Santa Barbara looks to ocean desalination while Democrat legislature is in a coma

Robert Roebuck, project manager for Santa Barbara's public works department, at the water desalination plant in Santa Barbara, Calif., Thursday, Feb. 26, 2015. Santa Barbara is preparing to restart a salt water desalination plant it constructed 20 years ago to address the city's water needs during an earlier severe drought. (Patrick Tehan/Bay Area News Group)

California Cities Take Action

• While the Democrat legislature obsesses about importing more illegal aliens we see local cities taking real action to create brand new water.

SANTA BARBARA -- A mothballed desalination plant sits like a time capsule near Santa Barbara's main tourist beach, a relic of California's last drought to end all droughts.

With its control room filled with dot-matrix printers, floppy disks and obsolete computers, the padlocked Charles E. Meyer Desalination Facility represents this quintessential California coastal city's once-fleeting hope of quenching its thirst by tapping the ocean.

Now, 23 years after it closed, with the state entering the fourth year of its worst drought on record, Santa Barbara is preparing to reopen the plant, rekindling a debate that is spreading to communities up and down the coast: Is the state's water shortage now so dire that Californians should embrace desalination -- with its high economic costs and environmental risks -- as a critical element of a pricier water future?

The dilemma is the focus of the latest installment of this newspaper's ongoing series "A State of Drought."

"Desal is the last resort -- and we are at the last resort," said Bob Roebuck, Santa Barbara's project manager for the plan. "Our reservoirs are going dry. Our wells are dropping. This is it."

By early June, the Santa Barbara City Council is expected to vote to spend roughly $40 million to modernize and restart the desalination facility, located in an industrial area between Highway 101 and Santa Barbara's landmark Stearns Wharf.

The plant cost $34 million to build during California's last major drought in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But shortly after it opened in 1992, drenching rains returned. And because the water was so expensive to produce, the city shut down the plant three months later and sold its filters to Saudi Arabia. It has sat, closed, ever since.

A $1 billion plant in Carlsbad, north of San Diego, is set to open this fall. It will be the largest in North America and will supply 50 million gallons a day -- 7 percent of San Diego County's water supply.

The town of Cambria, 10 miles south of Hearst Castle on the San Luis Obispo County coast, began operating a small emergency $9.5 million desalination plant in November to keep it from running out of water. And officials in Monterey County this year drilled a 250-foot-deep test well at a remote beach in Marina as part of a plan to build a $320 million desalination plant to serve 100,000 residents of Monterey, Carmel and other surrounding towns by 2019.

The project still needs final approval from the state Coastal Commission and other agencies. It is proposed to replace water that state regulators ruled 20 years ago the Monterey Peninsula's water supplier, California American Water Co., has been taking from the Carmel River without proper rights.

Read more at the San Jose Mercury News

Vintage computers in the administration office at the water
desalination plant in Santa Barbara, Calif., Thursday, Feb. 26, 2015.

Carly Fiorina blames environmentalists for California drought

And Now She Runs for President

• As a Conservative John Muir Conservationist it staggers me seeing political hacks like Carly pretend in public that they have any brains.  
• Carly mindlessly tries to blame "liberals" for a lack of rain.  Then she says we should rape the Sacramento Delta of what little water is left so we can continue to water Southern California golf courses and grow crops in the desert.

(Politico)  -  Carly Fiorina is blaming liberal environmentalists for what she calls a “man-made” drought in California.

“It is a man-made disaster,” Fiorina, who is “seriously considering” a run for president in 2016, told the Blaze Radio on Monday.

“California is a classic case of liberals being willing to sacrifice other people’s lives and livelihoods at the altar of their ideology. It’s a tragedy.”

Republicans have blamed California’s protections for endangered species for the drought. In December, the House passed a bill to pump water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to Southern California, a move that environmentalists said would harm endangered fish species.

“That’s the tragedy of California, because of liberal environmentalists’ insistence — despite the fact that California has suffered from droughts for millennia, liberal environmentalists have prevented the building of a single new reservoir or a single new water conveyance system over decades during a period in which California’s population has doubled,” Fiorina said.

Read More . . . .

