10-11-09

 
10-11-09
Modesto Bee
Wanted: Your opinion on North County Corridor...Garth Stapley
http://www.modbee.com/local/v-print/story/889211.html
The time for speaking up about the North County Corridor has arrived.
People with axes to grind or rose petals to scatter have registered hundreds, if not thousands, of comments about the future expressway stretching across north Stanislaus County.
But only comments received since environmental studies were released two weeks ago will count on the official record.
The easiest way to be heard might be to show up Tuesday in Oakdale for the first of two town hall-type public hearings, or the second next week in Riverbank.
Agendas show open house displays and chances to chat with transportation officials starting at 5:30 p.m., with a more formal presentation at 6:30 followed by public statements at a microphone until about 8. A court reporter will record input.
"Your comments will become part of the public record," reads a notice distributed by the California Department of Transportation. Its partners in the vision of a $1.2 billion, 26-mile freeway from Salida to Oakdale are Stanislaus County, Modesto, Riverbank, Oakdale and the Stanislaus Council of Governments.
Caltrans' recently released studies suggest traffic delays increasing 500 percent in 20 years without the North County Corridor. A smooth-flowing, limited-access expressway should improve the accident rate from north Modesto to Oakdale, which is about 35 percent higher than the statewide average for comparable roads, Caltrans says.
Quality of life concerns
Most people showing up for monthly meetings of the freeway's joint powers authority are landowners concerned with diminishing quality of life. Many own farms or homes in a 2,000-foot-wide swath being studied before Caltrans decides on a precise route, which might occur in 2012.
The freeway's 18-mile eastern leg of four to six lanes, from McHenry Avenue to Highway 108 six miles east of Oakdale, could break ground in five to 10 years. The western portion, widening to eight lanes at Highway 99 in Salida, could be complete by 2030.
The east leg could force out 670 people living in 124 homes and 266 workers in nine stores, 27 industrial buildings and 37 farm buildings, according to the draft environmental report.
The potential toll includes 95 trailers in two mobile home parks, a gas station, apartment house and 55-year-old steel plant at McHenry and Kiernan avenues and 3,000 agricultural acres, the report says.
However, traffic counts on Claribel Road just east of McHenry could climb 261 percent without the North County Corridor relieving pressure on nearby streets, the study says.
Sacramento Bee
Editorial: On water, all must give – not just take
http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/v-print/story/2243978.html
California lawmakers are closer than they have ever been to a water deal that could bring real relief to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and improve the state's use of water.
They are not there yet, but as of Friday afternoon, they were very, very close.
California must change how it manages its liquid assets, particularly the water that flows through the Delta. Fisheries are collapsing. Court decisions have hurt irrigators. Levees that date back to the 1800s are an earthquake away from collapse.
Part of the problem stems from the bifurcated governance of the Delta. For decades, it has been split between various state and federal agencies. The package that lawmakers are considering would create a new Delta Stewardship Council that would guide key decisions.
One of these decisions is "conveyance" � how to move water through the Delta to cities and farm districts dependent upon it.
The current system involves massive pumps that grind up fish and distort the natural flow of the estuary. Nearly everyone agrees that dependence on these pumps is unsustainable, especially as the Delta becomes more salty with sea level rise.
Under the legislative package, alternative forms of conveyance � including a new version of a peripheral canal � would be studied. The preferred alternative would become subject to a stringent Natural Community Conservation Planning review.
If it passed that review, the conveyance option would become part of a larger strategic plan the Stewardship Council would adopt by 2011.
The peripheral canal was divisive in the 1980s, and it is stirring strong emotions now. One water lobbyist recently appeared on a TV show and claimed it would "decimate" the Delta. Guess what? The Delta is being decimated now.
Any canal proposal will need to be closely examined, to better understand its potential impact on fisheries and flows. But for far too long, canal bashers have balked at any fresh studies of conveyance options, while offering no real alternatives of their own.
The proposed legislative package includes many elements that environmentalists should embrace. It creates a new conservancy for the Delta, and starts the state down the road toward managing its groundwater supplies. The legislation also includes clear language protecting the water rights of communities.
Even with its strengths, this legislative package could be stronger. For instance:
� One bill in the package would require a 20 percent reduction in per capita water usage by 2020. This is a worthy goal. But it needs to be backed up with clear penalties for scofflaws.
Sacramento could easily meet these targets if it complied with its obligations under a negotiated regional pact, the Water Forum. But it hasn't, and now it is lobbying to weaken the conservation bill in the package.
� Lawmakers need to make sure the Delta Stewardship Council is adequately funded. Delta counties also need adequate representation on the board � a sticking point in negotiations.
� Lawmakers must figure out how to pay for Delta restoration and storage improvements in a way that doesn't overly burden the general fund. A $12 billion bond referendum? Too much. It needs to be smaller, with a date set for establishing user fees so beneficiaries of the water pay their share.
Finally, there must be hearings before any vote on final legislation. These bills are far too important be rammed through with little public review.
Stuart Leavenworth: Steinberg falls back on old ways to close the deal
http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/v-print/story/2243993.html
Darrell Steinberg is lord of the Senate, but in his own backyard, he may have to hide in the doghouse for a while.
Local politicians are angry at Steinberg for negotiating a water deal with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger that, in their view, threatens the water supplies of Sacramento and Northern California.
Many of these politicians were slow to see this train coming. But now that it is roaring into the station, they are throwing flaming tires on the tracks.
"A lot of people are mad at me," Steinberg told me last week, looking weary and sleep-deprived. "I guess that is the price of leadership."
When Steinberg ascended to the helm of the Senate last year, local muckety-mucks rejoiced. You could almost see dollar signs light up in their eyes.
Then reality intruded. The economy tanked. It also became clear that in his new post, Steinberg was going to act like a Senate president pro tempore.
This shouldn't have been surprising. Throughout his career, Steinberg has pursued complex, controversial policy agendas of statewide interest, sometimes stumbling along the way. Leaders in Sacramento's suburbs are still mad at him for a regional tax revenue-sharing proposal he pushed as an assemblyman.
That effort failed, but Steinberg came back last year with an even more complicated effort to reform land use in California. That legislation, Senate Bill 375, was signed into law by the governor.
Steinberg doesn't smoke cigars, but he has a backslapping style that harkens back to old-school politicians.
Instead of getting all the stakeholders in a room, he prefers a tag-team method of negotiation. He cuts a deal with one party, then goes to another, then circles back to the first.
This style has its detractors. In the current water debate, various water districts and legislators say they were cut out of negotiations at key moments. Others say Steinberg made pledges to them that, as of last week, had not appeared in legislation.
Perhaps Steinberg's greatest shortcoming is his temper. While he'll never match the yelling and profanity of former Senate leader John Burton, he's been known to lose his composure when things didn't go his way, both in private and in public. I saw that in February when on the Senate floor, his voice quivering, he scolded Republicans for adding to the delays in closing a $40 billion budget shortfall.
During a visit to The Bee's editorial board last week, Steinberg was similarly animated. In an 80-minute meeting, we questioned him on the process that led to the water package � closed-door meetings, minimal hearings, language changed at the last minute.
Steinberg countered that he has held numerous hearings, has been meeting with stakeholders and is still fine-tuning the bill.
"Editorial boards criticize politicians for not getting stuff done," he said. "And then you criticize us because the process itself at times is a little bit messy and a little bit ugly."
Steinberg, who turns 50 next week, took command of the Senate with a pledge to open up the legislative process. Now, in desperate need of a win, he appears to be falling back on the deal-closing traditions of his precedessors.
He deserves credit for making it this far. As a legislator from Sacramento, a town that wastes water with abandon and has a low regard for Southern California, he could have easily punted on this issue, as lawmakers have for decades.
But on a matter as fundamental as water, details matter. And until impassioned public servants like Steinberg commit to a more transparent way of doing business, even their most admirable displays of courage will be called into question.
Stockton Record
Peripheral canal project getting bigger, unbelievable by the minute...Michael Fitzgerald
http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091011/A_NEWS0803/910110301/-1/A_NEWS#STS=g0o1h7k7.16uj
A humdrum story about the Port of Stockton's position on the proposed peripheral canal this week contained a remarkable fact: The canal may go underground.
Big time. One design envisions the canal diving underground by Stockton and flowing through four giant tunnels totaling two miles long. Another design envisions a 17-mile subterranean stretch.
