The Great Water Deal of 2009

By Peter Schrag, California Progress Report
On the rare occasions when the biggest players in Sacramento blow kisses to one another for a historic achievement, the object of the celebration deserves a hard second look. It happened again last week when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, legislative leaders and a gaggle of other politicians and lobbyists reached the great water deal of 2009. He wanted to congratulate all concerned, said the governor “for this historic accomplishment.”

Like many other big deals in Sacramento in recent years, this one, too, was composed in large part of black boxes, deferrals, fudges and borrowing — $11.1 billion in general obligation bonds in this case– for large water projects, some as yet unspecified, plus a fair amount of pork having little to do with water.

From 30,000 feet, the agreement, in the form of five bills, touches nearly all the major issues in California’s complex water picture: flood control, protecting the fragile Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta ecosystem, securing more water for the big San Joaquin Valley growers, many of them suffering the effects of a severe drought, reducing water consumption, monitoring and replenishing the state’s overdrawn ground water and addressing the increasingly severe effects of global warming.

We don’t yet know whether the deal will lead to the construction of a peripheral canal to take Sacramento River water around the ecologically overstressed Delta, for delivery to those growers and to Southern California cities. Nor do we know how much of the new storage capacity will be the costly surface dams the growers love and how much will go into the Valley’s depleted underground aquifers.

What we do know is that the deal did little to guarantee effective ground water monitoring by the state or to require more efficient use of water by agriculture, which still consumes roughly 80 percent of the state’s water. It aims to reduce urban water use by 20 percent but requires no similar effort by growers. And it’s still the taxpayers who’ll have to pay off the bonds – with interest a total of as much as $22 billion — not the farmers, developers and flood plain property owners who will be the major beneficiaries.

Water is a fixed – and probably declining – resource. The only way it can be stretched is by conservation, recycling of waste water and by more efficient use. This deal takes the first baby steps in that direction, but only by promising more goodies to agriculture and by taking most of the money to pay for it not from the beneficiaries but from schools, universities, the old and the sick, and from the taxpayers, present and future. Next November, when they get to vote on the bonds, they’ll have the last word on that.

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Source: California Progress Report

Missouri Pours Money on Water Projects

JEFFERSON CITY – Gov. Jay Nixon on Monday announced $146 million in federal stimulus funds to speed infrastructure construction across Missouri.

The grants, in conjunction with $120 million in low-interest loans provided by the state, will pay for more than 50 wastewater- and drinking-water system improvements statewide, including projects in and around Kansas City.

Kansas City will receive $23.9 million — including $3 million in grants — for eight projects, according to the state Department of Natural Resources. Blue Springs, which already won approval for about $33 million in low-interest loans for a wastewater-treatment expansion project, will receive $3 million.

Other area cities receiving grants or loans include Harrisonville, $7.3 million; Liberty, $1.9 million; Parkville, $612,048; Platte City, $1.2 million; and Weston, $3.6 million.

Source: KansasCity.com

Connecticut’s Experiment with Bottled Water Deposits

By Gregory B. Hladky, Fairfield County Weekly

Starting last week, the soft gurgling of the estimated 561 million bottles of water sold every year in Connecticut was supposed to translate into the sweet clink of millions upon millions of nickels rolling into the threadbare pockets of state government.

Oct. 1 was the trigger date for expanding Connecticut’s long-standing system of requiring 5-cent deposits on beer and soda bottles and cans to include all those plastic water bottles.

Theoretically, the bottle-and-can deposit system ensures beverage containers are recycled, thus keeping them out of landfills and incinerators and off the streets, because consumers return them all to supermarkets or redemption centers to get all their deposits back. But lots of people don’t bother to redeem their containers and just throw them away.

A day after the new deposits hit, prices for a 24-pack of Poland Spring ranged from $3.99 at the Wethersfield Price Rite, to $5.49 at the Big Y in Ellington, to $6.99 at the Rocky Hill Stop & Shop. Sorkin said those pricing decisions are made by individual stores for reasons that could include a local sale, efforts to use up water that was delivered before wholesale prices rose, and possibly an effort to temporarily ease sticker shock for consumers.

The battle over who gets to keep the unclaimed deposits has been raging for years. Beverage distributors hired high-powered lobbyists like Pat Sullivan and Jay Malcynsky to convince lawmakers to let the industry keep the estimated $24 million in annual unclaimed deposits. They insisted they needed the money to cover beer and soda container handling and recycling costs, and their arguments and influence worked for a long time.

The turning point came late in 2008, when the recession’s brutal impact on state revenues started to become painfully clear. Lawmakers desperate for money to cover gaping holes in the budget saw those unclaimed deposits as “low-hanging fruit,” a revenue source that was a lot less painful than things like tax increases. So the General Assembly agreed to rip the unclaimed deposits away from distributors and stick them in the state’s treasury.

Environmentalists had warned for years that the mountains of plastic water bottles being thrown away were choking our landfills and polluting our air through incineration, littering our streets, and increasing our dependence on foreign oil. (The plastics used in most water bottles are petroleum-based.)

