5-24-09

 
5-24-09
Fresno Bee
Valley smog fighters wage media battle
Is the barrage of messages worth the cost of $850,000 in public funds?...Mark Grossi
http://www.fresnobee.com/local/v-print/story/1423665.html
The Valley's smog fight is going public with a bombardment of messages on billboards, at churches, in newspapers, on television -- at a price of more than $850,000 in public money this year.
The advertising is successful and necessary, say officials at the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District.
In winter, the messages tell people to check the district's Web site or call a toll-free line to find out if wood-burning is allowed. In summer, residents are urged to drive less, carpool and buy electric lawn equipment.
But one prominent critic of the ads -- Sen. Dean Florez, D-Shafter -- questions the wisdom of spending money on a publicity blitz.
"I don't understand using these precious dollars that could go to grants for cleaning the air instead going to promote current supervisors on the air board that have done nothing but vote against the many clean-air initiatives that I and other clean-air advocates have proposed," Florez said in an e-mail. "Save the TV costs, just have them sit in a room and run them on a projector to the board itself. It's their voting the right way that will clean the air, not hot air."
But air officials credit publicity for reducing unhealthy air days by 50% over the winter, because people heard the message about observing stricter fireplace wood-burning rules. About half of the $850,000 was spent last winter.
"Fresno County had zero unhealthy days for the first time ever. Public outreach is the only way to get the word out there," said executive director Seyed Sadredin.
Officials don't get a lot of arguments from most environmentalists. Kern County resident Tom Franz of the Valley-based Association of Irritated Residents has long criticized the district as not being aggressive enough, but not on the issue of investing money to inform the public.
"If it's spent wisely, it is money well-spent," he said. "You've got to change people's minds in the Valley."
Is the district wisely spending the money? Four of every five dollars goes directly into advertising and marketing in newspapers, television, radio, billboards and on the Internet.
About $424,000 was spent on winter and fall marketing. Officials plan to spend $377,400 this summer on the "Healthy Air Living" campaign, aimed at getting people to drive less and think more about air quality in their lives.
Another $56,100 is budgeted to help people buy cleaner wood-burning stoves and electric lawn mowers, as well as fund the district's annual air quality symposium, which promotes clean-air practices for businesses and private residents.
The $857,500 for such advertising and marketing -- a 2% increase from the previous year -- comes from the district's $35.9 million budget. Most of the advertising and marketing funding comes from vehicle registration fees.
The district's investment is modest for a campaign as complex as changing the public's behavior to reduce air pollution, say some experts. The Bay Area Air Quality Management District spends $4 million annually on advertising, marketing and public outreach. The Bay Area had 12 federal ozone violations last year. The Valley had 127.
"How do you get people to carpool?" asked Lisa Fasano, Bay Area district communications director. "It's the hardest thing we do. I'd say the Valley air district's $850,000 is a drop in the bucket."
Michael Kirby, a Southern California creative consultant who has worked on social marketing campaigns for many years, agreed: "The best marketing works on an emotional level. You won't get that out of a press release."
The Valley air district's advertising and marketing program amounts to less than 30 cents per person in the Valley. Officials estimate it helped trim up to 16 tons of wood-burning soot daily during winter -- a whopping reduction for the money.
By comparison, some air district rules require multimillion-dollar industry investments in technologies that sometimes yield less than a ton per day of pollution reduction.
District officials say they now will use the outreach program to break some big news to businesses: they will be required to reduce employee commutes to fight Valley ozone.
There will be summits in Fresno, Bakersfield and Modesto in early June. The two-hour sessions will showcase options, such as telecommuting, flexible work schedules and carpooling. Firms with 100 employees or more will have to figure a way to reduce employee commuting.
In the past, such rules have included fees for businesses that do not conform. For instance, builders pay an extra fee if they do not include enough air-friendly improvements in new subdivisions. The district also plans public meetings at libraries, community centers and churches in 15 cities from Tracy in San Joaquin County to Arvin in Kern County. They are billed as public chats just to talk about air quality.
Jaime Holt, the district's chief communications officer, said advertising is important, but face-to-face conversations must be part of the formula. In addition, the district is using social-networking tools online, such as Facebook and Twitter.
"There is no silver bullet," she said. "We need everyone to become involved to reach the federal standard. We're trying to reach people any way we can."
