Library Director Sass
My name is Library Director SassSas and I’m the director of the Sacramento Public Library. But we’re very excited to be hosting this event tonight with the Project for an Informed Electorate and to have the panel that we have tonight talking about the initiatives. How many of you are confused about how you’re going to vote? I am. I haven’t voted yet and I’m a permanent vote by mail person. So, what luck we have with the guests that we have here tonight. And I just want to say one thing: thank you for not being at home watching the first game of the World Series! Even though, does anybody know what the score is? 3-nothing, Giants? Aw...ok, good. No, I’m happy! I don’t want them to win by too much because that would be cruel.
So, anyway, do you all know who Professor Nalder, Professor Professor Nalder Nalder, is, from California State University Sacramento? She’s the brains and brawn behind the Project for an Informed Electorate. This is the second time we’ve done this at the library. We did this in 2012, and we thought that it was such a good idea that we set the date for this back in January 2014, so thank you for actually coming tonight because you always worry when you want to do that.
So very quickly I’m going to go through our panel. Explaining Initiative number 1:Anton Favorini-Csorbafrom the Legislative Analyst’s Office. All the folks are from the Legislative Analyst’s Office and they’re all the folks that wrote the legislation, or the language, right? I mean the…
Anton Favorini-Csorba:
No, no, the…
Library Director Sass:
Oh, the thing in the thing (referring to the Official Voter Information Guide Proposal Descriptions). Ok, Anton Favorini-Csorba, raise your hand please? Ok, then we haveRoss Brown BrownMiller. Ryan Miller. Thank you. He’s Initiative 2. Sorry, Ross Brown BrownBrown. See, I had a Ross Brown Brownup there! Ross Brown BrownBrown is 45 and 46. Drew SoderborgSoderborg is filling in for someone, and you’re 47? And Anita LeeLee is Initiative number 48. And I hope I brought all my stuff. How many of you brought your stuff from home? I brought mine too, so by the time this is all through we better be well informed. Yes sir, a question from the audience.
Man in audience:
Are those their ages, or…?
Library Director Sass:
Yes, actually, Anton Favorini-Csorba is very precocious. Yes, very precocious. Thank you very much. With no further ado we’ll get started. And I hope you all will afterwards have some goodies. Thank you.
Professor Nalder:
Thank you very much. I’m Professor NalderNalder, I’m a Political Science Professor at Sacramento State and I direct the Project for an Informed Electorate. So I just want to let you know a few things. One is that we have voter guides over here if you didn’t get one on the way in, if you want to take notes or something, we also have pens available. So, everyone should be set to take notes get ready to know how you’re going to vote.
I also wanted to mention that, this event is being taped, it’s being filmed, by the University, and we will be putting online, segmented by initiative, so that if you want to direct it to other people to look at, or if you wanted to look at it again, it’ll be on the website for the Project for an Informed Electorate. The web address is on those little sheets on your seats and it’s also right there on that banner and you can look up all this information after the fact. There are also other voter resources available on that website.
I also wanted to put in a little plug for another thing that we’re doing this election season. We’re doing ad-watches with KCRA and Capitol Public Radio. Those are airing at the 6 or 6:30pm timeslot and they’re also available to stream on our website and if you go to [the Project for an Informed Electorate] web address, on the right hand side, there’s a link to all the ones we have done so far. There’s one airing tonight on Measure L, which we will not be covering tonight, but if you live in the City of Sacramento there’s an ad-watch on Measure L that you can look on the website and watch that one as well.
Thank you for coming tonight. As a political scientist, I can tell you that social science studies do show that when Northern Californians pay attention to civic matters, the Giants actually do better. Yes, it turns out that they do 5% better and that’s an even stronger finding than having an outrageous beard. So, I’m very happy you are here tonight and so are the Giants.
So, without any further ado, let’s go ahead and get started on Measure 1.
The way we’re going to do this is the LAO analysts, and these are the experts on these measures. That we have them here, live (we’re in Sacramento) so we’re very lucky to have them. And then I’ll flip through some slides over here that will tell you who the endorsers are, so who’s taking a position on these ballot measures, and then also the money. The campaign spending tells you a lot about who stands to gain or lose, and so we’ve got all that data available. After we do that, we’ll have questions on each measure. If you want to ask a question, that’s where the mic is set up, at that podium. So if during a ballot measure, if you already know you have a question, if you could line up over there. After questions, then we’ll move onto the next measure. We only have about 15 minutes each, so it’s not a lot of questions, but if you have a burning question, please, you know, this is your big chance to have them answered.