Susan Collins, executive director of the California-based Container Recycling Institute, says putting deposits on bottles and cans is “by far the way that has been most effective” in getting containers out of the waste stream and into recycling.

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Source: Fairfield Weekly

Dangerous Toxins Taint Drinking Water in Schools

The Associated Press (AP) is breaking with news that not only has the drinking water at thousands of schools nationwide been found to contain a variety of dangerous toxins, but its investigation found these contaminants to be present in schools in every state.

Unsafe and dangerous levels of pesticides, leads, and an array of other chemicals and toxins have been found in schools’ drinking water and, worse, said the AP, the issue is basically going unchecked by the government, with the problem escalating and most prevalent at schools in which water is fed by wells. About one in five schools has been found in violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act over the past ten years, said the AP, citing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Schools with well water were not the only culprits, said the AP. Schools utilizing public water tested with higher lead concentrations, which can occur for a number, for instance, when lead flakes from lead-soldered pipes and lead levels increase during a school’s down time. Worse, said the AP, a Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) survey found about half of the schools in the United States do not test for lead.

“It’s an outrage,” said Marc Edwards, an engineer at Virginia Tech University who has been honored for his work on water quality, quoted the AP. “If a landlord doesn’t tell a tenant about lead paint in an apartment, he can go to jail. But we have no system to make people follow the rules to keep school children safe?”

Exposure to lead in children can cause brain and nervous system damage, behavioral and learning problems, slowed growth, hearing problems, headaches, mental and physical retardation, and behavioral and other health problems. Lead is also known to cause cancer and reproductive harm. Once poisoned by lead, no organ system is immune. Of particular concern is the developing brain because negative influences can have long-lasting effects and can continue well into puberty and beyond.

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Source: newsinferno.com

Alternative Energy vs Water?

By Todd Woody, New York Times

AMARGOSA VALLEY, Nev. — In a rural corner of Nevada reeling from the recession, a bit of salvation seemed to arrive last year. A German developer, Solar Millennium, announced plans to build two large solar farms here that would harness the sun to generate electricity, creating hundreds of jobs.

But then things got messy. The company revealed that its preferred method of cooling the power plants would consume 1.3 billion gallons of water a year, about 20 percent of this desert valley’s available water.

Now Solar Millennium finds itself in the midst of a new-age version of a Western water war. The public is divided, pitting some people who hope to make money selling water rights to the company against others concerned about the project’s impact on the community and the environment.

“I’m worried about my well and the wells of my neighbors,” George Tucker, a retired chemical engineer, said on a blazing afternoon.

Here is an inconvenient truth about renewable energy: It can sometimes demand a huge amount of water. Many of the proposed solutions to the nation’s energy problems, from certain types of solar farms to biofuel refineries to cleaner coal plants, could consume billions of gallons of water every year.

“When push comes to shove, water could become the real throttle on renewable energy,” said Michael E. Webber, an assistant professor at the University of Texas in Austin who studies the relationship between energy and water.

Conflicts over water could shape the future of many energy technologies. The most water-efficient renewable technologies are not necessarily the most economical, but water shortages could give them a competitive edge.

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Source: New York Times

National Academy of Sciences to Study California’s Water Woes

By Bettina Boxall, LA Times

In a bow to a summer of angry complaints about water cutbacks to Central Valley farms, the Obama administration said Wednesday it would invite the National Academy of Sciences to examine the environmental measures restricting some water shipments from Northern California.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said he would ask the academy to conduct an independent review of the science underpinning federal pumping limits imposed under the Endangered Species Act to protect smelt and salmon in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

In a letter to U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who had requested the review, Salazar said he was confident that the fish protections were “scientifically sound.” But he said he would like the academy to determine if there were other actions that could be taken that would have less of an effect on water supply.

The announcement came on the same day that Salazar held a public hearing in Washington on California’s water shortages, caused by a three-year drought and mounting environmental problems in the delta, the conduit for water shipments to the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California.

The delivery cutbacks have hit agribusiness on the west side of the valley the hardest because they have junior rights in the huge federal irrigation project that supplies much of the region.

State water officials say most of the delivery cuts from the delta are the result of drought — not the fish protections — but Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Central Valley congressmen have repeatedly denounced the endangered species restrictions as placing fish above people.

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Source: LA Times

Drilling Near NYC Aquifers Approved with Rules

By Jad Mouawad, New York Times

After months of deliberations, state environmental regulators on Wednesday released long-awaited rules governing natural gas production in upstate New York, including provisions to oversee drilling operations near New York City’s water supplies.

The regulations, in a report requested last year by Gov. David A. Paterson, do not ban drilling near the watersheds, as many environmental advocates had urged. But the report sets strict rules on where wells can be drilled and requires companies to disclose the chemicals they use.

The prospect of gas drilling in upstate New York has stirred strong opposition from a coalition of environmental groups, city politicians and residents, who fear that expansive operations of this sort could contaminate the city’s drinking water. But it has gained firm supporters upstate who say the economic benefits of a new gas boom far outweigh any potential risks, especially given the weakness of the economy.

