  
have enacted, we are on track to meet our 2020 goal of one-third of  
our electricity from renewable energy. We lead the nation in energy  
efficiency, cleaner cars and energy storage. Recently, both the  
Secretary-General of the United Nations and the President of the World  
Bank made clear that properly pricing carbon is a key strategy.  
California’s cap-and-trade system fashioned under AB 32 is doing just  
that and showing how the market itself can generate the innovations we  
need. Beyond this, California is forging agreements with other states  
and nations so that we do not stand alone in advancing these climate  
objectives.

These efforts, impressive though they are, are not enough. The United  
Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, backed up by the  
vast majority of the world’s scientists, has set an ambitious goal of  
limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius by the year 2050 through drastic  
reductions of greenhouse gases. If we have any chance at all of  
achieving that, California, as it does in many areas, must show the  
way. We must demonstrate that reducing carbon is compatible with an  
abundant economy and human well-being. So far, we have been able to do  
that.

In fact, we are well on our way to meeting our AB 32 goal of reducing  
carbon pollution and limiting the emissions of heat-trapping gases to  
431 million tons by 2020. But now, it is time to establish our next  
set of objectives for 2030 and beyond.

Toward that end, I propose three ambitious goals to be accomplished  
within the next 15 years:
Increase from one-third to 50 percent our electricity derived from  
renewable sources;
Reduce today’s petroleum use in cars and trucks by up to 50 percent;
Double the efficiency of existing buildings and make heating fuels  
cleaner.

We must also reduce the relentless release of methane, black carbon  
and other potent pollutants across industries. And we must manage farm  
and rangelands, forests and wetlands so they can store carbon. All of  
this is a very tall order. It means that we continue to transform our  
electrical grid, our transportation system and even our communities.

I envision a wide range of initiatives: more distributed power,  
expanded rooftop solar, micro-grids, an energy imbalance market,  
battery storage, the full integration of information technology and  
electrical distribution and millions of electric and low-carbon  
vehicles. How we achieve these goals and at what pace will take great  
thought and imagination mixed with pragmatic caution. It will require  
enormous innovation, research and investment. And we will need active  
collaboration at every stage with our scientists, engineers,  
entrepreneurs, businesses and officials at all levels.

Taking significant amounts of carbon out of our economy without  
harming its vibrancy is exactly the sort of challenge at which  
California excels. This is exciting, it is bold and it is absolutely  
necessary if we are to have any chance of stopping potentially  
catastrophic changes to our climate system.

California, since the beginning, has undertaken big tasks and  
entertained big ideas. Befitting a state of dreamers, builders and  
immigrants, we have not hesitated to attempt what our detractors have  
called impossible or foolish. In the last four years, in the last 40  
years, yes ever since Gaspar de Portola in 1769 marched along the  
King’s Highway, California has met adversity with faith and courage.  
We have had setbacks and failures, but always in the end, the  
indomitable spirit of California has triumphed. Through it all,  
through good times and bad, California has been blessed with a  
dynamism and historic trajectory that carries each generation forward.

Whether the early explorers came for gold or God, came they did. The  
rest is history: the founding of the Missions, the devastation of the  
native people, the discovery of gold, the coming of the Forty-Niners,  
the Transcontinental Railroad, the founding of great universities, the  
planting and harvesting of our vast fields, oil production, movies,  
the aircraft industry, the first freeways, the State Water Project,  
aerospace, Silicon Valley and endless new companies and Nobel Prizes.

This is California. And we are her sons and daughters.

Yes, California feeds on change and great undertakings, but the path  
of wisdom counsels us to ground ourselves and nurture carefully all  
that we have started. We must build on rock, not sand, so that when  
the storms come, our house stands. We are at a crossroads. With big  
and important new programs now launched and the budget carefully  
balanced, the challenge is to build for the future, not steal from it,  
to live within our means and to keep California ever golden and  
creative, as our forebears have shown and our descendants would expect.

Link: http://cert1.mail-west.com/tByjgO/myuzjanmc7rm/1tBgt/vzh2/Br8k9qn73eg/fmiah21tBqvnqt/28gcqpmbxqe?_c=d%7Cze7pzanwmhlzgt%7C12unvzsozcdpt82&_ce=1420557837.5fae987f8a078a57adf521b7a69b99a4

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