So, alright, Prop 1 we have Anton Favorini-CsorbaFavorini-Csorba.
Anton Favorini-Csorba:
Alright, thank you very much Professor Nalder, happy to be here. So Proposition 1 is a $7.5 billion water bond and I’ll kind of even get to what that means in a second, but first I wanted to just set the stage quickly with a couple of facts about California’s water supply and water system, just to put the bond in context.
The first piece of information to keep in mind is that we get most of our water from surface water, such as rivers and streams, but we do get a significant amount from ground water. So about 40% of the State’s water supply comes from ground water and that’s water in the little pockets of air in the soil, it’s not big underground lakes. There’s a tiny share of our water supplies that come from re-use and other types of water sources.
I think the second piece of context to keep in mind that water generally does not occur in the State where we need it, or when we need it. Most of the population is in the south, most of the rainfall occurs in the north. And also, we have a fairly defined wet season and most of our water use occurs in the summer. So we have to have a system to store and transport that water so that we can use it.
The third piece of information is that the way that we use the water system as effects on the environment. We dispose of waste, like cities have water treatment plants that discharge, runoff from farms, things like that. So we use the water system to dispose of waste. We also divert water for our use and that has environmental impacts. We do certain things to adjust for that, such as build waste water treatment plants.
And then I think the last piece of information about the water system is that the local level is where most of the spending occurs. For example, in terms of water supply (like providing clean drinking water to people), local governments spent $26 million per year in recent years. The state has authorized the sale of about $20 billion of bonds over the past 15 years, so since 2000. So that’s kind of a relative scale there.
With that in mind, I’ll talk a little bit about the proposition itself. So there’s a figure [on the PowerPoint], this is also in the Supplemental Voter Guide, if you want to follow along there, and that just lays out how much money would be allocated to different projects, or different types of uses. And it’s split up, as you can see, among water supply, water quality, ecosystem restoration, and flood control. So I’ll take a little bit of time just to talk about each of those pieces, and then I’ll give you, one of the things that we’re known for, which is the fiscal effects. What is this going to cost or save the state government as well as local governments?
As you can see from the figure, the largest piece of the bond is for water supply improvements; that’s about $4.2 billion. And within that, there’s one piece that’s larger than all the others and that’s for new water storage. New water storage can mean a couple of different things. I think one thing that people think of is reservoirs, new dams, whether they’re built on existing rivers or kind of off stream. But it could also include improving our ability to store water and ground water, finding good areas where we can spread water out to recharge ground water. And specifically, this $2.7 billion is supposed to fund the public benefits associated with new water storage, and the measure lays out what those public benefits are supposed to be. Some examples are recreation, flood control, [and] water quality improvements. I encourage you to look at the measure to see what all five of them are.
The remainder of the new water supply money, some of it ($810 million) would go to regional projects that are intended to improve local supplies, and provide multiple benefits related to water. So you could think of an example of a project as, if you capture rain water before it runs off in a city into a creek or stream, you’re both getting the benefit of having some more water because now you’ve captured it, but you’re also preventing pollutants from being washed into the stream by capturing that runoff.
And then there’s $725 million for projects that would take previously unusable water, such as waste water or salt water, and treat it so that it could be used for other purposes.
The next piece of the bond overall is for watershed protection or restoration. Think of it as environmental restoration projects, maybe restoring habitat. There’s $515 million that would be spent on specific areas throughout the State. For example, some money goes to the Delta for ecosystem restoration happening there, some money goes to the Sierra Nevada Mountains, some goes to the LA River, and there are so many other little pots.
Then we have almost half a billion dollars for some agreements that the state has entered into, associated with major, expensive restoration projects, usually over a billion dollars we're talking. These are projects the state has agreed we have some stake in. So there's a pot of money that could be spent on a couple of these projects. The Sultan Sea, I think, is a good example down in Southern California. There's a restoration project there [and] this could go to that.