Contra Costa Times
Where Delta Water Meets the Tumbleweeds...Video
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid16737344001?bclid=14644292001&bctid=24113411001
Pumping water and cash from Delta...Mike Taugher
http://www.contracostatimes.com/environment/ci_12439808
As the West Coast's largest estuary plunged to the brink of collapse from 2000 to 2007, state water officials pumped unprecedented amounts of water out of the Delta only to effectively buy some of it back at taxpayer expense for a failed environmental protection plan, a MediaNews investigation has found.
The "environmental water account" set up in 2000 to improve the Delta ecosystem spent nearly $200 million mostly to benefit water users while also creating a cash stream for private landowners and water agencies in the Bakersfield area.
Financed with taxpayer-backed environment and water bonds, the program spent most of its money in Kern County, a largely agricultural region at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. There, water was purchased from the state and then traded back to the account for a higher price.
The proceeds were used to fund an employee retirement plan, buy land and groundwater storage facilities and pay miscellaneous costs to keep water bills low, documents and interviews show.
Revenues from those sales also might have helped finance a lawsuit against the Department of Water Resources, the same agency that wrote the checks, documents show.
No one appears to have benefitted more than companies owned or controlled by Stewart Resnick, a Beverly Hills billionaire, philanthropist and major political donor whose companies, including Paramount Farms, own more than 115,000 acres in Kern County. Resnick's water and farm companies collected about 20 cents of every dollar spent by the program.
Those companies sold $30.6 million of water to the state program, participated as a partner in an additional $16 million in sales and received an additional $3.8 million in checks and credits for sales through public water agencies, documents show.
"For a program that was supposed to benefit the environment, it apparently did two things — it didn't benefit the environment and it appears to have enriched private individuals using public money," said Jonas Minton, a water policy adviser to the Planning and Conservation League, a California environmental advocacy group.
Representatives of Resnick's farm and water companies did not respond to repeated requests for interviews. A woman who answered the phone at the Resnick's holding company last week said, "We don't talk to the press. It's company policy." She transferred the call to a company official who did not respond for an interview request.
The state Department of Water Resources also declined to comment for this story.
A paper accounting thing
The idea behind the environmental water account was to protect the Delta ecosystem without taking water away from people, farms and agencies that held growing expectations — and contracts — for water. By setting aside water that could supplement flows from the Delta, biologists would be able to slow Delta pumps at sensitive times, thereby protecting imperiled fish such as Delta smelt.
The water account was meant to enhance existing environmental protections and protect water users from the possibility that regulators might force them to give up more water to protect fish.
Despite good intentions, however, the program lacked the resources to provide the environmental benefits it promised. Traditional users got their water, but the environment suffered. Delta smelt dropped to levels near extinction. Even the backbone of the state's commercial salmon industry, Sacramento River fall-run chinook salmon, broke under the combined strain of ocean fluctuations and a variety of Delta-related problems, possibly including water management. That salmon fishery, which had never before been closed, is now off-limits to anglers for the second consecutive year, leaving supermarkets temporarily devoid of wild California salmon.
The way it was supposed to work was novel. If fish were in danger of being sucked into massive Delta pumping stations, for example, biologists could invoke the account to slow the pumps down. Then, contractors who would otherwise be deprived of water from the slowdown would be made whole with water from the account.
In order to provide that replacement water to contractors, the water account needed water stored south of Delta pumps. The underground water storage facilities in Kern County's aquifers and ancient river formations proved to be its most important source.
But the location at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley was not ideal. It made more sense to store the water closer to the Delta, where distribution would be easier to a wider variety of places.
So the water in Kern County was "exchanged" for Delta water that was being pumped at record high — and environmentally damaging — rates. The Delta water was then deposited in the environmental water account at San Luis Reservoir near Gilroy.
The exchange legally moved the water that was stored underground in Kern County to San Luis, but the water was still there. To complete the trade, then, the underground water had to be treated as if it were being delivered from the Delta.
Sometimes, Kern County water agencies retrieved the "Delta" water from underground for irrigation, but in most cases, the state was delivering so much water they did not need to.
Instead, most of the time all they had to do was simply forego storing the excess Delta water and pocket the difference between the low rates they paid to the state and the higher market rates they collected from the sale to the water account.
"I wouldn't pump that water to sell the (environmental water account)," said Dennis Atkinson, general manager of the Tejon Castaic Water District, which sold about $2 million worth of water to the account. "How are you going to make any money? ... It's a paper accounting thing. We never turned on a pump."
