7-26-09

7-26-09
Modesto Bee
'Pay-As-You-Go' Act provides honest, transparent accounting...Dennis Cardoza
http://www.modbee.com/opinion/community/v-print/story/794701.html
As most people know, I have been a member of the fiscally conservative, moderate Blue Dog Coalition since the valley first sent me to Congress in 2002. With 52 members, we have fought tirelessly to rein in reckless federal spending and put an end to our spiraling deficit.
My belief is simple: We must get back on the road to fiscal responsibility before we pass the nation's keys -- and our debt -- onto our children and grandchildren.
On Wednesday, with my strong support the House of Representatives passed the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2009. The bill is a significant step in forcing Congress to reduce federal spending and curtail the national debt. In most simple terms, pay-go requires that new federal spending increases or tax cuts are fully paid for.
With the difficult economic challenges facing our nation, Americans are tightening their belts and cutting back their spending. It is time that Congress does the same. The United States currently has a deficit of more than $11.6 trillion with much of our debt being held by foreign countries such as China. This should concern everyone.
The pay-go rules were first instituted by a Democratic Congress and with President George H.W. Bush. President Bill Clinton and Democrats in Congress continued to work with Republicans on a bipartisan basis and turned decades of exploding budget deficits into four straight years of budget surpluses with record economic growth through the continued use of pay-go. During the late-1990s, for the first time in 30 years, America actually began to pay down its debt to foreign nations.
Pay-go was allowed to expire in 2002, and the Blue Dogs had been advocating for its reinstatement ever since. With President Barack Obama's strong support, the House of Representatives passed statutory pay-go earlier this week.
Unfortunately, there are those who have attempted to downplay this recent accomplishment when we should all be celebrating it, regardless of any political ideology.
Some critics have attempted to claim that this bill would allow for trillions in new spending to be added to the national debt. They are either purposefully misleading the public or have just not done their homework.
I would remind them that for much of this decade, budget gimmicks were used to sweep hundreds of billions of dollars in funding under the rug in the hopes that nobody would notice.
It was common practice for Congress to pass "fixes," or one-year extensions of current tax policies, or to fund programs such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan outside of the normal budget process. There was never any full accounting of how these policies were increasing the deficit.
Now, for the first time in nearly a decade, we have provided up-front, honest and transparent accounting. Not only are we putting those tax cuts and programs on the books, we are ensuring that future laws we put into place are fiscally responsible.
It would simply be impossible for Congress to go back and undo all the past eight years of tax cuts and deficit spending that weren't paid for. It is, however, possible, realistic and fiscally responsible for Congress to move forward and once again put us on a long-term path to budget surpluses using the proven tool of pay-go.
We know we cannot continue spending taxpayer dollars with reckless abandon. We know cutting spending and making tough choices is never easy. We also know that when both the administration and Congress -- regardless of party -- are willing to cooperate and adhere to fiscal discipline, pay-go works.
We have shown that willingness to cooperate again and it is imperative that we seize that moment. The pay-go bill was passed with strong bipartisan support and has strong bipartisan support in the Senate. This shows there is serious desire to work together once again.
By passing pay-go, we are choosing to return to the proven, bipartisan fiscal measures that worked so well in the 1990s and early 2000s. This is critical as the choices we make today will impact what we will be able to provide for our children and grandchildren tomorrow. It's time we return to the fiscal accountability measures that I and my Blue Dog colleagues have long advocated. And it's high time we start doing the right thing and start paying for what this country buys.
Cardoza, a Democrat from Merced, represents the 18th Congressional District, which includes all of Merced County, about half of Stanislaus County and small portions of San Joaquin, Madera and Fresno counties.
Sacramento Bee
Mike Eaton: To save Delta: Ditch the groundwater myth
http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/v-print/story/2054701.html
The remaining wet spots in the Cosumnes River channel in southern Sacramento County faded away earlier this month. Most of the river corridor from the foothills to the Delta will be bone-dry until the rains return.