A third "all-tunnel conveyance" design hides the whole shebang underground all 36 miles from Freeport to Tracy through two 33-foot pipes.
"It's not going to be like putting sprinklers in your front lawn," said Matt Knotley, a spokesman for the Department of Water Resources.
The canal will pass deep beneath the San Joaquin and Mokelumne rivers, other waterways, railroads, etc. It's a lower-impact, ecologically friendlier way to grab water.
It would be blasé not to marvel at this, even if the noxious canal never gets built, even if some proposed versions of the canal, such as the all-tunnel conveyance, are not under serious consideration.
Even if certain aspects of these plans teeter on engineering megalomania.
The improbable dimensions of the basic peripheral canal have already been published: 49 miles long and 540 feet wide - with a vast, 1,400-foot-wide "footprint" carrying 15,000 cubic feet per second of water at a depth of 23.5 feet.
So, how do you build something roughly the size of the Panama Canal underground? The 4.5 tunnel proposal call for a 27-foot diameter pipe, tall enough to fit a two-story house.
"It would be akin to the English channel" tunnel, said Mark Madison who, as director of the city's Municipal Utilities Department, oversees underground pipe projects.
But not like this. "You're not going to make a 27-foot pipe, put it in the bed of a truck and haul it into a pit," Madison said.
Such engineering would require a real dog and pony show, an entirely different approach. Pipe would be formed as the tunnel goes along. And how would these cavernous tunnels be dug?
"There'll be spots several miles apart where a boring machine will go into the ground-to 150 to 200 feet - then they start tunneling," Knotley said.
Boring machines? Only giant construction companies such as Bechtel have such rare Tunnel-Boring Machines. Or TBMs must be custom-made for a project.
Two such giant mechanized moles were used to carve out a branch of Los Angeles' Metro light rail line.
German company Herrenknecht custom-made the TBMs, nicknamed Lola and Vicki. Each stretches 344 feet. Each weighs more than 2 million pounds. Each cost $10 million.
Sixty feet below L.A., Lola and Vicki started chewing parallel tunnels under Boyle Heights in February 2006.
They broke through to the link-up with the existing system nine months later.
If it took Vicki nine months to burrow 1.7 miles, how long would it take to dig one or two proposed tunnels for four miles? Or 17 miles? Or under the whole Delta? How many mammoth German dreadnoughts would be required?
And how much would it cost? A consultant's report in August said the cost of a peripheral canal could run anywhere from $23 billion to $53.8 billion.
I predict costs will soar up to three times that much.
An Oakland utility analyzed canal debt payments. I posted the analysis on my blog. I recommend you read it. Those TBMs will bore a hole right through California's budget.
Another fantastic aspect of such a project involves the water table. Groundwater begins at 20 to 30 feet below sea level at some places. A canal 150 feet deep would traverse a level deep within the aquifer.
To enable construction, the entire water table would have to be lowered.
Doing this on smaller city projects, the trick is "Simply to pump it out, with groundwater wells or 'well points,' " Madison said. "Use extraction wells. Pump it hard. To where the soil is dry and stable."
But lowering the water table by 100 feet or more across a huge swath of the Delta - pumping billions of gallons and storing them somewhere - whew! That's a whole other column.
The grandiose magnitude of this project inspires blunt disbelief from some.
"How absurd," scoffed Bill Jennings, head of the California Sportfishing Alliance. "We've gone far beyond Rube Goldberg now. He could never have designed a contraption like this. We've gone into a surreal word. It's like Fellini is now the director of the Department of Water Resources."
Oh, yeah, by the way - they're going to create a new forebay like Clifton Court Forebay, too.
Swamping regional concerns: Outside interests can't have the only say about Delta plan...Editorial
http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091011/A_OPINION01/910110306/-1/A_OPINION#STS=g0o1i6wr.joj
The Port of Stockton has become the latest entity to warn proponents of a peripheral canal that they will be watching if the proposal moves forward.
Port officials said they are not taking a position, but are letting it be known that whatever is built and wherever it is built, it cannot interfere with the port. If it looks like it will, then Port officials likely - and properly - will come out swinging.
The Port warning comes amidst a flurry of activity by officials from counties surrounding the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the largest freshwater estuary in the western United States and the water source for about 22 million state residents. They officials are trying desperately to slow down what increasingly looks like a Sacramento steamroller with Southern California water interests in the driver's seat.
