The 1st week of December is generally a quiet week in California politics, but there is nothing about this political moment either in California or the nation that can be characterized as “quiet.”
California’s election results are still not completely final – mostly final and for all intents and purposes final, but not completely final until the state certifies the results at the end of this week. The last race to be called was the Congressional District in the Central Valley where Democrat Adam Gray prevailed by some 165 votes over incumbent Republican John Duarte. It was the last race in the nation, yielding a Republican majority in the House of Representatives that at 220-215 is the slimmest House majority in American history. With President Elect Trump appointing two members of that slim majority to cabinet posts, Speaker Johnson will start the 2025 legislative session with only one vote to spare until such time as those seats are filled by special election, assuming that both elections again yield Republican members.
Interestingly, while California Democrats appear to have flipped two Republican Congressional seats and held the one vacated by Katie Porter in Orange County, they appear to have lost two seats in the Assembly and one in the Senate – not nearly enough seats to lose their 2/3 super majority in either house but enough to shave that super majority down a bit.
And those slimmed down super majorities have already gotten down to business and done so with roughly ¼ of each house containing new members. Governor Newsom called them into session Monday to appropriate the funds necessary to support the myriad lawsuits California expects to file against a federal government that the state anticipates will try to repeat what the previous Trump administration did upon taking office in 2017 – deny the exemptions that California has routinely used for more than 50 years to pursue air and water standards that exceed federal standards, oppose certain federal attempts to preempt California law, and avoid participation in any efforts to use California law enforcement to regulate immigration.
Interestingly and perhaps tellingly, Speaker Rivas (D-Hollister) has made it clear that he plans to focus more on a state that Californians don’t believe is working for them than to worry about what happens in Washington D.C. The Speaker has also made much noise about the need to focus more on “affordability” issues than non-pocketbook issues. Whether this is evidence of looking closely at recent election returns or a reflection of the District he represents (Salinas – Hollister) is fodder for speculation, but our “speculation” is a combination of both.
As they begin their work beyond the performative “work” that promises to suffuse much of the current “Special Session,” legislators will have to pick their bills more carefully. After years of complaints that there are just too many to fully vet and debate, legislative leaders proposed — and the rank and file approved — a limit of 35 each for the two-year session. That’s down from 50 in the Assembly and 40 in the Senate.
One of the bills sure to be filed echoes the Speaker’s “affordability” lament. Indeed, it has already been filed by the Republican Senate Caucus and involves an outright appeal of the low-carbon fuel standard adopted last month by the California Air Resources Board (CARB), the standard whose costs are estimated to raise the price of gas in California anywhere from 32 to 63 cents per gallon. As with almost all bills filed by that Caucus, it won’t go anywhere. However, the bipartisan “problem solvers caucus” has proposed to lower gas prices through a less blunt mechanism by requiring the air board to approve a fuel blend with more ethanol. That’s a bill that could go somewhere. To the extent it does will tell us much about where the political winds may be shifting.
One thing to watch closely after President Elect Trump becomes President Trump is whether international industries like the automotive sector continue to follow the much higher emission standards set by California when the federal government again tries to deny California the exemptions necessary to exceed the minimum standards set by the federal government. That is exactly what happened in 2019 with the world’s automotive giants resolved to hew to California’s standards, effectively killing the whole notion. The question then, as it is more so now, is whether they resolved to follow the higher standard because they had concluded that Trump would be a one-term president or because the rest of the industrial world was going to follow the higher standard no matter what the American national government did. A lot of international industries face that question. Our guess is that it will come down to whether enough of the other industrial economies, particularly those in Europe, reverse their policies on climate change and de-carbonization. If they don’t, and we expect they won’t, the world’s mega-corporations are going to stick with the higher standard.
Bottom line: Notwithstanding Speaker Rivas’ admonition about a California-centric focus, there is much about the relationship between California and the federal government that is sure to command California’s attention – and much to worry about to the degree to which many of the state’s infrastructure ambitions, particularly its mega-billion water infrastructure ambitions, are dependent upon federal largesse.
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The 1st week of December is also unquiet on the water front – one could even say loud.
The seven states that form the Colorado Compact are meeting this week in Las Vegas to review the four (4) options the Bureau of Reclamation has crafted to outline paths toward reaching consensus on divvying up a hollowed-out Colorado Basin after 2026 when the current agreement expires. No one anticipates an easy meeting. It’s a meeting not made any easier by the fact that the Administration in Washington D.C. will be changing hands next month. No one knows what the Trump Administration’s take on this is going to be. Other than a few comments about California needing to send more water to its farms and residents and less to the environment, President Trump said little to nothing about water during the presidential campaign.
The Bureau’s four (4) approaches are: 1) The states do nothing, and the federal government dictates the new allocations; 2) a hybrid of federal intervention combined with a measure of cooperative arrangements among the seven states; 3) conservation incentives cum flexible management strategies; and 4) a hybrid of proposals submitted by the separate states or a combination of separate states. It strikes us that the 1st option is more threat than viable option. We cannot figure out what the 3rd option would mean. That leaves the two “hybrid” options that give the states as much latitude to come to agreement as they are able to achieve, leaving the federal government to fill out whatever remains blank.
There is as much at stake in these discussions as there is a compelling need to arrive at consensus. While there is disagreement about some of the whys, wherefores, and mechanisms of aridification, there is wide agreement that California’s warmer, drier conditions are all but guaranteed to yield roughly 10% less water from the Colorado River and 10% less from the State Water Project in the shortest of orders.
Also, this week and again next week, the Southern California Metropolitan Water District (MWD) will consider adding another $141.6 million to the $160.6 million it has already spent to continue pursuit of the Delta Conveyance Project, which is now calculated to cost in the vicinity of $20 billion when completed. In a nutshell, the project would construct a 45-mile pipeline underneath the Sacramento Delta to create a second route to transport from the Sacramento River to the aqueducts of the State Water Project. As the largest of the project’s funders, what MWD decides is all but determinative of whether the project moves forward.
The argument put forth in favor of the Delta Conveyance by its business sector supporters: The project will improve water supply reliability in light of climate change, sea-level rise, and the risks of an earthquake putting the State Water Project out of commission for 12-18 months. The arguments put forth in opposition by its environmental critics: The state has underestimated costs and overstated benefits; the project will destroy the ecosystem of the Delta; and the ratepayers will get soaked by substantially higher utility bills to pay for it. The supporters further argue that without the supply reliability provided by the Conveyance the state’s economy will atrophy. The detractors further argue that investing more in the pursuit of supply alternatives such as stormwater capture, recycling, aquifer recharge, and conservation would provide the reliability that is the goal of the Conveyance.
As those who soak up these missives know, it is in the interest of a sector like golf that is water dependent to approach matters like these not as “either-or” propositions, but rather “both-and” propositions by doing all the things capable of providing sustainable water supply – the “things” proposed by the state’s business community and the things proposed by the state’s environmental community.
Prediction: MWD will approve the expenditure.
Speaking of the MWD, late next week MWD’s conservation team and Los Angeles Water & Power meet with the City of Los Angeles’ golf community to continue their long-running dialog on multiple matters, among them the greater use of those agencies’ “performance based” rebate/incentive programs to help stimulate the use of conservation measures other than turf removal, things like the massive re-grassing program at El Caballero CC in LA’s San Fernando Valley that resulted in water savings in the 30% range, an achievement that captured for the club one of MWD’s four (4) conservation awards earlier this year.
El Caballero CC is hardly alone in playing the conservation card that follows after all the out-of-play turf has been removed. We trust everyone reading this understands that in the arid Southwest (increasingly, other places too) golf needs to keep playing conservation cards to remain viable, and if past is prologue, what the state’s largest water wholesaler and largest water retailer do may soon become practice in other parts of the state; indeed, maybe even the state will see fit to provide the incentive that AB 2947 (Lackey; R-Palmdale) could have provided had it not died in Appropriations last year. The state’s parks in particular, including that 22.7% of the state’s golf courses that are municipally owned, will never be able to fund turf conversions without some assistance.
Of course, what’s missing in this discussion should be the obvious but is often overlooked by the golf community. The new strains of warm season Bermuda grasses that thrive with much less water didn’t spontaneously appear in nature. They were developed at the nation’s universities – those with turf research programs. While there are many in the Midwest and parts of the Northeast, there is but one in this huge state – UC Riverside. And we are happy to report that the first of two new Bermuda grass strains (“Coachella”) developed by Dr. Jim Baird’s team at UC Riverside is set to hit the commercial market in partnership with West Coast Turf in early 2026. Sports stadia, parks, and golf courses are the first targets, followed by homeowners. According to Baird, Coachella offers 15-25% additional water savings than other Bermuda cultivars and maintains much better “winter color retention” than the others, which can allow for sports fields and golf courses to forgo water consumptive overseeding practices.
Overriding points: Golf would not have the turf conversion card to play without the research done at colleges and universities. California has only one such turf research program. Research takes money! The golf community may be the disproportionate funder of that lone program at UC Riverside; nonetheless if the program is going to keep delivering the new conservation cards the game is going to need to keep reducing its water footprint and remain politically and socially viable, more is going to be needed.
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“Reflections on the Election – Volume I” closed with a teaser about some changes at the California Alliance for Golf (CAG) aimed at building “a firmer foundation atop which a larger and more robust statewide advocacy alliance can be constructed over time.” Change # 1: The Alliance has retained former SCGA Director of Public Affairs Craig Kessler as its first executive director, albeit on a part-time basis. Change # 2: The Alliance has retained the firm of Madden & Quiñonez to serve as its Sacramento legislative consultant.
The information in this newsletter is being distributed among allied associations that form the California Alliance for Golf (CAG), the organization that speaks with one voice in the Capitol regarding legislative and regulatory issues of statewide scope.