It wasn't always so. Historically, the river helped replenish groundwater during the wet season, and in the summer, enough groundwater seeped into the river to sustain a rich corridor of life from the Delta to the Sierra.
The extensive pumping of groundwater, first by nearby farmers and then, increasingly, by Sacramento County and its growing cities, upset this natural cycle. Throughout the region, pumping of groundwater now exceeds direct diversions of surface water from rivers significantly.
Enabling this shift to excessive use of groundwater was a legal delusion: a premise that surface water is unconnected to groundwater. Under state law, groundwater, unlike surface water, can be pumped virtually at will, unless limited by local governments or the courts.
This legal delusion dates to California's early days, when water resources seemed inexhaustible, and salmon were abundant in our rivers and streams. It remains in effect today despite what science and common sense tell us: Water moves constantly from the surface of the land, pulled by gravity out of our rivers and streams to fill the dry space created below ground when water is pumped out.
Regulatory and legal structures may be rooted in the past and slow to change, but California is not. Our population has mushroomed from fewer than a million in 1879, when our current state constitution was adopted, to nearly 40 million today. And we've deployed energy and technology to store, move and use water in ways that early settlers could never have imagined, just as they could not have imagined the demise of California's once-large salmon populations.
The consequences of this disconnect – backward-looking law, forward-moving state – have become increasingly problematic in an era of growing competition for water and rising concern about the environmental costs of water diversions and groundwater pumping.
No setting illustrates these conflicts better than Sacramento County. Today, Sacramento's local governments, along with farms and rural residents, pull an average of more than a half-million acre-feet of water a year from the underground aquifer. This groundwater use is in effect a diversion from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, because the major sources of "recharge" for Sacramento's groundwater are the rivers, wetlands and sloughs in or flowing to the Delta. The more groundwater Sacramento entities pump, the greater the yearly diversion from – or interruption of water flow to – the Delta.
As a de facto user of Delta water, Sacramento ranks high. Its take of groundwater every year is equivalent to about one-third of the volume of the State Water Project's expected shipments this year from the Delta to the rest of the state.
Because the law pretends that groundwater pumping has no impact on surface flows, however, and because state regulators have yet to use existing authority to address the problem, local agencies have a free ride, acting as if they are not complicit in the ecological problems of the Delta and hold no responsibility for an important resource like the Cosumnes River.
Other Delta-dependent water users, recognizing the fragility of the resource and their vulnerability to cut-backs, have invested heavily in water efficiency and water reclamation, and come to the table as stakeholders to address the Delta's ecological and water conveyance challenges. Sacramento County and its cities lag far behind in water conservation and reclamation, are the largest contributors of some important pollutants to the Delta, and seem to resist recommendations for reform of Delta policy and governance.
Moreover, Sacramento County seems to see the Bay Delta Conservation Plan as a threat to its interests. Rather than resist the Delta conservation plan, Sacramento should seek ways to connect the plan with its own long-delayed habitat conservation plan for the lower Cosumnes area, because the fate of the Cosumnes is of far more than symbolic importance. The Cosumnes is a key Delta resource and has received significant public and philanthropic investment for precisely that reason. Both plans should embrace the goal of mitigating groundwater pumping impacts that have devastated the river's salmon fishery and put at serious risk many of its wetlands, oak forests and riparian habitats.
Without the pressure of a reality-based state water law, Sacramento will continue to lag on issues ranging from water-use efficiency to habitat protection and restoration. It's time for state regulators, policy makers and the courts to recognize the pull of gravity and articulate a modern legal framework to integrate the management of groundwater with surface water.
The current disconnect of state water law from reality fosters far more waste, inequity, economic inefficiency and environmental degradation than California can sustain. We deserve a consistent accounting for all water use, a uniform and science-based accountability for impacts, and a single standard for upholding the public trust and assuring reasonable use of water in an arid state.
It would be ironic if the state's capital region remained a poster child of the need for change. Better, it would seem, to anticipate inevitable reforms and embrace best practices now.
San Francisco Chronicle
Mendota: a town scraping bottom...Kevin Fagan
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/26/MNQ718IAAI.DTL&type=printable
Mendota, Fresno County -- Maria DeLourdes Oregel hasn't found work since her harvesting job petered out last year, her husband's hours at the local chicken farm have been cut by a third, and even though she feeds her children meat only once a week, she runs out of cash before the end of each month.
She's one of the lucky ones. At least she has a roof and her family has some kind of paycheck.
In one dreadful year, this dusty city in the heart of the most productive agricultural region in the nation has become a desperate place where mothers wash disposable diapers for reuse, children are sleeping in cars, and the unemployed trudge door to door to beg for food.
The fact that the unemployment rate in Mendota, 38.5 percent, is the highest in California doesn't even raise an eyebrow here. The anguish, frustration and hunger are visible in every corner and on every face of this town of 7,800 people 35 miles west of Fresno - and nobody sees any relief in sight.
"I try hard not to be depressed, but the little money we do get we can't stretch enough," Oregel, 38, said in Spanish as she sat in a weekly meeting at a community center, where mothers gather to share survival tips. "It's never been this bad in my life. I even have a friend who called his family in Mexico to ask for help, which never happens. We are always the ones sending our money home, not the other way around."
In the worst national economic crisis since the Great Depression, there are few better illustrations of the resultant human suffering than Mendota, where 95 percent of the population is Latino and 42 percent of residents live below poverty level. Even in a good year, seasonal unemployment ranges above 20 percent because of the transient nature of farm work, but the past year or so has brought a convergence of blows that have made suffering a year-round reality.
Chain of disasters
First came the national housing meltdown, which led to hundreds of foreclosures in Mendota and halted construction on thousands of units of housing and commercial developments in the area. More than 2,000 people moved out of town in the past two years, and the loss of both residents and workers able to buy goods sent sales of everything from chain saws to groceries plummeting.
Then water deliveries from the Westlands Water District to Mendota farmers were cut to 10 percent of normal, with federal officials blaming the three-year drought and the need to protect delta smelt and other threatened species.
In short order, the Spreckles sugar plant on the edge of town, a furniture store and several restaurants shut down. The main bank announced it will soon close. Even the 99-cent store and the two thrift shops, the types of places that do well in hard times, are empty of customers most days.
Now, as harvest season begins in earnest for tomatoes, corn and the melons that have made Mendota the self-proclaimed "Cantaloupe Center of the World," hope is as hard to find as a shady spot in a cotton field.
Endless job hunt
"I've been going from farm to farm looking for work for a long time, and all I can get is one or two days of work a week," said Pedro Miranda, 30. "If things don't get better, I will have to go back to El Salvador soon."
Miranda lives with his wife and baby son in a house so dilapidated it's scarcely fit for habitation. He's stuffed toilet paper into holes in his door and walls to block out the wind, the rust on the metal kitchen cabinets rubs off on his pants if he brushes by them, and the paint is so worn it's hard to tell what color the walls are supposed to be.
Miranda's rent is $550 a month, which takes 13 days of fieldwork to earn. That's about as much work as he gets in a good month now, so he lines up with 300 or more people for the town's once-a-month food bank handouts, knocks on neighbors' doors for help and rarely eats more than rice and beans.
"My baby needs food," he said quietly, swatting flies from his 2-month-old son's face as they buzzed in through the torn window screen. "My wife needs food. I need work."
Estela Lara, a social worker with Centro La Familia Advocacy Services, said she has seen depression and alcoholism "getting out of hand" all over town.
"Before this year, you wouldn't see people standing out on the street drinking all day, but now just look at them," Lara said. She pointed across the street at a liquor store, where a dozen unemployed men in cowboy hats leaned against the wall at 11 a.m., swigging from bottles in paper bags.
"These are incredibly hard-working people in Mendota," Lara said. "They are proud people, but it's hard to stay proud when you are down for so long."
Down the block from the liquor store is Westside Grocery, where City Councilman Joseph Riofrio, a former mayor, feels he's been tap dancing ahead of ruin for two years as his business plummeted by 75 percent. He refuses to sell beer, to discourage alcoholism, and it's hurt his bottom line.
Noodle lunches
Over the past two years, Riofrio converted half of his store into DVD rental racks and added specialties like Häagen-Dazs bars alongside his Mexican ice creams. But these days his best sellers are the stacks of 50-cent Cup Noodles that farmworkers such as Miranda take to the fields so they won't have to buy lunch from the more expensive on-site taco trucks.
"We were having a housing boom here until about a year ago," the 47-year-old Riofrio said, leaning on his counter waiting for the rare customer. "Pacific Union Homes had a plan to double the size of this city for two years. Then, when the economy went bad a year ago, they pulled out. We have half-finished houses all over the area.
"And even if the farmers got 100 percent of their water next year, are they going to raise the minimum wage (typically $8 an hour) they pay?" Riofrio said. "Are they going to stop charging the workers $10 for a ride to the fields, $8 to cash their checks, give them health care? Some of our families are sleeping in cars in between jobs, and the only difference is there are more of them now.
"What we really need in Mendota is an industrial park, an expansion of the airport, more stores in town," Riofrio said. "But we're not going to see any of that until the economy picks up."
Just last year, Fernando Tirado was making two hauling runs a day in his Freightliner truck rig. Then his business dribbled away: Stores cut back on supplies, cotton gins restricted production and farmers canceled shipments. Now he's lucky to run two loads a week.
"I didn't even work for five months this winter," Tirado, 40, said as he fueled up half of one of his 100-gallon tanks - all he could budget for the day - at 5 a.m. at the Fastrip gas station.
Fastrip, the main day-labor spot in town, used to be a beehive of hiring from 4 to 6 a.m., but on this day there were only a handful of tense faces watching as vans whisked the fortunate few to the tomato and melon fields.
"I'm going to pick up 4,500 gallons of fertilizer today," Tirado said, managing a weary smile. "It's a good day. I wish they were all like this."
A fight for business
Mendota's current mayor, Robert Silva, has been leading a crusade to attract business that has resulted in the restart of stalled construction of a federal prison and a scheduled groundbreaking next month of a solar-energy farm by Cleantech America Inc. of San Francisco. He and others are also lobbying Sacramento and Washington to get federal water allocations increased.
But nothing, it seems, has been enough.
"We always have unemployment go up in the winter, but I never imagined it could be like this," said Silva, 68. "Our economy is based on agriculture here, and if we don't have the water, everything else suffers."
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency earlier this year for the entire state because of the drought and asked President Obama to do the same on the federal level, specifically for Fresno County, which would free up more unemployment and food assistance.
But so far, digging out of the crisis remains mostly a self-help effort for farmers like Todd Allen, who because of the cutbacks in water deliveries was able to harvest only 40 acres of wheat this year out of the 600 acres he hoped for. For the first time since his father started the farm in 1975, he's afraid he'll go out of business.
No rain
"I was hoping Mother Nature would help me out with some rain, but month after month went by, and this part of the county just didn't get what other areas got," Allen said, standing in a fallow field and staring morosely at a sea of 3-inch wheat stalks burned brown by the sun.
Like many farmers, Allen has been trying hard to innovate. He spent $140,000 on a drip-irrigation system to cut water usage nearly in half for some crops and scrimped last year to save water for this year - which was the only reason he was able to grow the 40 acres he did.
"The suffering, the worrying I've gone through has been terrible," said Allen, 46. "I've got a wife and two daughters to feed, but I can't even sell the farm right now. I never thought it would get this extreme.
"Why don't people realize how important farmers are and give us our water, a little help?" he said. "If you like foreign oil, you're going to love foreign food when we all go away."