Being pushed, and many claim pushed behind closed doors, is a Panama Canal-size ditch bypassing the Delta to the east to deliver more water to a thirsty Southern California and to south San Joaquin Valley farmers. This is a rerun of the 1982 attempt at such a system, a system soundly rejected by state voters. There are millions more Californians now, and they all drink water.
Building a disaster
Members of the Delta Counties Coalition, a group representing five counties, contend a peripheral canal risks destroying the Delta, its water quality, its fragile environment and its farming. They want to slow down the process, acknowledging that their hopes were nearly dashed last month when the Legislature seemed on the verge of approving legislation that, while not explicitly approving a canal, still managed to backdoor it. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is a supporter.
Last week the National Academy of Sciences was asked to join the fray and study the Delta's environment.
And on that point, too, the Coalition is upset. It contends there is no reliable science on what a peripheral canal - proponents now like to call it a conveyance system - would mean to the health and future of the Delta. No one really knows how much is too much water to be pumping out to send south.
The governor, doing his carrot-stick, good cop-bad cop, Jekyll-Hyde thing, also threatened to veto about 700 bills sitting on his desk. His demand: lawmakers had to meet his arbitrary and rather petulant water deal deadline of last Friday at midnight, a deadline which was ignored as work continued Saturday on the issue. Those talks failed, and they meet again today. Even if legislative leaders and Schwarzenegger were to strike a deal today, it still faces the Legislature.
There are easier and faster ways than a canal to improve our state's water supplies. And cheaper, too, certainly less costly than preliminary estimates that put canal construction as much as $50 billion, Coalition members said. Unfortunately, they as well as Delta region lawmakers have been frozen out of ongoing Legislative water talks.
They are urging, as they should, not only that they have a place at the negotiating table but that their views be taken seriously. They correctly point out that it is residents who live in the counties surrounding the estuary who will be most affected by whatever is decided about the Delta.
Under the dome
As might be expected, the view from Sacramento is considerably different than the view from the Delta counties. From the perspective of people such as state Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, Delta interests do have the ear of lawmakers and the Delta will be protected.
Ah huh. At least that's the collective, boiled down version of how such statements are being received by many who do not daily labor under the state Capitol dome. From here, it looks like regional interests are not being considered and regional officials - including our representatives in the Legislature - have been purposely squeezed out of the process.
Water wars in California predate statehood. They will continue. If lawmakers, and a lot of them hail from the south state, push through a Peripheral Canal proposal and put it on the governor's desk, the fight will go to the courts. That literally could tie things up for decades and cost millions of dollars. Such a possibility helps nobody and solves nothing.
Problems are here now
The problems in the Delta are huge. And they are not out there in the future, but with us today.
The lattice-work of public and private levees need immediate attention. Vowing action, as we've done time and again, after a levee fails or when the flood waters rise is too little too late.
There are huge, complex environmental issues to be considered. Canal proponents like to pooh-pooh the endangered Delta smelt when they try to downplay environmental concerns. In truth, the Delta is home to a whole range of plants and animals, a number of them endangered. Mitigation is not going to be easy or cheap, but it is a must. Its cost should not fall to north state residents who will get no benefit from the water moved south.
There are agricultural concerns. The Delta is some of the richest farmland in the world. Last year, San Joaquin County alone had farm production valued at $2.1 billion, about $500 million of it coming from Delta. We can't just shut that down without it damaging the county's economy.
There are water quality issues. It is not good enough to assume, as some canal proponents claim, that with ocean levels rising the Delta eventually will become little more than a salt water marsh anyway. That may be true or it may be voodoo science.
Point in fact, we do not know. We do know that the more water sucked out of the Delta the more salt water intrudes into it.
Even more daunting
On Oct. 1, federal water officials began releasing water from Friant Dam east of Fresno, the first part of a huge project to restore the San Joaquin River.
It took years of lawsuits and laws and negotiations to bring us to the point of actually seeing water going back into the San Joaquin River.
Complex as that restoration settlement was it pales beside the issues we must resolve regarding the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.
It is silly to believe a hand-picked group of lawmakers can go behind closed doors and quickly come up with a water plan that protects the Delta and enhances water supplies.
It's silly and it's dangerous. A mistake could be with us for decades, perhaps forever.
On the other hand, Delta region officials cannot let themselves become the Coalition of No. Coming to the bargaining table means bargaining.
There are solutions. We must find them. And we must all be involved in the search.
San Francisco Chronicle
EBMUD to vote on water supply, Pardee Reservoir...Kelly Zito...10-10-09
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/10/10/MNBL1A39BO.DTL&type=printable
When the East Bay's largest water utility officially ended mandatory districtwide rationing in July, managers were relieved they'd weathered a year that had drained their reservoirs to critically low levels.
Now, the East Bay Municipal Utility District faces a more difficult predicament - not just the system's ability to handle this dry spell, but how to deliver water to a customer base that is expected to surge by about one-third over the next three decades.
On Tuesday, the district's board will vote on whether to approve a suite of measures and projects to supply roughly 80 million more gallons each day by 2040 - including a highly controversial proposal to enlarge Pardee Reservoir, a T-shaped lake on the Mokelumne River along the border of Amador and Calaveras counties in the Sierra Nevada foothills.
Critics in the foothills communities along the Mokelumne River say a Pardee expansion would inundate about 1,200 acres, including several miles of the river east of the current reservoir, destroying a historic bridge, popular whitewater run and fishing spots. (The water district and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management own the acreage that would be flooded.)
Tuesday's meeting is not the final word on the water management plan; each project would require environmental approvals along with water rights and planning permits.
"We don't have big public parks like they do in the East Bay, we have the Mokelumne River," said Katherine Evatt, president of the Foothill Conservancy, an advocacy group for Amador and Calaveras county communities. "We take our kids there, we walk our dogs, have picnics, fish. It would be unconscionable for us to go to the East Bay and take their water for our use."
The Mokelumne watershed is extremely important to the foothills economy, Evatt said. In addition to attracting retirees and refugees from Bay Area cities, the river is popular with kayakers, fishermen and others.
Guarding against diversions
To district officials, expanding the 1920s reservoir would provide some insurance against heftier water diversions upstream as districts with more senior water rights look to supply their own growing populations. In addition, it would offer crucial storage for use during extended dry stretches that climatologists fear will ravage California in coming decades.
"EBMUD's water supply problem is a dry year problem," said Dennis Diemer, general manager of the water district, which currently serves about 1.3 million in Alameda and Contra Costa Counties. "In normal and wet years the Mokelumne provides what we need. But in dry years we need a supplemental supply."
Among those who oppose enlarging the Pardee are the cities of Berkeley, Richmond, Jackson, Sutter Creek, Amador County, the Sierra Club, California's Planning and Conservation League and CalTrout.
EBMUD wants "to take a watershed that's already oversubscribed and hammer it some more, and that's completely unacceptable to sport fishermen," said John Beuttler of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance. "We used to have spring run salmon and steelhead that averaged over 10,000 returning adult fish a year. Now we have a couple hundred."
Long-range plans
Like most water agencies in California, EBMUD is attempting to stretch existing water supplies and look for new ones at a time when population forecasts are up and long-term predictions for precipitation levels point down. On top of that, many water purveyors say their customers have achieved all of the easy, "low-hanging" conservation. In other words, there's little wiggle room in the water system for a spike in demand or dampened supply.
Still, Diemer emphasizes that EBMUD's long-range plan rests heavily on conservation and recycling - to the tune of nearly 50 million gallons per day by 2040. What's more, the agency's proposal also calls for a regional desalination project with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and others as well as banking more water underground in aquifers.
The Pardee expansion plans haven't been finalized, EBMUD officials say. And if the district does move forward with the Pardee proposal, Diemer insists it would take years to hone a plan "with broad stakeholder support." The utility has no interest, he said, in pushing through a project that ruins treasured natural and economic resources.
The environmental groups girding for Tuesday's meeting worry that if they allow EBMUD's broader water supply plan to move forward unchallenged, however, it could be harder to halt individual projects like Pardee later. As such, some groups are considering filing a lawsuit charging EBMUD's plan with violating California environmental law. They are also pushing to have this specific section of river permanently protected as a "wild and scenic" river. Such designation can only come from Congress or the U.S. Department of Interior.
Lawsuits possible
A lawsuit over submerging the Mokelumne seems ironic to many involved in the long battle to open up some of that very river to the public. In the name of water quality, EBMUD for decades severely restricted access to a 21/2 mile stretch of the river to the extent of erecting "no trespassing" signs and prosecuting kayakers. The utility finally changed course in 2003, and, with state grant money, built a new boat ramp on the once-disputed section of waterway. The launch is close to the 1912 Middle Bar Bridge, which was rehabbed about 10 years ago after falling into disrepair after the Loma Prieta quake.
"Imagine our surprise that just a few years later, EBMUD is proposing a project that would put all that underwater," said Steve Evans, conservation director with Friends of the River.
San Diego Union-Tribune
Agencies adopt water diets
Lawmakers crafting strict conservation measures for all consumers...Mike Lee and Michael Gardner
http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/oct/11/lawmakers-crafting-strict-conservation-measures-al/?metro&zIndex=180898
As the state enters its fourth straight year of drought, water agencies are putting in place permanent rules to reduce use even after the rains and snow return.
Their directives are aimed at new and renovated developments, businesses and homes.
“There is not a Californian who won't be affected,” said Tim Quinn, executive director for the Association of California Water Agencies.
By January, cities statewide are supposed to have regulations that limit the amount of water used for landscape irrigation in future commercial and residential projects. In particular, the developers will have to abide by a water “budget” for each property.
The city of San Diego and some other water providers also are moving ahead with rules to increase the number of individual meters in apartments and other multiunit complexes, where residents typically pay a flat rate for water and don't know how much they use.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and lawmakers are crafting tougher conservation requirements for cities, farms and industries. Their efforts are part of broader negotiations over a legislative package that would pay for building reservoirs and restoring the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the main cog in California's system for moving water from the north to the south.
In addition, Schwarzenegger is considering legislation that would affect older homes.
The measure, Senate Bill 407, would force owners of most residential and commercial real estate built before 1994 to bring plumbing up to current requirements for water conservation. Homes would have to be in compliance by 2017; apartments and businesses would have until 2019.
Anyone putting property on the market would have to make the upgrades before completing a sale.
The American Water Works Association estimates that the measure could trim use in those homes and buildings by 35 percent.
In San Diego County, numerous conservation mandates took effect in June and July, driving regional consumption down more than 10 percent. But water managers are concerned that some residents cut back so far and so fast that they will soon burn out and revert to their old ways.
The challenge is how to push the trend line further down when many of the easiest conservation measures have been adopted.
“Toilets and shower heads were where we all started,” Quinn said. “We will have to rethink where we use water — everywhere.”
One example is the increased interest in tapping “gray water” from showers, sinks and clothes washers to irrigate plants. Recent changes to state law made gray-water systems much cheaper to install.
Meters are another focal point, particularly in Sacramento. That city, pushed by state legislation, is gradually installing the devices in houses that have avoided monitoring for decades.
“We need to tighten up and quicken the pace of metering to deter the use of nonessential water and deter waste,” said Jim Metropulos of Sierra Club California. He wants the state deadline for water meters pushed up by 10 years, to 2015.
While meters are required for houses and townhomes in San Diego County, local momentum is growing for placing meters on some apartment and condominium units and billing residents accordingly.
A San Diego city committee has drafted what would be the region's first ordinance mandating “submeters” for new, multifamily homes with three or more units and those undergoing major renovations.
Councilwoman Marti Emerald is leading the push, which she hopes will prompt new codes by next year and drive down water use at apartment and condo complexes by 15 percent or more.
“About 50 percent of the people in the city of San Diego live in multifamily housing,” Emerald said. “Those tenants aren't really paying for the water they actually use, so there is no accountability.”
Emerald's initiative is producing results.
Officials at The Dinerstein Companies volunteered to install submeters in their 260-unit complex on Collwood Boulevard when Emerald asked them to lead the way.
“We felt it was the right thing to do, based on everything that's happening with all of the current water issues the state is having,” said Josh Vasbinder, a partner with the Dinerstein development group.
Alan Pentico, a spokesman for the San Diego County Apartment Association, is concerned that owners of existing complexes would face big expenses if they have to add submeters. But he supports San Diego's concept and hopes the city's proposed ordinance catches on.
“It works in single-family homes,” Pentico said. “People see their bills and suddenly they say, ‘I know that a 12- to 15-minute shower makes a difference.’ ”
More water agencies would be smart to adopt submetering rules, said Richard Bennett, water conservation administrator for the East Bay Municipal Utility District in Oakland. East Bay's measure took effect in January.
“If you don't do metering of individual units (in condos and apartments), you have larger populations in your service area that are not directly responsible for their water bills,” Bennett said.
Another emerging strategy is for local governments statewide to set water budgets for new and renovated landscaping.
Last week, the San Diego City Council adopted the first such ordinance in the region under a state law designed to expand the use of drought-tolerant plants and other conservation methods. The city allocates a water limit for each parcel based on a formula that takes into account the square footage of landscaped areas.
Officials countywide are expected to approve similar ordinances by January, the state-mandated deadline.
“It's going to be a shift to a new design paradigm,” said JoEllen Jacoby, a landscape expert for the city of San Diego. “It will force dramatic changes from the large, grassy commercial sites that you see in Kearny Mesa” and the University Towne Centre area.
The direct effect of the new rules may be blunted initially because there is so little development amid the recession, said Glen Schmidt of Schmidt Design Group Inc. in San Diego.
But he said the standards will have wide influence on landscape architects when they talk to customers about which plants and water-consumption levels are right for San Diego.
“We have this water budget to be able to design to,” Schmidt said. “It's a great tool.”
Washington Post
Calif. lawmakers again fail to reach water deal...The Associated Press...Saturday, October 10, 2009 11:25 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/10/AR2009101002893_pf.html
SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- California lawmakers met again Saturday in hopes of reaching a deal to upgrade the state's decades-old water system, but left without resolving a handful of major outstanding issues.
Lawmakers offered only lukewarm reactions to their four-hour meeting with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger Saturday, despite the governor's claim a day earlier that they were on the verge of a historic breakthrough on water.
"Sadly, there's little in the way of progress," Assembly Minority Leader Sam Blakeslee, R-San Luis Obispo, said as he left the meeting. He said the latest proposal would "create a vast new government bureaucracy."
The legislative leaders are trying to draft a plan to upgrade California's water system, which is failing to provide for farmers, cities and wildlife. They agreed to meet at the Capitol again Sunday.
Hanging in the balance are about 700 bills that Schwarzenegger has until midnight Sunday to sign or veto. He had previously threatened to veto "a lot" of the bills unless lawmakers agreed to a comprehensive water deal, but backed off late in the week when lawmakers appeared to be making progress. Action on the legislation was delayed until Sunday afternoon.
"We are going to reconvene with the leaders on Sunday and make a decision on the bills after that meeting," Schwarzenegger's spokesman, Aaron McLear, said Saturday evening.
Upgrading the water system is a top priority for Schwarzenegger, who is heading into his last year in office and wants to count a water deal as part of his legacy.
The state's network of reservoirs and canals dates to the term of Gov. Pat Brown in the 1960s. Schwarzenegger and many others have said the system is inadequate for today's population and the millions of people likely to be added in the years ahead.
Three years of dry weather have left many Central Valley farmers and cities around the state short of water. Supplies also have been cut back by federal pumping restrictions to protect a collapsing ecosystem in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the water conduit for two-thirds of the state's residents.
Last month, Democrats presented a $12 billion package that sought to improve how water is used, delivered and stored in California. It died after Republicans complained that it failed to provide assurances that dams would be built, a key demand of the governor and GOP lawmakers.
Lawmakers from both parties have also questioned whether the state could afford to issue billions of dollars in bonds. Senate Minority Leader Dennis Hollingsworth, R-Murrieta, has said lawmakers are now considering a smaller bond between $8 billion and $10 billion, although many of the details are still being worked out.
A water deal that includes a bond requires a two-thirds vote in the Legislature, and thus needs at least some support from Republicans, the minority party. Bills dealing only with policy issues can pass with a simple majority vote.
Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, said financing for the package was among the outstanding issues Saturday, along with water conservation mandates that environmentalists favor, rules to strengthen groundwater monitoring programs, protection of water rights and mandatory conservation standards for cities.
He noted that even if a deal is reached Sunday, both parties would need to present any package to their caucuses to ensure enough votes in the state Legislature.