To the Idiot Carly:
All the water "conveyance" systems built in the world cannot transport water that does not exist.  Political hacks from both parties have pushed unlimited population and business growth in what is the desert of California.
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Carly plays the partisan bullshit card ignoring the fact that 6 of the 10 California Governors since World War II were Republicans.

Obama's DOJ continues their war on California Medical Marijuana

A failure but the "war" goes on

• The Statists who worship an all-powerful Federal Government just cannot stop themselves from trying to control everything you do, eat, drink, smoke or think.

(East Bay Express)  -  California’s multi-billion medical cannabis industry will remain in the crosshairs of federal prosecutors, despite direction from Congress to cease interfering with state medical pot systems.

In December, the US Congress passed and the president signed a historic amendment that de-funded the Department of Justice’s war on medical pot. Medical marijuana is legal in 23 states, yet the Obama Administration had spent an estimated $300 million enforcing the marijuana provisions of federal Controlled Substances Act.

After three months reviewing the amendment, the DOJ told the Los Angeles Times this week that “it did not believe the amendment applies to cases against individuals or organizations.”

The amendment states no DOJ funds may be used to: "prevent [medical marijuana] States from implementing their own State laws that authorize the use, distribution, pos- session, or cultivation of medical marijuana."

The Justice Department spokesperson said the department won’t arrest state regulators, but will continue to arrest, imprison, and seize the property of citizens and organizations involved in lawful state medical marijuana activity.

But the amendment’s author, Congressmember Dana Rohrabacher, said in February in San Francisco that prosecutors who waste time targeting legitimate dispensaries are breaking the law. 

“If any of you is being attacked, that federal prosecutor is breaking the law — that breaks the letter and the spirit of the law that passed the House with great debate,” he said. "Make sure your lawyers know [U.S. prosecutors] are breaking the law by being there. Their paycheck cannot be used to prosecute."

Federal appeals court judges have already begun to question prosecutors on the amendment's applicability to pending cases.

Northern California’s US Attorney Melinda Haag has targeted several of the Bay Area’s most legal, regulated dispensaries for property forfeiture including Harborside Health Center, and Berkeley Patients Group. These cases are mired in appeals motions over the cities of Oakland and Berkeley’s rights to have standing in the cases.

Harborside attorney Henry Wykowski told the Times the amendment is vague and open to interpretation in upcoming court hearings. 

The amendment could be read broadly to cover the California cannabis industry, the regulation of which includes some state laws, as well as a California Supreme Court ruling vesting regulatory authority with local jurisdictions. 

Many cities have banned cannabis dispensaries, while others tax and regulate collectives operating out of retail storefronts as well as cultivation. The federal government has a history of threatening California city councilmembers, county supervisors, and government staffers with drug trafficking charges if they seek to regulate medical cannabis cultivation or distribution. Federal prosecutors have shut down cultivation regulation programs in Humboldt County and Oakland. 

Update 4/3 3:20 p.m.: 

Congressmember Rohrabacher's office responded to the DOJ's statement via email, calling the DOJ's reading of his law incorrect. Rohrabacher’s Communications Director Ken Grubbs stated: “Rohrabacher believes the DOJ's self-referential interpretation to be emphatically wrong. The legislation's explicit language speaks for itself.”

(East Bay Express)

The California Drought - Overpopulation is the Culprit

Frank Gehrke of the California Department of Water Resources walks into a snowless meadow during the annual snowpack survey at Phillips Station in the Sierra Nevada. The survey showed that the Sierra snowpack was 5 percent of normal for April 1.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article17115506.html#storylink=cpy

“Today we are standing on dry grass where there should be five feet of snow” 

Governor Jerry Brown

(Washington Post)  -  California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) announced strict new curbs on state water use Wednesday to combat a worsening drought affecting more than 50 million people in the western United States.

The executive order imposes mandatory water reductions across California to reduce water usage by 25 percent. Brown announced the new restrictions on a mountain near Lake Tahoe, where state officials gathered to conduct an annual snowfall measure. The field where the measurement took place has averaged 66 inches of snow on April 1 since records began in 1950; today, there is no snow on the ground.