Then there's about $500 million that would be available to applicants state wide, so it could be spent anywhere in the state, some for buying water to help fish and others for urban stream restoration.
The third piece is improvements to water supply and water quality. Most of that funding, as you can see, would go to ground water clean-up. So areas where you had a military base and some rocket fuel maybe contaminated ground water, or dry cleaners. There are various ways that contamination gets into the ground water and this $800 million would be used to clean some of that up. Then there's some money for communities that can't afford to treat their drinking water adequately, or treat their waste water adequately; $260 million for each. Then $100 million to help implement the new ground water legislation, if you've heard about that, to help some projects there.
And then, finally, the last overall piece of the bond is $395 million for flood control. As you can see, most of that goes to levies in the Delta. I can talk more about that if anybody is interested.
There are a couple key pieces that would influence how the projects would be selected under the bond. One of the note-worthy pieces is that the money for new storage, $2.7 billion, would not go through the legislature's annual budget process. Instead, it's given to an existing State agency that could just choose the projects based on a return on investment.
A second comment is that the measure states that the legislature can't direct funding to a specific project, only to categories of projects.
And then the last piece, I think particularly relevant to Northern California, is the measure says that none of the funding could go to a peripheral canal around the Delta or any other project that might take water and move it around the Delta.
So with that, I'll briefly turn to the fiscal effects and then I think we have some time for questions.
So the fiscal effects, you can kind of think of it as having two pieces. One is State side, and there are some State costs. The other, there's the local government side, and we expect some savings there. On the State side, in order to get access to this money we have to borrow it like a mortgage, so we have to pay that back with interest over time. We expect that the cost of the principle and the interest to total $360 million a year and it will take us, we're projecting, forty years to pay that off.
On the flip side, much of this money would go to local governments for projects that they would do and in a lot of case, we suspect that the projects that local governments would fund using bond dollars would be similar to projects that they would have built otherwise, but they would have had to use rate-payer dollars or local tax revenue. We expect that there will be some sort of off-setting savings because now you're using state bond dollars to cover a portion of those projects. Those savings we expect to average around a couple hundred million dollars a year, [but it is] hard to put a specific number on it. And so with that, I think we'll have some questions.
Professor Nalder:
If anyone has questions if you could go up [to the podium] and in the meantime, I'll show you the funding and the endorsements. So the funding is very lopsided on this one, and that's true of most of the ballot measures we have here. We have mostly construction organizations, unions, and so forth, on the Pro side giving money because presumably they would benefit from the new work that would be done on water. And then on the flipside, there's not much money, but on the No side there is some money from some farms, who would presumably not have access to as much ground water? Is that true?
Anton Favorini-Csorba:
The farms generally are located in the Delta which, I think, reflects some kind of concern over any connection to the governor's tunnel plan.
Professor Nalder:
Right, ok that makes sense. Endorsements: we have both major parties in favor of this. This has been through the legislature already. The Libertarian and Peace and Freedom parties are opposed. Other organizations, we have the Chamber of Commerce, the Farm Bureau, League of Conservation Voters, etc. on the Yes side and NOW (National Organization of Women) and the Friends Committee, which is the Quakers, who are against. And the unions that are on record are in favor. And newspapers, for the most part, with one exception, are in favor of this measure, except for the San Francisco Bay Guardian which just folded. So this is their last opportunity, I guess, to take a stand. In any case, those are the endorsements. We have questions. Go ahead.
Prop. 1, question 1:
Hi, I have a quick question. Would Auburn Dam be funded in this and under what category if it were?
Anton Favorini-Csorba:
So, the measure does not specify any particular dams or storage project. It potentially could be funded under the $2.7 billion allocation for new water storage, but whether or not that particular project, Auburn Dam, was funded would be based on basically how high it scored in the process that the Water Commission would use to allocate the funding.
Prop. 1, question 2:
I was doing a little research on this proposition, and I was reading some of the wording on it, and I noticed there were a lot of previous propositions mentioned in it that funded the same types of programs. And it was talking about using some unused bonds to fund it. First of all, what is the difference between this and all the other ones that seem to cover the same categories, and why are there unused bonds?
Anton Favorini-Csorba: