5-12-09

 
5-12-09
Merced Sun-Star
UC Merced scrambling to line up sponsors for commencement
Facing $700,000 tab, officials have raised only $130,000 so far...SCOTT JASON
http://www.mercedsunstar.com/167/v-print/story/840433.html
UC Merced has secured another $30,000 from sponsors willing to help defray the cost of Saturday's commencement ceremony.
The event, launched into the national spotlight in March when first lady Michelle Obama accepted the invitation to speak, is expected to draw about 12,000, including several federal and state officials.
The university has raised $130,000 to go toward the estimated $700,000 bill. Leaders budgeted $100,000 for the ceremony before Obama accepted the invitation.
They quickly realized they needed to redraw the plans to accommodate all the guests, said John Garamendi Jr., vice chancellor for university relations, Monday.
Garamendi, who's planned past ceremonies, has been focused on lining up sponsorships, while other vice chancellors are dealing with the cost.
Construction crews spent the day assembling the massive stage as campus officials waited for Obama's advance crew to arrive sometime this week to approve the setup.
"These days are just blurring together," Garamendi said. "It's exhausting. Fabulous -- but exhausting."
High-profile government officials planning to attend include Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, Attorney General Jerry Brown, Assembly Speaker Karen Bass and other members of the Assembly and state Senate.
Garamendi said Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wouldn't be there.
Besides the political interest, the campus has been hit by demand from community members wanting to watch the historic event.
Every request was fulfilled, though each person could only request two tickets. The university mailed 2,213 tickets.
Some of the big-ticket budget items include hiring an audio/visual company to tape and televise the event on JumboTrons. It will also provide a video feed for media outlets.
Garamendi is charged with looking for sponsors and said he'll keep contacting businesses until Friday.
AT&T, the Educational Employees Credit Union and Kaiser Permanente each donated $25,000.
ProWest Constructors, of Wildomar, recently committed to giving $25,000. Sonic Foundry, of Madison, Wisc., is handling the online Web cast of the ceremony worth $5,000.
In return, the university is holding a luncheon before the event, putting the firms' names on the program and JumboTron and giving tickets them to the ceremony. Twenty-five tickets is the most one company received, he said, adding that the number of tickets isn't tied to the amount of money given.
University trustees have been writing checks as gifts as well, he said.
The White House hasn't offered to help, though Garamendi said he wouldn't expect it to either.
Other campus leaders are working to pare down the $700,000 budget. The university is looking at tapping operation funds, discretionary funds and more private donations. It has also asked the University of California system for help, spokeswoman Tonya Luiz said.
"The idea," she said, "is that from all those sources we'll make up the difference, if there is one."
Atwater City Council holds first hearing on water restrictions...JONAH OWEN LAMB
http://www.mercedsunstar.com/167/v-print/story/840427.html
A proposed water conservation ordinance that went before the Atwater City Council for the first time Monday night could severely restrict water use on the eve of state mandated metering that will cost residents millions over the next two decades.
The ordinance would limit watering to certain days of the week, restrict the watering of driveways and discourage water wasting.
"The state's in a water emergency," said David Church, public works director. "We want to do our part."
The city's water may come from wells, he said, but groundwater levels have been dropping for years and there is a real need for a long range plan.
Not everyone thought there was an immediate need for water conservation.
Jim Murphy, who is running for city council in the May 19 special election, voiced concern over the effectiveness of the ordinance.
There is little enforcement as it stands, he said, and putting into effect no-water days would just promote overwatering when people were allowed to water.
City Attorney Dennis Meyers questioned whether there was a need for such strict measures.
"It just assumes that we have a problem with water," he said of the proposal. "I think it's a little drastic."
The ordinance was just part of a larger overhauling of the city's water system that will soon include mandatory metering.
Currently, more than 2,000 homes are metered, said Church, but because of a state mandate, by 2011 all homes built after 1991 will have to be metered at an estimated cost of $600,000. By 2025, all homes will have to have meters. The cost for the metering of the town's 4,000 houses built before 1991 is estimated to run from $5 million to $6 million, said Church.