The price of water
The cost to taxpayers for Kern County water averaged $196 per acre-foot. The price Kern County paid for Delta water varied, but in 2007, the last year the environmental water account was operating, Kern County water users paid an average of $86 for Delta water. Some of that water was purchased for as little as $28 from a discount program.
The environmental water account was administered by the state Department of Water Resources, which also operates the state-owned pumps near Tracy. It bought most of its water from the Kern County Water Agency, whose general manager insisted the prices charged to taxpayers were fair and necessary to offset the cost of buying, storing and managing the water.
"The prices were in line with what we felt were the appropriate costs," said general manager James Beck.
Still, Beck acknowledged, there was nothing in contracts to prevent sellers from making money.
Of course, selling reserves can be risky, and Beck said market prices this year are $350 per acre-foot or more. Given this year's water shortages, he said that if Kern County landowners could go back in time and undo those sales, they would "in a heartbeat."
To Atkinson, of the Tejon-Castaic Water District, it made sense for water districts to reap a return on the sales because water contractors have been paying for the state's dams, pumps and canals since the 1960s, while the demand that more Delta water be dedicated to the environment is more recent.
"These guys have showed up lately and want something someone else has," Atkinson said. "Since they don't have infrastructure, they have to get it from the people who made the investment."
The vast majority of the financing for the nearly $200 million program came from state environment and water bonds that will be repaid with interest over the coming years.
Of that total, about 70 percent was used to buy water from entities in Kern County.
And of the Kern County sales, the $30.6 million sold directly by Resnick's Westside Mutual Water Company was more than twice the sales of any other entity, records show.
Open spigot
The environmental water account's effectiveness was hampered by the fact it was perpetually short of the 380,000 acre-feet a year envisioned when it was set up. In addition, a 2002 court decision favorable to water users reduced a separate source of environmental water, a cut that had to be made up by the environmental account, according to a 2005 report by the Environmental Defense Fund.
Also in 2005, three years into the fish collapse but the first year scientists could be sure that what they were seeing was a statistically valid plunge, the Contra Costa Times detailed how biologists worried about Delta smelt near the pumps were unable to get water managers to fully accept recommendations to slow the pumps because of concerns about driving the environmental water account into debt.
A study published last fall in the scientific journal Environmental Management concluded the account improved the reliability of water supplies for Delta water users but it was unclear whether it provided any meaningful environmental benefit.
Meanwhile, while the water account was meant to offset the environmental damage done by pumping water out of the Delta, it was being relied upon during a period when the state Department of Water Resources was ramping Delta water deliveries up to record levels. The environmental water account went into effect in 2000, and the five highest water deliveries from the Delta were 2000, 2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006, years in which, along with 2007, state water officials also sold large volumes of discount water that Kern County agencies would buy in 2007 for $28 per acre-foot.
The sharp decline in fish populations began around the same time, starting in about 2002. And while there are likely numerous factors that caused the collapse, most scientists studying the problem believe pumping patterns contributed.
Water officials have argued that the increase in discount water deliveries through a program known as Article 21 made no difference, since the price of water has no biological effect and because the amount of water pumped annually was below the maximum authorized by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
But regulators disagree.
A permit from the Fish and Wildlife Service, first issued in 2004, contained restrictions that were supposed to protect Delta smelt from going extinct due to water pumping. It was issued based on regulators' understanding that the use of Article 21 would be much less than it turned out to be.
In a 400-page analysis accompanying a replacement permit issued in December, the service's biologists noted that the Article 21 program was used far more extensively than they had been told when they issued the 2004 permit.
And that, in turn, helped drive up overall pumping rates from the Delta, which regulators tied to the environmental decline.
A coalition points elsewhere
Most of the water sold through the Kern County Water Agency originated with about a dozen smaller public water district "member units" and a handful of private interests who previously stored water, mostly from the Delta, in underground reservoirs.
Several of those entities are members of the Coalition for a Sustainable Delta, a group that banded together to fight back against pumping restrictions imposed in late 2007 by courts and regulators.
The coalition has filed three lawsuits and threatened to file several more to shift blame away from water pumping's role in the Delta's collapse. The group contends other environmental threats are also to blame for the Delta's demise, including housing development in Delta floodplains, pesticide use, dredging, power plants, sportfishing and pollution from mothballed ships near Benicia.