1950s new tract home constriction

No One Talks About Overpopulation

It is not a lack of rain, but way, way too many people

By Gary;

Forget desalination plants or water saving measures.  Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans want to address the real issue of California:  overpopulation.

We are slammed by business interests wanting endless growth and Leftists wanting the endless importation of the citizens of foreign nations for political reasons.

I grew up next to walnut orchards in Los Angeles.  Those orchards were long ago paved over to build crappy strip malls and shoulder-to-shoulder tract home housing.

Instead of being the Golden State, California is becoming an ant hill.

The quality of life in major cities sucks, is getting worse every year, and we keep importing more people and building more water sucking businesses and homes.

We have more than enough water for a 1950s California population.  But the politicians will not address the population issue.  They keep approving endless new housing tract and business construction projects in the name of jobs.

But jobs and housing for who?  Those of us already here have a home and a job.  The growth is for the importation of new residents.

Unless our water totally runs out I doubt any politician will address zero population growth.

California population by decade

What quality of life?
How about zero population growth?  Let's address the people already here.
Importing more and more people does not improve our quality of life.
Plus each new resident sucks down more water.

The Death of California Pool Culture?

Drought puts screws on California's 

swimming pools

• Say it ain't so!  The end to hot babes and poolside BBQs?
• But to the point, the swimming pool industry is an industry and creates jobs.  Pools are the tip of the economic iceberg.  At every level the California economy runs on water and we are rapidly running out.  
• Meanwhile another day goes by without the politicians demanding the building of desalinization plans up and down the coast.

(CNBC News)  -  Swimming pools have been part of California's lifestyle for decades, but as the state struggles through its fourth year of a worsening drought, communities are putting bans on filling pools or restricting new pool construction.

A handful of cities and water districts statewide have implemented restrictions on swimming pools, ranging from moratoriums on swimming pool construction to restrictions on draining and refilling pools. The California Pool and Spa Association, a trade group, has responded to restrictions with a "Let's Pool Together" campaign that gives consumers tips on being more water-efficient.

"They're trying to hammer us with the 'we're the culprits' because we do pools," said Blaine Enbody, who runs Enbody Custom Pools in Moorpark. "But if homeowners put in (landscaping), they are wasting more water than if they had a pool."

The strictest water rules are found in Montecito, a wealthy community that's home to Oprah Winfrey, Ellen DeGeneres, Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Berkshire Hathaway's Charlie Munger. New pool construction is banned in Montecito, where nearby water sources, such as Lake Cachuma, are drying up.

There are bans on emptying and refilling swimming pools in at least two communities in the San Francisco Bay area. A ban on filling pools in several Orange County communities in the Santa Margarita Water District was rescinded last year after the pool industry argued that it was being singled out unfairly. The Los Angeles suburb of Glendale considered a moratorium on building new pools last summer but backed off and implemented tougher outdoor irrigation rules instead.

Last month, a moratorium on new swimming pool construction in Coalinga, a Fresno County community hard hit by the drought, was lifted in part to help attract a new Best Western Hotel that wanted a pool. Coalinga still limits the emptying of swimming pools to once every 12 months, although most swimming pools have the same water for up to seven years.

"Some people are deciding to build sooner to avoid possible moratoriums if there is one," said Greg Kearns of Fresno-based Wildwood Pools, a builder in the drought-stricken San Joaquin Valley. "People are extremely eager to get a pool in, particularly in Coalinga, because they were shut off a year or so."

That said, drought and cost worries also are keeping some homeowners from rushing into putting in a new pool. The average new pool with the latest equipment and decking can cost upwards of $50,000, according to builders.

The number of new pool construction permits in California rose 2.5 percent to 5,200 permits in 2014 from the year prior, according to figures compiled by Metrostudy, a company that tracks real estate data. Last year represented a slowed growth in percentage terms, although the actual number of permits was much higher than the industry experienced during the Great Recession when annual permit numbers sank to below 1,100 permits in 2010 and 2011.

There are approximately 1.18 million residential swimming pools in California, according to Metrostudy. The typical residential pool requires from 10,000 to 30,000 gallons of water to fill.

Read More . . . . 

San Francisco Cops accused of forcing inmates to fight each other

What About a Pay Per View?