Mendota
-- Residential building permits issued: 100 in 2008; 10 in 2009
-- Adults who have completed high school: Mendota 23 percent; California 80 percent
-- Individuals living below poverty level: Mendota 42 percent; California 12 percent
-- Median age: Mendota 25; California 35
-- Those who speak a language other than English at home: Mendota 82 percent; California 18 percent
-- Unemployment rate in Mendota: 24 percent June 2007; 27 percent June 2008; 38.5 percent June 2009
-- Unemployment rate in California: 11.6 percent June 2009
Sources: University of the Pacific, U.S. Census Bureau, city of Mendota
Los Angeles Times
Recovery of Mexican gray wolves remains elusive
Federal efforts to bring back the endangered animal in the Southwest have backfired, critics say...Julie Cart
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-wolves26-2009jul26,0,3289742,print.story
Reporting from Gila National Forest, N.M. — Something has gone awry -- some would say everything has -- in the federal government's effort to reestablish the population of Mexican wolves, North America's most endangered mammal.
Beginning with an initial release of 11 wolves in 1998, the Mexican wolf population in the Southwest was projected to reach at least 100 by 2006. Three years beyond, the number of wolves in the wild is half that.
Wildlife managers -- following the program's often punitive rules -- have contributed to the deaths of more than 25 wolves through shooting, trapping, sedating, penning and relocating the notoriously skittish animals.
A wolf slated for capture died of hyperthermia after a helicopter chase. At least eight wolves died of stress in holding pens. Six pups were killed when placed in the care of another captive pack. The program's most-photographed wolf -- Brunhilda, a young female in the first pack -- died after federal biologists captured her to perform a routine check; the animal became stressed and overheated during the examination and died.
On paper, Gila National Forest was the logical place to reintroduce the Mexican gray wolf. The 3.3 million acres of densely treed slopes, spare grasslands and desert scrub in the nation's first designated wilderness area are stocked with plentiful elk and deer that make up the bulk of wolves' diet.
But endangered-species biology plays out on a complicated landscape of emotion, politics and power -- never on paper.
Critics of the program, including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials who designed it, say the Mexican wolf reintroduction has been a dismal failure, falling short of most of its goals. Pup survival rates are far lower than expected, adult wolf mortality higher than projected, and the recovery program is way behind the timeline that federal biologists established.
"We are witnessing the second extinction of the Mexican wolf in the wild," said Michael Robinson, a conservation advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity, one of several groups suing the federal government for "failing to recover" the wolf.
"It's the worst-case example abrogation of Endangered Species Act responsibility that I've seen, in many regards," said Jamie Clark, the former director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and now executive vice president of the conservation group Defenders of Wildlife.
"Everybody knows what's wrong," she added. "Nobody will lead their way out. No one is taking responsibility."
Benjamin Tuggle, the Southwest regional director for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Albuquerque, said there was much he disliked about the program he inherited.
"We've made some mistakes on our own," he said. "We've cost the lives of wolves. I don't want you to think that I am comfortable with where we are in handling these wolves, because I'm not.
"What I'm looking at, however, is a system that is not functioning at its optimum potential."
Endangered species
Gray wolves once roamed widely throughout the Southwest and Mexico, but decades of government extermination programs to support livestock interests rendered the species functionally extinct. The Mexican gray wolf was placed on the federal endangered species list in 1976.
By the 1990s, when the recovery program was conceived, there were fewer than 200 Mexican wolves remaining in North America, nearly all of them in zoos or research facilities. Trappers managed to capture seven wild wolves in Mexico, and those animals became the genetic forebears of the current population.
The first year of the reintroduction set the tone for a troubled program. The first wolf released was illegally shot and killed. Four more met the same fate. The first Mexican wolf pup born in the wild in more than 70 years was presumed dead after its mother was shot. By the end of the year, the Fish and Wildlife Service recaptured the rest of the released wolves and penned them for their own safety.
For a decade, the gray wolf program has limped along, undone, critics say, by measures that penalize the animals for behaving as wolves do.
For example, wolves that stray out of the designated recovery area along the New Mexico-Arizona border are captured, penned and relocated elsewhere in the recovery zone, where the animals then must relearn the geography and locate food and water sources. Ninety-three wayward wolves were "translocated" through 2008.