The Coalition for a Sustainable Delta's phone number is the same as Paramount Farms, and of the four coalition officers listed on tax documents, three are Resnick employees: William Phillimore, chief financial officer and executive vice president for Westside Mutual and Paramount Farming; Scott Hamilton, resource planning manager for Paramount Farming; and Craig B. Cooper, chief legal officer for Roll International, Resnick's holding company.
A spokesman for the coalition said that although it has an employee working out of the Paramount Farms office, the group is governed by dues paying members and not Resnick. He attributed the heavy presence of Resnick's companies on the group's tax returns to issues associated with getting the new coalition up and running.
"It's an ad hoc coalition. You have to organize that way," said spokesman Michael Boccadoro.
Paper shuffle allows for vast supply of easy money...Mike Taugher
http://www.contracostatimes.com/environment/ci_12437335
It must have seemed like easy money.
The state was delivering more water than ever to its customers, and in Kern County some of those customers sold some of it back, through a simple trade, at a higher price.
Tens of millions of dollars in sales to the "environmental water account" were little more than paper shuffles. It was all perfectly legal.
But the environment lost while Kern County water agencies collected $138 million in sales to the program, the vast majority of which was paid for with the proceeds from taxpayer backed environment and water bonds.
Public water agencies in Kern County used money from sales to an environmental water account to fund an employee retirement plan, buy land and pay for miscellaneous repairs, documents and interviews show.
One document shows that the Kern County Water Agency used revenue from the sales to help finance a lawsuit against the Department of Water Resources — the same agency that wrote the taxpayer-backed check to the agency — to lower its water bills.
The head of the Kern County Water Agency, James Beck, denied the lawsuit was funded with the sales revenue, but he could not explain why the general manager of one of his agency's member districts recounted that version of events to his board of directors.
Beck said revenues from the sales were used to cover the cost districts paid to buy, store and deliver the water. He also said funds were set aside to cover the cost of future purchases to replace water that was sold.
But documents and interviews show the sales were seen by the water agency's "member units," at least in some cases, as a source of revenue that could be used for a wide variety of purposes:
In 2003, the Buena Vista Water Storage District, based in Buttonwillow, put $500,000 in revenues from the environmental water account sales into its employee retirement plan, documents show.
Water districts put environmental water account revenues into their coffers to offset miscellaneous repairs and other costs in order to keep customers' water bills down, said Dennis Atkinson, general manager of the Tejon Castaic Water District. "We take that money and apply it against our bills," Atkinson said.
One district participated only marginally — selling small amounts of water at a relatively low price to the account's precursor one year and participating as a partner to help other water districts complete their sales in another. The Rosedale-Rio Bravo Water Storage District, based in Bakersfield, still was able to buy land to expand its groundwater storage capacity and build facilities with the proceeds, said general manager Eric Averett. Increasing the groundwater banking capacity is arguably consistent with managing water for the account, although the district did not sell any water to the account after 2001.
MediaNews identified $8.6 million worth of checks, refunds and credits, presumably to offset water purchases and pumping costs, including more than $3 million to Paramount Farms, that were paid to landowners in public water districts that sold to the water account. Blackwell Land LLC also received more than $3 million in refunds from the sales, while the remainder went to fewer than 10 other private landowners.
In 2003, Westside Mutual Water Company and the Wheeler Ridge-Maricopa Water Storage District negotiated a $600,000 payment to the water company, controlled by Beverly Hills billionaire Stewart Resnick, after a change in circumstances shifted a portion of the sales from Westside Mutual to the water district. At a meeting of sellers to the account, there was "a plea from Westside MWC that some compromise be worked out to adjust for the windfall" to the Wheeler Ridge-Maricopa district, which gained a greater share of the sales at Westside's expense, according to a memorandum from the water district's general manager, William Taube.
Wheeler Ridge, which serves water to about 90,000 acres of farmland south of Bakersfield, shifted $600,000 in sales to Westside Mutual, which still left the district with $1.4 million in "net revenue."
The most unusual use of environmental water account money may have been its apparent use to sue the state Department of Water Resources — the agency that wrote the check for the purchases — to lower Kern County's water bills.
Beck denied that happened, but that is what Taube told his board of directors in May 2007.
In an interview, Taube said that while it was possible he was mistaken, the point he made was that Kern's "member units" would not have to contribute attorneys' fees because enough revenue had been generated from the water sales.