All of these costs will be paid for by taxpayers when the new rate structure goes into effect, he said.
The current flat rate of $15 a month has not been raised since 1992. So even without the state- mandated metering, the city's water fund would be in the red.
On May 26, the City Council will have a second public hearing on the ordinance.
Letter: Paid too much...PAUL GORDON, Merced
http://www.mercedsunstar.com/180/v-print/story/840417.html
Editor: I think that some of our local government employees make too much money.
Like the one -- who will remain nameless -- making $261,000 a year. That is a big wage.
I think that some of them should take a pay cut. It's not right that teachers are getting laid off, while municipal officials get their full pay. You need someone to cut their pay and make them earn their wages. And leave it up to the people of Merced to say who gets a raise.
Then teachers, police and firefighters can keep their jobs. So they can teach and protect our town.
Come on people, get off the porch and do something.
Modesto Bee
College Crunch: State's schools fees face 70 percent spike since 2001...Laurel Rosenhall. Modesto Bee staff writer Merrill Balassone contributed to this report.
http://www.modbee.com/local/v-print/story/699378.html
Parents: Get ready to write bigger checks.
Students: Steel yourselves to pay off larger loans.
It's getting more expensive to go to college in California.
The University of California Board of Regents raised next year's undergraduate fees by 9.3 percent last week. California State University trustees take up the issue Thursday, when they'll look at raising student fees by 10 percent.
Large fee hikes have become the norm in recent years, as California's public universities turn to students and families for money they're not getting from the state. If fees go up again as proposed, the cost of a college education in California will have jumped more than 70 percent since 2001, even when adjusted for inflation.
Leaders of the state's public universities say their schools remain a bargain compared with others nationwide and maintain that the price tag won't hurt needy students. They say their plan will take from the rich and give to the poor: One-third of the money raised by increasing fees will be set aside for financial aid.
But for the students who borrow their way through college, the rising fees sting. Just ask Jeremy Ogul, a sophomore at UC Davis who relies mostly on loans. The annual cost of a UC education will go up by $693 next year, from $8,027 to $8,720.
"That would put me in the position of having a bigger loan that I'll have to pay back when I'm older," said Ogul, 19.
The CSU proposal calls for raising student fees by $306 a year, from $3,849 to $4,155.
Alessandra Mendoza, a psychology major at CSU, Stanislaus, said that means she'll have to rely more on grants, scholarships and loans.
"I'm just going to have to work harder to ... pay off my schooling," Mendoza said.
Ninos Peyour, a CSUS criminal justice major, said the hard economic times make it even more important for people to be able to educate themselves for the job market.
"They are depriving students from coming back and taking classes," he said. "I think it's a sad ending."
Making students and families pay for the state's budget problems is "really unfair to Californians," said Pat Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.
Lawmakers and university leaders "should be doing a lot more to protect students and families rather than passing the pain on to them," he said. "This would be a steep increase in a good economic time, but in a hard economic time, it's really the wrong approach."
Instead of raising fees, universities should save money in other ways, Callan said. He suggests that they reduce enrollment of graduate students, who are costly to educate, and ask faculty to beef up their teaching load.
University officials say they're doing everything possible to keep higher education affordable through various types of financial aid.
About 40 percent of CSU students won't pay the higher fees because they have incomes low enough to qualify for full grants, said Robert Turnage, CSU's assistant vice chancellor of budget.
Fee increases for UC students largely will be offset by expanded grants and tax credits that are part of the federal stimulus package, UC officials said. About 81 percent of undergraduates with family incomes less than $180,000 will benefit from those grants or tax credits, said UC President Mark Yudof.
Even with the rising prices, California's public colleges are a bargain compared with similar schools nationwide, university leaders here say. The average cost at schools UC compares itself to -- including the University of Illinois and the University of Virginia -- is $9,905, more than $1,000 higher than the UC.