• As long as we are all descending into Hell why not do a pay per view with the proceeds going to the victims of crime?

(CBS News San Francisco)  —  San Francisco Sheriff’s deputies have been organizing jail inmate fights and gambling on the outcomes, according to the city’s public defender.

At a hastily-arranged press conference Thursday, Public Defender Jeff Adachi said that deputies at the city’s jail at the Hall of Justice were involved in setting up gladiator-style fights and betting on who would win.

“I can only describe this an an outrageously sadistic scenario,” said Adachi.

He said four deputies were involved in staging the fights and the ringleader was Deputy Scott Neu, who was accused in 2006 of forcing inmates to perform oral sex on him. That case was settled out of court in 2009.

In the complaint, one inmate, Stanley Harris, described part of the ordeal:

“…while I’m incarcerated, Deputy Neu made me fight another individual that we’re – we’re housed in the same tank. He made us fight. We had like two fights already. It’s like, uh, he would make us go to like a – like a (inaudible) to where nobody can see, and he would make us just wrestle and fight each other to his own entertainment.”

Inmates told investigators the deputies would threaten them with beatings, handcuffing or pepper spray if they did not participate in the fights, Adachi said.

The inmate accusations were not going to be made public until the inmates were out of custody, but his Adachi said his office learned that another fight was planned for next week.

In a letter sent to Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, Adachi requested “that you take immediate action and at a minimum, remove the deputies involved from any position where they have any contact with prisoners, including the clients they have harmed.”

In the letter, Adachi said at least one inmate had been injured with a possible cracked rib.

Sheriff Mirkarimi, who spoke after Adachi’s presentation, said he will ask the U.S. Department of Justice to help in the investigation and determine whether a culture exists within his department that promotes or facilitates unlawful behavior among corrections officers.

Let the games begin

Dems - Register everyone with a drivers license

Registering Idiot Voters

• "Election Reform" to a slimy, corrupt Democrat is to put to every unmotivate mouth-breather possible on the voter rolls.
• Instead of California limiting political parties, how about opening up the process to all voters? (See below)

(Huffington Post)  -  California Secretary of State Alex Padilla has proposed automatically registering eligible residents to vote when they obtain or renew their driver's licenses, a measure that could help reverse the state's dismal voter turnout.

Padilla's proposal is modeled after the "motor voter" law recently enacted in neighboring Oregon. That legislation -- the first of its kind in the nation -- uses Department of Motor Vehicles data to automatically register eligible voters, offering them a 21-day opt-out period if they choose not to register.

“One of the biggest barriers to citizen participation is the voter registration process," Padilla said of the California initiative, according to the Los Angeles Times. "A new, enhanced California Motor Voter law would strengthen our democracy. It would be a game-changer."

He noted that if passed, an automatic voter registration law could potentially boost California's voter rolls by the millions -- the secretary of state's office estimates that there are 7 million eligible Californians currently unregistered.

Padilla, a former state senator who was elected as secretary of state last year, is teaming up with Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego) to get the legislative process rolling.

In 2014, just 42 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot in November's midterm elections.

Election Reform in California

.
One reason California voter participation is low is voters have ZERO meaningful choices on their ballots.  California has banned all smaller opposition political parties from general election ballots.  Voters are only allowed to vote for a Democrat or a Republican.  Even your write-in vote has been declared illegal and will not be counted.
.
Free multi-party elections in the states of Germany help boost voter turnout because a voter has many real choices on their ballot with five parties winning seats in their state legislature.
.
I suggest that the voters by initiate open up the California lower house with proportional representation.  If a party gets 20% of the vote they would get 20% of the seats.  If voters had real election choices turnout would increase.

party.

e • d Election results for the Landtag of Lower Saxony

Party		Ideology	Vote % (change)		Seats (change)		Seat %
	Christian Democratic Union (CDU)	christian democracy	42.5%	−5.8%	68	−23	44.7%
	Social Democratic Party (SPD)	social democracy	30.3%	−3.1%	48	−15	31.6%
	Free Democratic Party (FDP)	free market	8.2%	+0.1%	13	−2	8.6%
	Green Party (Bündnis 90/Grünen)	environmental	8.0%	+0.4%	12	−2	7.9%
	The Left (Die Linke)	democratic socialism	7.1%	+6.6%	11	+11	7.2%
	National Democratic Party (NPD)	extreme nationalist	1.5%	+1.5%	0	+0	0%
	Free Voters (FW)	various	0.5%	+0.5%	0	+0	0%
	All Others (gaining less than 0.5%)		2.0%	+0.0%	0	+0	0%
	Total		100.0%		152	-31	100.0%
Source: Parties and Elections in Europe

Piping water from a national forest during a drought

A State of Crazy People

Bottling National Park water and shipping it out 

of California during a drought

(The Desert Sun)  -  Miles from the nearest paved road in the San Bernardino National Forest, two sounds fill a rocky canyon: a babbling stream and the hissing of water flowing through a stainless steel pipe.

From wells that tap into springs high on the mountainside, water gushes down through the pipe to a roadside tank. From there, it is transferred to tanker trucks, hauled to a bottling plant and sold as Arrowhead 100% Mountain Spring Water.

Nestle Waters North America holds a longstanding right to use this water from the national forest near San Bernardino. But the U.S. Forest Service hasn't been keeping an eye on whether the taking of water is harming Strawberry Creek and the wildlife that depends on it. In fact, Nestle's permit to transport water across the national forest expired in 1988. It hasn't been reviewed since, and the Forest Service hasn't examined the ecological effects of drawing tens of millions of gallons each year from the springs.

Even with California deep in drought, the federal agency hasn't assessed the impacts of the bottled water business on springs and streams in two watersheds that sustain sensitive habitats in the national forest. The lack of oversight is symptomatic of a Forest Service limited by tight budgets and focused on other issues, and of a regulatory system in California that allows the bottled water industry to operate with little independent tracking of the potential toll on the environment.

Water flows down Strawberry Creek in the mountains north of San Bernardino.
(Photo: Jay Calderon, The Desert Sun)

In an investigation of the industry's water footprint in the San Bernardino National Forest and other parts of California, The Desert Sun found that:

• No state agency is tracking exactly how much water is used by all of the bottled water plants in California, or monitoring the effects on water supplies and ecosystems statewide. The California Department of Public Health regulates 108 bottled water plants in the state, collecting information on water quality and the sources tapped. But the agency says it does not require companies to report how much water they use.
• That information, when collected piecemeal by state or local agencies, often isn't easily accessible to the public. In some cases, the amounts of water used are considered confidential and not publicly released.
• Even as Nestle Waters has been submitting required reports on its water use, the Forest Service has not been closely tracking the amounts of water leaving the San Bernardino National Forest and has not assessed the impacts on the environment.
• While the Forest Service has allowed Nestle to keep using an expired permit for nearly three decades, the agency has cracked down on other water users in the national forest. Several years ago, for instance, dozens of cabin owners were required to stop drawing water from a creek when their permits came up for renewal. Nestle has faced no such restrictions.
• Only this year, after a group of critics raised concerns in letters and after The Desert Sun inquired about the expired permit, did Forest Service officials announce plans to take up the issue and carry out an environmental analysis.

A growing debate over Nestle's use of water from the San Bernardino National Forest parallels other arguments in places from the San Gorgonio Pass to Mount Shasta. And those debates have turned more contentious as a fourth year of drought weighs on California's depleted water supplies.

Bottled water companies in California are typically subject to environmental reviews only when a permit for a new project triggers a formal study. Otherwise, the impacts of bottling plants on creeks and aquifers often aren't scrutinized by government agencies.

Read more at the Desert Sun.com

Bottles of water move on a conveyor belt at the Nestle Waters
North America bottling plant in Ontario.
(Photo: Jay Calderon, The Desert Sun)

PANIC - California snow stands at 19% of normal

The Three Stooges could produce more water than any Democrat.

Idiots are Running California

• While water supplies dwindle insane California Democrats spend their days in endless self-masturbatory wet-dream fantasies of bullet trains, driver's licenses for illegal aliens and political correctness.
• Meanwhile I sit here waiting for Democrats (or even the brain dead GOP) to demand a string of water desalination plants up and down the coast.  