The lawsuit, known as the "Hyatt-Thermalito litigation," is a dispute over how the state prices power from turbines at Lake Oroville. Kern County Water Agency and other water districts north of the Tehachapis, including Bay Area districts, want the prices to reflect market rates, which would increase the cost of water in Southern California — where it takes more electricity to deliver Delta water because of the greater distance and the need to pump the water over the Tehachapis.
The power sales are applied to contractors' debt for the State Water Project's dams, pumps and aqueducts, so raising the price of the electricity would reduce debt for contractors north of the Tehachapis at Southern California's expense.
In May 2007, Taube told his board that at the Kern agency's April board meeting he attended, the Kern board "directed that 2007 EWA sale proceeds accruing to the Agency would be used to fund the Hyatt-Thermalito litigation. This will reduce the litigation cost borne by Member Units and delay the time when Member Unit contributions to this litigation will be necessary," according to minutes of the Wheeler Ridge-Maricopa district's meeting.
Beck said that was incorrect but did not offer an explanation for how a misunderstanding might have occurred.
"That was my understanding at the time," Taube said. "If he (Beck) disagrees, maybe I misunderstood something."
Asked to clarify what his understanding was at the time, Taube said it was that, "They weren't going to need to call on member units ... because of the EWA."
Department of Water Resources Director Lester Snow, through a spokesman, declined to comment on the possibility that the proceeds from taxpayer-financed water sales to his agency may have been used to sue his agency.
In response to a formal request under the state Public Records Act, the Kern agency said it had no records showing environmental water account revenues being used to pay for lawyers. The official minutes of the Kern agency's April 2007 meeting contain no mention of the Hyatt-Thermalito lawsuit and its meetings are not recorded.
Water ownership murky, complicated...Mike Taugher
http://www.contracostatimes.com/environment/ci_12437097
Kern County water users who sold millions of dollars worth of water to a program meant to help the environment said the arrangement made sense because the water was rightfully theirs.
Few would dispute that water that was purchased and stored in Kern County could be sold to the environmental water account.
But the sales were made easier by the fact that the state Department of Water Resources was cranking up water deliveries to unprecedented heights at the same time it was buying water back for the environment.
The general manager of one of the agencies that sold water through the program, Dennis Atkinson of the Tejon-Castaic Water District, acknowledged that the sales only made sense to him if state pumps were delivering more water than his district could immediately use.
In other words, the higher pumping levels not only took an environmental toll on the Delta, they also made water available to buy back to protect the Delta.
Was the state required to deliver all that water or could it have pumped less and potentially saved the cost of buying it back? Put another way, does Delta water belong to contractors or do environmental needs have priority?
The answer is unclear.
Kern County water districts have a contract that awards them about 1 million acre-feet of water a year. And as customers of the State Water Project, they have to make the same payments on the project's dams, pumps and canals no matter how much water they get.
The state's water customers contend the contract obligates the state to make water available, and the contracts and simple fairness support that, at least to some degree.
On the other hand, a consolidated version of the full contract — which runs 348 pages and has nearly 40 amendments — appears to recognize that water shortages can develop "due to drought or any other cause whatsoever."
And the right to water in arid states is always conditional. The government can promise all the water it wants, but it can't make it rain.
Environmental laws, a constitutional requirement that water use be reasonable and beneficial and an ancient legal doctrine that ensures water is used in a way that considers public trust values — including the health of natural resources such as the Delta — further limit the use of water, making the question of who "owns" water complicated.
"Because it's called a right, people tend to think of it like the First Amendment," said Phil Isenberg, a former legislative leader and chairman of a Delta Vision task force appointed in 2007 by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to figure out how to fix the Delta.
"The water rights system is a way of figuring out who is first in line when supplies aren't enough to satisfy all of the water needs."
One of the state's biggest difficulties in delivering water to users while protecting the environment is the fact that water has been dramatically overpromised, Isenberg said.
As the Delta Vision committee was wrapping up its work last year, a memo arrived that members had requested from the state agency that administers water rights.
It carried this sobering comparison: The average natural flow of water in the Delta watershed is 29 million acre-feet per year, while the face value of water rights in the same watershed is 245 million acre-feet, or more than eight times the average flow.
"I was dumbfounded," Isenberg said.
Not all of the water in those rights is actually used, some of the rights are double-counted and much of the water that is used finds its way back into rivers where it can be used again.
Nevertheless, the figures are convincing evidence to Isenberg and others that the state has promised far more water than it can deliver.
Further complicating matters, the State Water Project signed contracts with Kern County, Southern California and others at a time when plans called for dams to be built on North Coast rivers that would produce millions of additional acre-feet a year to spill into the Delta for contractors to use. Those dams were never built.
Faced with overpromised water, population growth, a sensitive environment and periodic droughts, it is no surprise California has difficulties managing water.
Those difficulties also are not new.
After the last major drought ended in 1992 a series of deals were struck to fix the system, culminating in 2000 with a plan known as "CalFed."
There may not have been enough water to satisfy farmers, cities and the environment, but when the deal was signed in 2000, the state was awash in money thanks to soaring real estate, stocks and dot-com enterprises.
One of the keys to the CalFed deal was the environmental water account.
The idea was to use the market to strike a new balance between the needs of the environment and people. The account would be used by regulators to enhance the environment by buying water from willing sellers, thereby reducing conflicts that arise when regulators take it away from water users.
In the absence of an environmental water account, water users faced the possibility of additional environmental restrictions, according to a 2001 report by the Legislative Analyst's Office. For that reason, the LAO said water users should help pay for the program.
"Since compliance with endangered species laws is a responsibility of the state and federal water projects, (the environmental water account) in effect reduces the compliance burden for these projects," the LAO found.
Instead, the environmental water account ended up relying almost exclusively on taxpayer-backed bond funds, and most of that money was spent to buy water stored in Kern County. 
The Resnicks: farming's power couple...Mike Taugher
http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/ci_12437262
Stewart Resnick is not your typical dirt-under-the-fingernails farmer.
The Beverly Hills billionaire's companies, according to tax records, appear to own more than 115,000 acres in Kern County, about the size of four San Franciscos and more than all of the East Bay Regional Park District's parks combined.
The operation is the largest pistachio and almond growing and processing operation in the world, according to the company's Web site, and part of a business empire that Resnick runs with his wife, Lynda, whose Web site asserts they are the largest farmers of tree crops in the country.
The Resnicks' holding company, Roll International, also owns Fiji water, Pom Wonderful pomegranate juice, Teleflora, the largest floral wire service in the world and, until October 2006, the Franklin Mint, the largest collectibles company in the world.
Forbes ranks Roll International as the nation's 246th largest private company.
Resnick, a New Jersey native who graduated from UCLA in 1959, started his own janitorial company to pay his way through college, while Lynda started her first business at 19. The couple bought their first business together in 1979.
Today, the Resnicks' net worth is estimated at more than $1 billion, and they are believed to be among Los Angeles' richest people. They give generously to art museums, throw parties attended by Hollywood stars and donate lavishly to political campaigns — usually, but not always, to Democrats.
During the presidential campaign that ended in November, they gave money to anyone who had a shot at winning, including Democrats Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Edwards, Bill Richardson and Republican John McCain.
In the past decade, the Resnicks and their Kern County farming operations gave more than $1.6 million to political campaigns in California, including a whopping $373,000 to former Gov. Gray Davis.
Shortly after he was elected in 1998, Davis appointed Stewart Resnick as co-chairman of his water and agriculture advisory committee with former Rep. Gary Condit, D-Modesto, and Keith Brackpool, a businessman with plans to develop water storage underground in the Mojave Desert.
Last year, the couple pledged more than $55 million to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and this year they are opening a charter school in the farm town of Delano. Both sit on an executive committee for UCLA's medical sciences. Stewart Resnick is on the board of directors for the environmental group Conservation International.
Los Angeles Times
Dust storms speed snowmelt in the West
An unusually high number of the storms has left a film of dust on the Rocky Mountain snowpack, causing it to melt earlier and forcing farmers to adjust. This could be the new normal, scientists say...Nicholas Riccardi
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-pink-snow24-2009may24,0,7416181,print.story
Reporting from Denver — A series of unusual spring dust storms has left the snowcapped mountains of western Colorado stained brown and red, even a bit pink. The dust is speeding up the runoff to rivers that supply millions of people with water and raising fears of an increasingly arid West.
Twelve dust storms barreled into the southern Rockies from the deserts of Arizona, Utah and New Mexico so far this year. In contrast, four storms hit the mountains all year long in 2003. Eight occurred in each of the last three years.
"This year's been really, really strong," said Jason Neff, a hydrologist at the University of Colorado-Boulder. "Something's been going on, and I don't think we're exactly sure what."
The storms leave a dark film on snow that melts it faster by hastening its absorption of the sun's energy. That, coupled with unseasonably warm temperatures, has sped up the runoff here, swelling rivers to near flood stage, threatening to make reservoirs overflow and fueling fears that there will not be enough water left for late-summer crops.