Among the schools the CSU compares itself to -- which include Rutgers University in New Jersey and Arizona State -- fees average $7,516.
"Our fees now are among the lowest in the United States," said Charles Reed, chancellor of the CSU, where fees are about $4,000. "The CSU is a good investment and a good deal."
But the national comparisons can be misleading, many experts say. Academic fees are just one part of the cost -- families must consider books, food and housing.
"The cost of living in California is not lower -- it's higher. So the overall costs are quite high," said Hans Johnson, a demographer with the Public Policy Institute of California.
Dorms at UC Berkeley, for example, range from $11,000 to $17,000 a year. Dorms at the University of Michigan go for $4,000 to $8,000.
College costs are a huge concern to Californians, a survey by the policy institute found. Eighty-four percent described college costs as a problem; 72 percent worry whether they can afford college for their youngest child.
Yet the economy is demanding ever more educated workers, Johnson's research shows. So when universities raise fees, he said, they are hurting the state.
"Actions that make college less affordable and lower college-going rates will be detrimental to California's future," Johnson said. "There's no doubt about that."
The price of a UC education recently became obvious to Ogul, the Davis student, when he looked into a calculus class this summer. The course was going to cost more than $1,000 at UC San Diego, he said.
"Then I realized I could take it at community college, and it's going to cost me $136," Ogul said.
"As I get closer to graduating and having to start looking at student loan bills, I'm beginning to look back and wonder if those first two years at a UC were worth the extra money I'm paying."
Fresno Bee
Judge rejects splitting up suit over Western bird...TODD DVORAK, Associated Press Writer
http://www.fresnobee.com/559/v-print/story/1396333.html
BOISE, Idaho Environmental advocates say a judge's recent decision in their lawsuit over dwindling Western bird habitat will let them fight for a sweeping regional solution and avoid costly state-by-state legal battles.
The Western Watershed Project accuses the U.S. Bureau of Land Management of improperly giving priority to grazing and energy development over habitat for the sage grouse, a hen-sized game bird the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering adding to the list of threatened or endangered species.
The conservation group claims the BLM violated environmental laws and its own policies in creating 18 land-use plans covering more than 25 million acres in Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, Montana and northern California.
Last month government lawyers, joined by members of the Wyoming livestock and petroleum industry, asked a federal judge to dismiss the lawsuit or split it apart to be argued separately in federal courts in each state.
Government lawyers argued that the court in Boise lacks jurisdiction over challenges of policy developed in other states and that keeping case consolidated undermines the local public input used to craft each of the 20-year plans.
U.S. District Judge B. Linn Winmill dismissed the idea that he lacked jurisdiction to settle environmental claims in other states, citing a recent example of how a federal judge in Montana has handled lawsuits over delisting wolves in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.
"Resolution of environmental actions often affects areas far outside the judicial district of the resolving court," Winmill wrote.
The case is one of several filed in recent years by Western Watershed on behalf of the sage grouse, whose numbers across the West have dwindled significantly in recent decades.
"I think this shows the judge recognizing that the BLM needs to look at the sage grouse on a West-wide basis," said Laird Lucas, a lawyer for the group. "This is a big-picture lawsuit that tries to force the BLM to take a big-picture view."
Government scientists say as many as 16 million sage grouse lived in western states in the early 1800s, thriving in sagebrush stands stretching from Kansas to Nevada and northward into Canada.
Conservationists and biologists attribute the population drop to loss of habitat from urban and energy development, wildfires, the spread of invasive weeds, global warming and livestock grazing.
---
EATON, Ind. (AP) - Environmental investigators were trying to determine whether a multimillion-gallon manure spill at an eastern Indiana hog farm was an intentional act.
The manure released from a lagoon at the defunct farm on Sunday entered two drainage ditches and flowed to the Mississinewa River three miles away, causing a fish kill, said Amy Hartsock, a spokeswoman for the Indiana Department of Environmental Management.
Investigators from IDEM and the state Department of Natural Resources were on scene Monday, trying to determine what caused the release of an estimated 4 million to 5 million gallons of manure.
Hartsock said investigators had found "a possible cut in the lagoon dike wall" that might have been deliberately made. The breach was repaired Sunday with help from nearby residents.
An IDEM contractor already had been working since earlier this month to clean up excess manure at the farm, which went out of business after being prosecuted for violating environmental laws.
Efforts to save salmon may be undone by climate change...ROCKY BARKER, McClatchy Newspapers
http://www.fresnobee.com/629/v-print/story/1396797.html
BOISE, Idaho The Pacific Northwest has spent two decades retooling dams, rebuilding damaged watersheds and restoring stream flows to keep salmon from disappearing.
The United States has invested billions in the effort - $350 million in 2004 alone - by far the most money spent on any endangered species.
But a new threat is more devastating than the gill nets that sent dozens of salmon runs into extinction. It is more deadly than the hydroelectric turbines that still kill millions of migrating smolts. In fact, it raises doubts about whether salmon will survive in the Northern Pacific at all.
Climate change already has made rivers warmer and spring runoff earlier, disrupting the life cycle of the fish that are an icon of the region.
No matter what actions the world takes to reduce greenhouse gases, river temperatures in more than half of the lower-elevation watersheds may exceed 70 degrees by 2040 - too hot for salmon.
"The only salmon that are going to survive the century mark are the ones in the large populations in the higher elevations that are still going to have snow and cold water," said Jim Martin, a former chief of fisheries for the state of Oregon.
But even these runs and those as far north as Alaska would be threatened if the world does not reduce gases like carbon dioxide over the next 50 years.
This means the hydroelectric dams that provide more than half of the electricity in the region - without emitting carbon dioxide - are more valuable than ever.
That presents an ethical challenge to the environmentalists, Indian tribes and commercial and sport fishermen who have fought for years to reduce the impacts of dams on the fish. The dams are no longer just economic drivers in the region. They could be - at least for the short term - critical tools for reversing the most dramatic environmental peril of our time.
The dilemma is another for environmentalists who are slowly recognizing that they will have to reconcile their decades-old efforts to "save all the parts" of the environment with the increasingly urgent need they see to stop or reverse climate change.
Environmentalists can't simply try to stop what they consider harmful activities, said Pat Ford, executive director of Save our Wild Salmon. They need to offer solutions.
"If you are not working both, you are setting up a blind spot you cannot sustain," he said."We are no longer in the time when these are economic versus environmental arguments," said Steve Wright, administrator of the Bonneville Power Administration, which markets the power from the dams and uses some of the proceeds to pay for fish recovery. "Increasingly these are environmental versus environmental arguments." Scientists expect climate change to force an ecological bottleneck. Even in a best-case scenario, a period of maximum impacts from climate change will affect living conditions for all species - including humans - before human efforts can reverse climate change.That means making painful choices about priorities - choices being faced by environmentalists worldwide."I think global warming demands leadership from conservationists in a way we haven't consistently done yet," Ford said.Idaho's Snake River sockeye were listed under the Endangered Species Act in 1991, requiring that the federal government take no action that will jeopardize the existence of the species. That has driven the management of the dams, farming, logging and residential development in salmon-spawning habitat across a Columbia watershed about the size of France.In many ways, this has focused the attention on the weakest salmon runs - often in the most degraded habitat with the most dams blocking migration.
Now the threat of climate change has brought another approach to the forefront: preserving the strongholds of salmon populations not just here but across the Pacific.
Some scientists say salmon in places like Kamchatka in Russia's Far East, Bristol Bay in Alaska and many Northwest watersheds are the healthiest and most genetically fit, and have the best chance of surviving growing population pressures and climate change.
Guido Rahr, president of the Wild Salmon Center in Portland, Ore., said protecting these strongholds is the most cost-effective way to make sure salmon survive.
"Look at salmon populations as a stock portfolio," Rahr said. "Most of our stocks are the most expensive and the highest risk." He is careful politically to say protecting strongholds and recovering all endangered salmon shouldn't be an either/or proposition. But the growing realities of climate change may force society to make those choices down the road.
"If our goal is to have healthy salmon runs on some part of the Pacific Northwest in 50 to 100 years, we have to do something different," Rahr said. "The Endangered Species Act is not enough."
Imagine the Pacific Northwest of 2109, where the salmon of the future will have to survive: Portland and Seattle have quadrupled in size.
Temperatures have risen and the Northwest's climate resembles that of San Francisco and Sacramento today. Despite the world's efforts to stem global warming, temperatures have increased enough that many rivers once red with fish are now uninhabitable for salmon.
California runs - troubled enough in 2009 that coastal fishing was called off for the second year in a row - have become only a memory. In fact, many of the stocks we are spending the most money on today may be extinct no matter what we do.
"Those populations whose life cycles put them in the river in the summertime either for their spawning migration or juvenile rearing are likely to see the biggest negative impacts from climate change," said Nate Mantua, University of Washington assistant professor of atmospheric sciences and a researcher focused on the impacts of climate change on the Pacific and its ecosystems. "From southern British Columbia down to California, many of the southern stocks are already seriously compromised."
Salmon in and among the Northwest's cities will face vastly different hurdles than they do today, said Martin, the former Oregon fisheries chief.
"Right now we're trying to save salmon in these little suburbia streams on the edge of the city," he said. "But in the longer term, we understand the population development and climate change are going to overwhelm the salmon in those streams."
The federal salmon recovery plan now before U.S. District Judge James Redden emphasizes an ambitious program of habitat restoration, hatchery improvements and dam modifications instead of removing the four dams.
BPA cut a deal in 2008 with all Northwest Indian tribes except the Nez Perce that increases spending on salmon by another billion dollars over the next decade. Most of the money would go to expensive habitat restoration programs in low-elevation watersheds long altered by human activities. Another big chunk of money goes to hatcheries to meet harvest demands and treaty rights or to augment severely depressed wild stocks.
"What we have now is a strategy that emphasizes the number of salmon that survive the decade," Martin said. "This strategy will actually reduce the number of salmon that will survive the century."
So far, Ford and other fish advocates aren't ready to give up on any salmon stocks. Preventing society from making "Noah's choice" - deciding which species survive - is one of their core values.
Instead, they seek to keep open as many options as possible, such as the nearly $30 million captive breeding program that seeks to preserve Redfish Lake's sockeye and their genetic fitness that scientists see as so precious.
And still, their first priority - even for protecting the salmon they hope will survive a climate change bottleneck - is the same as always: Remove four dams on the Snake River in Washington that present major barriers to the salmon of Idaho and eastern Washington.
Idaho shares some key attributes with the salmon strongholds of Alaska's Bristol Bay and Russia's Kamchatka: pristine undeveloped habitat and diverse and potentially productive genetically fit stocks of salmon, said Jack Williams, a fisheries biologist with Trout Unlimited.
The region once accounted for 50 percent of the 8 million to 16 million salmon that historically spawned in the Columbia Basin.
Williams and many other fisheries biologists believe that potential can be tapped again, if we can remove four of the eight dams standing between the Pacific and more than 22 million acres of wild and roadless high-elevation watersheds in central Idaho and eastern Oregon.
If the dams were removed, they believe that among all the southern runs, these salmon and steelhead have the best chance to survive climate change.
But the four dams generate about 1,000 megawatts of electricity a year - close to what Idahoans use now - without spouting the nearly 4 million tons of greenhouse gases that coal plants would produce to make that power.
With the right plan, the Pacific Northwest doesn't need to make this choice, said Sara Patton, executive director of the Northwest Energy Coalition, which promotes energy efficiency and low costs for consumers.
A coalition study shows that energy-efficiency programs - along with wind, solar, geothermal and biomass generation plants - can boost power generation by 6,500 megawatts by 2020, enough new electricity to power 845,000 of today's homes for less than a penny a kilowatt.