The gas industry has argued that vast gas reserves could be found in the Marcellus Shale basin, which extends for roughly 600 miles through Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York.

The million-acre watershed supplies 15 million people, including 9 million New Yorkers. The Department of Environmental Conservation, which issued the preliminary guidelines, said that it found no reasonable basis for a drilling ban near the watershed, but that measures were necessary to allay concerns raised last year in public hearings.

Under the new rules, for example, drillers would be required to disclose the chemical fluids used for each well. Buffer zones would be created around reservoirs and aqueducts in the watershed. Wells drilled within a 1,000-foot corridor of underground tunnels that carry drinking water to New York City would require special approval, and in some cases, state inspectors would have to be present during some phases of operations.

“We need to have a zero-risk policy here, and it is not appropriate to allow drilling in such a unique and extraordinarily valuable resource,” said Kate Sinding, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The record in other states is so abysmal, and it doesn’t take much to do better than other states.”

The Manhattan Borough President, Scott M. Stringer, said the protections outlined did not go far enough and could expose the city to billions of dollars of expenses if it needed to invest in water filtration plants to counter contamination.

“A buffer zone is not a ban,” he said. “Quite frankly, a lot of these are half-baked measures that put the watershed at risk.”

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Source: New York Times

Male Breast Cancer Patients Blame Water

TAMPA, Florida (CNN) — The sick men are Marines, or sons of Marines. All 20 of them were based at or lived at Camp Lejeune, the U.S. Marine Corps’ training base in North Carolina, between the 1960s and the 1980s.

They all have had breast cancer — a disease that strikes fewer than 2,000 men in the United States a year, compared with about 200,000 women. Each has had part of his chest removed as part of his treatment, along with chemotherapy, radiation or both.

And they blame their time at Camp Lejeune, where government records show drinking water was contaminated with high levels of toxic chemicals for three decades, for their illnesses.

“We come from all walks of life,” said Mike Partain, the son and grandson of Marines, who was born on the base 40 years ago. “And some of us have college degrees, some of us have blue-collar jobs. We are all over the country. And what is our commonality? Our commonality is that we all at some point in our lives drank the water at Camp Lejeune. Go figure.”

Starting in 1980, tests showed drinking water at Camp Lejeune had been “highly contaminated” with solvents. Several wells that supplied water to the base were found to have been contaminated in 1984 and 1985, and were promptly taken out of service after the pollutants were found, the Marine Corps told CNN.

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Source: CNN

Water for Auction in California

By Bettina Boxall, LA Times

Need more water? If you’ve got $30 million or so, you can bid for it at an auction this fall.

In what officials believe is a first for the state, a Southern California water agency is planning to auction off enough water to supply about 70,000 homes for a year.

Water sales are not uncommon in California, especially when supplies are tight, as they are in the current drought.

But putting water up for bid in an auction — which is bound to drive up the price — appears to be unprecedented in the state.

“Water in general has always been a very low-priced commodity, and I think the reality is, it’s going to start catching up with other utilities. It’s going to fluctuate with markets,” said Ken Manning, chief executive of Chino Basin Watermaster, a quasi-public entity that manages the basin. “Whether that’s right or wrong, I don’t know. I just know where it’s going.”

Manning anticipates that the water will fetch $800 to $1,000 an acre-foot, or roughly $30 million. Underground storage in the basin will cost another $30 million.

“We think we’re offering a reliable product. It’s in the ground. So it will demand a higher price,” he said.

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Source: LA Times

Courts Reviewing Environmental Impact of Natural Gas Drilling

By Kate Winston, Inside EPA, Sept 18, 2009

Key federal courts are backing activists in suits under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to review the impacts of natural gas drilling fluids on underground aquifers, rulings that activists hope will bolster pending bills to restore EPA’s Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) authority to oversee hydraulic fracturing — a controversial gas drilling procedure that requires injection of chemicals into wells.

Activists also say such precedent will likely spur other groups to use NEPA to challenge the use of chemicals in gas drilling, a practice that is expected to increase as more electricity producers switch to the fuel to comply with upcoming climate change regulations.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit — which includes key gas drilling states of Oklahoma, Wyoming, Kansas, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico — in April ruled in State of New Mexico ex rel. v. Bureau of Land Management that the bureau must conduct further analysis under NEPA of the drilling activities covered by its resource management plan for the Otera Mesa region, including providing more evidence that drilling would not harm the aquifer.

Meanwhile, a federal district court in Colorado Sept. 3 granted environmentalists’ request for a preliminary injunction to block exploratory oil and gas drilling in the Baca National Wildlife Refuge until the resolution of the case, San Luis Valley Ecosystem Council et al. v. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service [FWS]. In the ruling, Judge Walker Miller found in favor of activists on a number of issues, including activists’ claims that the FWS’ environmental assessment (EA) for the project likely violated NEPA by failing to analyze potential impacts of drilling and failing to analyze alternatives that would have a smaller environmental impact.

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