"It creates a high-pressured game of Twister for water managers," said Thomas Painter, director of the Snow Optics Lab at the University of Utah. "They're having to make decisions quickly to hold on to water or release water."
Painter has found that dust can speed up snowmelt by as much as 35 days -- in other words, snow that would normally disappear by May 15 would instead be gone by April 10.
Ever since European settlement of the West, there has been dust, caused by outside forces breaking the fragile crust that holds undisturbed desert soil in place. Initially, grazing cattle kicked up the dust. Scientists say it is now more likely to be caused by off-road vehicles, mountain bikers or energy exploration. In a study last year, Neff found that the amount of dust in the Rockies is five times greater than before the late 19th century.
"This is really the story of the wholesale transformation of the West," Painter said.
Even without the dust storms, forecasters predict that global warming will reduce the soil quality in the western United States to dust-bowl levels by 2050, said Jayne Belnap, a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey. The Southwest's temperatures are expected to rise by 10 degrees Celsius by 2100.
"It's just a harbinger of the future," Belnap said of the dust storms. "This is the kind of world we need to imagine we're going to be living in and decide if we can afford this dust."
Dust and soot are contributing to the disappearance of mountain snows and the disturbance of water supplies all over the world. The Asian "brown cloud" rising from that continent's megalopolises is blamed for speeding up the melting of glaciers and snow in the Himalayas. Dust blown from the plains of eastern Africa is helping destroy the snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro.
In California, the Sierra Nevada snowpack gets some soot from Asia and from the state's own smog-emitting centers, but little dust. State officials have begun to study whether that soot could be contributing to a sped-up snowmelt that, if it continues unabated, could someday overwhelm the reservoir system.
Because winds in the western United States blow from the southwest, dust from the deserts of California, the Great Basin and the Colorado plateau is deposited on the southern Rockies.
The amounts of wind-blown dust in the West peaked in the 1920s, reaching seven times the historic norm. Scientists think the level of dust dropped after Congress sharply limited cattle grazing in 1934, near the height of the Dust Bowl.
Today, levels are five times the historic norm.
It is only recently that scientists have begun to study dust's effect on snow and water supplies. Painter and his colleagues only started tracking storms in 2003. "We haven't thought about dust as a serious environmental issue," Neff said.
This year's storms put the issue front and center, especially the final three, which swept through southeastern Utah and southwestern Colorado within a few days of one another in late March and early April. Mountains that usually remain snow-covered until midsummer are already almost bare along the entire western stretch of Colorado.
"We've seen several days with just incredible obstruction in the air," said Steve Vandiver, general manager of the Rio Grande Water Conservation District, 7,500 feet high in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado.
Now the snowmelt is about 20 days early, and Vandiver's system is on the brink of flooding.
He said some farmers and ranchers who rely on streams that normally run all summer long will be without water. "This whole system was built around the runoff coming pretty much as the crops came up," he said.
The dust left its smear on a number of Colorado's storied ski resorts, leading to grousing by some skiers about slushier, dirtier snow.
Jeff Hanley, a spokesman for the Aspen Skiing Co., said that as long as slopes were being groomed the dust was not a problem.
"It didn't affect our operations. It just looked kind of funny," he said. "You'd ski and turn around and look at your tracks and they'd be red chocolate."
He said the industry is not worried -- yet. "If it's going to be a regular thing for the next few years, that's one thing, but we don't know that yet."
But some scientists note that the West has ended an unusual, 50-year wet period and is returning to its normal, more arid state.
Belnap, the USGS scientist, said that the sort of activities that kick up dust may not be increasing -- they just may be more damaging because conditions are drier.
"We've been talking about this for 20 years, but it's been wet and we've had a lot of plants" helping to hold the soil down, Belnap said. "It's not necessarily that everyone's doing more. You've suddenly got a drier surface."
New York Times
Another Way Lead Kills Condors...MALIA WOLLAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/science/earth/24condor.html?_r=1&sq=endangered%20species&st=cse&scp=2&pagewanted=print
KING CITY, Calif. — Bruce Robertson, a private detective, had little to go on. Two gunshot victims, one soon to be dead, both found in the Big Sur wilderness. The victims had brown eyes, ruddy faces and nine-foot wingspans.