(San Francisco Chronicle)  -  Snow levels in the Sierra Nevada are at or below what they were during the driest years in California’s recorded history, surveyors said Tuesday, dashing hopes that last weekend’s storm would begin to pull the state out of its increasingly frightful drought.

The water content of the snow statewide stands at 19 percent of the average for this time of year, according to the third snow survey of the season by the California Department of Water Resources.

That means California is neck and neck with 1977 and 1991 for the most parched winter since 1950, when the state began publishing measurements of the snowpack in the Sierra. California could set a new drought benchmark this year.

Opening day of the California Legislature

“We’re looking at historical lows,” said David Rizzardo, the chief of snow surveys and water supply forecasting for the Department of Water Resources. “You go into the winter hoping that (the drought) doesn’t get worse, but I think it’s undeniable at this point that it’s going to be worse. You just can’t recover at some point from how dry it has been.”

Water consumption back up

While the state dries up, Californians have increased their water use, according to the state Water Resources Control Board. Water use was cut 22 percent in December compared with the year before, but urban residents slacked off after that, according to the water board.

California residents cut water use only 8.8 percent in January compared with the same month in 2014, water board statistics show. That’s well short of the 20 percent conservation target that Gov. Jerry Brown asked residents to meet.

"Ski" Lake Tahoe

Winter sports enthusiasts at Squaw Valley Ski Resort were seen weaving through patches of dried ground.  Many Lake Tahoe resorts have been forced to close, while others have been left with only a hint of powder.

Read more: Daily Mail. 

Inland Empire is the second fastest growing region in California

Riverside County

Growing and Growing

• Yes there is growth, but no one likes to talk about water.  You cannot keep building water guzzling business and cites in a desert.  At some point the drought will drive the entire California economy into a depression unless meaningful actions are taken.

(ONTARIO)  -   The Inland Empire has returned to its place as one of the fastest growing economies in the state, said John Husing, chief economist of the Inland Empire Economic Partnership business advocacy group, at his annual State of the Region address.

Husing told the crowd of 400 leaders and members of the business community that the region had recovered the number of jobs it had lost during the recession.

“I think when you have 400 people come together and you hear such a positive message, with people applauding when we talk about the number of jobs being created in logistics, manufacturing, and healthcare, that’s all positive,” said Paul Granillo, president and CEO of the IEEP, which sponsored the event. “A job is the best thing people can have, and in a region like ours, the more jobs we have means that our quality of life is going to get better and better.”

California's Inland Empire
San Bernardino and Riverside Counties

Husing also was happy to tell the audience that the Inland Empire, comprised of both San Bernardino and Riverside counties, added more jobs than any other area of California, except for Los Angeles, beating out the Bay area — another economic powerhouse in the state.

“It means we’re turning to the role we have historically had for the last 15 to 20 years,” Husing said. “We have often been one of the strongest economies in the state. We lost that because of the housing downturn of the great recession, but we’ve now gained it back.”

Husing forecasts the region will add about 51,200 jobs this year, with a growth rate of about 3.9 percent. That’s coming after 53,117 added last year, and 51,075 in 2013, he said.

“It will be the first time we’ve ever had three years in a row with growth over 50,000,” Husing said. “We’ve all lamented the fact that the economic recovery has been so slow. In fact, what it has done is put us on a very solid foundation where you can get continual growth of this size.”

The region’s logistics sector, or the jobs related to the warehousing and transportation of goods to and from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach throughout the Inland Empire, carried the most job growth in the past year, Husing said.

He said a strong dollar, while hurting manufacturing because of weak exports, is actually helping the Inland Empire, because increased imports benefit the region’s logistics business with more goods coming through.

Also helping the industry is the continual growth of online shopping, which has led to an increase of distribution warehouse centers, such as the large Amazon fulfillment centers in Redlands and San Bernardino. Experts say the region should expect more to come in the future.

“The one that’s really the growth engine is logistics,” Husing said. “Like I said, if anybody is going to oppose logistics, they’ve got to walk around naked and not use any electronics.”

Read more at San Bernardino County Sun.

Crime
The Inland Empire's other growth industry.