Perhaps the most controversial policy is the so-called three-strikes rule that was formalized in 2005, when the Fish and Wildlife Service allowed officials in Arizona and New Mexico to set wolf policies.
Under the rule, any wolf that has killed three cows or calves in one year must be "removed" -- shot or placed in captivity indefinitely. Wolves killed 22 cows and calves in 2007, according to Fish and Wildlife.
Policies such as these have created a revolving door that shuttles wolves from holding pens to the wild and back again, hampering adaptation, breeding and pack dynamics.
Those results run counter to the intentions of a captive-breeding program, which ideally should leave wolves able to fend for themselves in the wild without human assistance.
Periodic independent studies commissioned by Fish and Wildlife have consistently criticized the system.
One reviewer remarked: "Frequent social disruption via mortality, recaptures and re-releases have altered the natural territorial behavior of packs. . . . These manipulations may be interfering with pack formation."
"Heavy-handed management from now to forever is not a goal that we should be seeking in this program," said David Parsons, who led the Fish and Wildlife Service's Mexican wolf recovery program from 1990 to 1999.
"There is a price to pay when you are doing a lot of capturing and handling of animals. The idea is to put an animal back into nature and allow [it] to exist like any other animal in nature."
Changes coming
Tuggle, the Fish and Wildlife regional director, said changes were coming.
"I understand the concept of manipulation," he said. "Where we have done those things, they have been disruptive. They have affected the pack dynamics. I'm not a proponent of managing them at the same level that we have been managing them."
But Tuggle will have to face a powerful interest group -- the region's livestock industry, which vigorously opposed wolf reintroduction.
Caren Cowan, executive director of the New Mexico Cattle Growers' Assn., said her organization estimated that 1,500 cattle had been killed by wolves in the 11 years since reintroduction.
"Some people say in 11 years that's not a lot of cows, but multiply that by $1,000 per animal, and that's a lot," she said.
Defenders of Wildlife compensates ranchers as much as $3,000 for each animal killed by wolves, and biologists say cattle make up only about 4% of wolves' diet.
The wolf-livestock conflicts persist because, as designed, the gray wolf recovery program placed the animals in harm's way -- smack into an area where federal land is leased for year-round cattle grazing.
In contrast, Canadian wolves released into the Yellowstone ecosystem are thriving, roaming an area that includes national parks and extensive wilderness free of humans and cattle.
Further, the northern Rockies wolf program requires ranchers to dispose of livestock carcasses to discourage wolf scavenging. The Mexican wolf program does not. The presence of cattle carcasses in Gila National Forest attracts wolves to livestock areas, tantalizing the packs with the option of killing slow-footed cattle, rather than having to chase fleet elk through rough country.
Ranchers insist that collecting dead cows on their federal grazing allotments is not possible, Cowan said.
Tuggle agreed that the socioeconomic landscape for the wolves is less than ideal.
"You've got these diametrically opposed forces: This predator that has a right to be in this space, and the other is this prey base, cattle, that has a right to be in this space," he said. "It doesn't take you long to cook that formula and come up with a pretty explosive situation."
As special interests and bureaucrats hash out their differences, Maggie Dwire, assistant wolf recovery coordinator for the Fish and Wildlife Service, hauls a wheelbarrow carrying a road-kill elk into pens at Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge, a spare slice of the Chihuahuan Desert south of Albuquerque. The wolves in the half- to 1-acre enclosures were bred in captivity and are being prepared for release into the wild.
Dwire and veterinarian Susan Dicks say they limit their interactions with the wolves so they retain their natural fear of humans.
"That's good. We like to see that," Dicks said, watching three slender gray wolves run in circles and pant nervously as she and Dwire entered a pen with the elk carcass.
Their reaction to humans will protect them, Dwire said.
She shrugged when asked about the morass that lies ahead for wolves.
"What has been a success in this program is that captive-bred wolves have shown they can be released into the wild and know what to do," Dwire said. "They know how to be wolves. It would be good if we could ever let them do that."