Ordinarily Mr. Robertson, of Los Angeles, hunts down philandering husbands and ferrets out insurance violators. But his skills are being tested in this latest mystery: the shootings of two endangered California condors.
“It’s a tough case,” said Mr. Robertson, 58. “The shooter could be anywhere.”
Biologists have been coaxing condors back from the brink of extinction since the early 1980s, when just 22 birds remained. Since then, the California condor count has been steadily climbing. The current tally is 336, with more than half of those living in the wild in Arizona, Baja California, California and Utah, and the rest living in zoos and bird sanctuaries. Those in the wild wear numbered ID tags and radio transmitters for tracking.
In March, scientists captured the two ill-looking condors, which were full of shotgun pellets. In addition, Condor 286, known as Pinns (because he was one of the oldest condors released at Pinnacles National Monument), and Condor 375 suffered from lead poisoning that biologists believe to be a result of eating bullet-laced animal carcasses left by hunters.
While the shotgun pellets lodged in the birds concerned scientists, it was the lead in their blood that proved more deadly. On May 11, Pinns died of lead poisoning at the Los Angeles Zoo. Condor 375 recovered and was released back into the wild.
News of two lead-riddled condors set phones ringing at environmental groups’ offices across the West.
“It was really distressing to me,” said Peter Galvin, a founder of the Center for Biological Diversity, based in Tucson. “As soon as I heard, I knew we needed to get a dragnet and resources out there to capture this shooter.”
Within 48 hours, Mr. Robertson was on the case — at the invitation of the center — and environmental groups, foundations and the state government had raised $40,500 in reward money for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the gunman or gunmen. Violation of the federal Endangered Species Act can result in a year in jail and a $100,000 fine.
Mr. Robertson logged over 1,000 miles on his car. He stopped at diners, gas stations and bars from the craggy Big Sur coast eastward to the Pinnacles National Monument. He questioned men in tiny communities with names like Bitterwater. Occasionally, Mr. Robertson pulled over to talk condors and guns with ranch hands.
His first stop in King City, some 150 miles south of San Francisco, was a one-room gun shop tucked behind a roadside liquor store. When he goes undercover, Mr. Robertson said, he tries to “keep the lies to a minimum.” So on this day he was just Bruce, a nature photography buff with a thing for really big birds.
“I want to photograph some wildlife,” Mr. Robertson told the gun shop owner. “Know where I can find wild pigs or elk or condors around here?”
The men got to discussing a new state ban on lead bullets, and the gun shop owner expressed his disgust with it.
The ban was instituted in July in condor territory, which stretches along the coastal ranges from Silicon Valley south to Los Angeles County. “Lead poisoning is the No. 1 threat to these birds,” said Kelly Sorenson, executive director of the nonprofit Ventana Wildlife Society, which raises, cares for and releases condors in Big Sur.
Condors scavenge for dead animals and often feast on the carrion of deer, pigs and squirrels shot — often with lead bullets — by hunters or ranchers. Fourteen condors have died from lead poisoning in California and 12 more in Utah and Arizona since the condor conservation program began in 1982. Dozens of poisoned birds have undergone blood transfusions, been given medication and been fed intravenously.
Mr. Sorenson is concerned that the timing of the condor shootings coincides with the lead-bullet ban. “There are clearly some people out there that are really angry and upset,” he said.
Mr. Robertson also said he thought that anger over the ban might have played a role in the shootings. When he asked a rancher near Pinnacles National Monument if he had seen any condors, the man replied that he had shot them all and that the birds’ eggs were pretty tasty, too.
This weekend Mr. Robertson plans to shed his undercover guise and begin distributing wanted posters on doorsteps, telephone poles and in mailboxes and gun shops across the Central Coast. The posters highlight the cash reward and ask anyone with information to call an 800 number or send an e-mail message.
“People will start talking when they find out about the money,” he said.
The posters rankle federal Fish and Wildlife Service officials. “It would be much better if people with information contacted law enforcement officials trained to handle such information in the proper way,” said Alex Pitts, an agency spokeswoman.
Law enforcement officials from the agency and from the California Department of Fish and Game and local sheriff’s offices are conducting their own investigation into the condor shootings. “I hope if he finds information he gives it to our investigators,” Ms. Pitts said of Mr. Robertson.
Meanwhile, Mr. Robertson has drawn a red circle on his map where he thinks the shooting occurred. “There’s definitely smoke around here,” he said steering around tortuous turns east of King City. “And where there’s smoke, there’s always fire.”