It would also be enough to meet the electric demand as the region's population doubles, while retiring 1,000 megawatts of coal-produced power and removing the four dams.
Patton said the trade-off to keep prices down was to plan for coal plants - many of which serve Idaho Power customers - to generate power through the life of the plants instead of shutting them down immediately. When they do close, it will reduce 80 percent of the region's greenhouse gases, the coalition predicts.
And even as the price of energy rises, customers' light bills will drop because they will individually use less power.
Wright, the BPA administrator, doesn't support removing the four dams, but he agrees that much of the region's demand could be met through energy-efficiency - though he is doubtful it can be done so cheaply.
He thinks it is too soon to talk about triage.
"It's way too early to say we understand how microclimates will change, to be able to write off species," Wright said.
Save Our Wild Salmon's Ford agrees. He figures Martin is right, but he acknowledges how little is known about how climate change will affect the Columbia Basin.
He wants to give salmon and the interconnected ecosystems on which they depend every chance he can. Ultimately their future - and ours - depends on the ability to adapt.
"Salmon are going to bring themselves through global warming," Ford said. "We aren't."
State’s large public pension payouts cannot be sustained...Editorial
http://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/v-print/story/1395957.html
Using data obtained from the California Public Employees Retirement System, a group of activists pushing public pension reform has compiled a list of retired public employees in California who earn $100,000 or more in pensions every year.
The information is likely to infuriate many taxpayers. According to the data compiled to date, the highest paid public employee retiree in the state is Bruce Malkenhorst, the former city administrator, clerk, finance director and treasurer of the city of Vernon. Vernon is a tiny industrial enclave near Los Angeles. He earns $499,674.84 a year or $41,639 a month in pensions.
At least 32 state and local government retirees in the central San Joaquin Valley earn more than $100,000 in annual pension pay. They include Jan Reynolds, a former Hanford city manager, $153,036; Jim Zulim, a former Clovis police chief, $114,399; George Sandoval, a former Visalia fire chief, $112,959; Bill Drennen, a former Lindsay city manager, $111,281.
Firefighters and police officers dominate the statewide list of $100,000 retirees. At the state level and in almost all local jurisdictions, public safety personnel have the richest retirement formulas.
If they work for 30 years, police and firefighters can retire in their early 50s with 90% of their last year’s salary, which is usually their highest.
Managers also dominate the $100,000 club list. These are the people who are supposed to represent the public when employee benefits are negotiated. But when government managers sit down with union leaders to dicker over compensation, they are negotiating for themselves as well. If rank-and-file workers get a wage or benefit boost, non-union managers get a commensurate hike and a matching pension benefit. The pension disclosures should cause concern. With the economy in decline, more and more public money is being diverted from key services and public employees are being laid off to keep pensions solvent.
It’s important to direct your anger at the right people. Ultimately our elected representatives — governors, legislators, county supervisors, city councils, and local fire and water district board members — are to blame. They approved these lucrative pension benefits.
The CalPERs board also bears a responsibility. Over the years, the board, which includes public employee representatives as well as governors, state treasurers and controllers, has consistently failed to warn legislators of the risk involved in benefit increases.
Legally, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to roll back benefits already earned. But the Legislature can change formulas for new hires and should do so. Retirement age should be increased to 60 or 65. Pensions ought to be calculated based on the average of an employee’s last three or five years on the job, as is common in the private sector.
The $100,000 list should be a wakeup call for public officials who so far have not dealt with the ramifications of out-of-control public pension systems. These large payouts are unsustainable.
Sacramento Bee
Badly needed California water transfers blocked by economic, environmental hurdles...Jim Downing
http://www.sacbee.com/topstories/v-print/story/1853186.html
As another summer of drought approaches, hundreds of thousands of acres of San Joaquin Valley farmland are expected to be fallowed, and much of urban California faces 20 percent water cutbacks.
But in the Sacramento Valley, rice farmers have been busy for weeks spreading water 6 inches deep over a half-million acres. Many experts expect a larger crop than last year's.
It's not that no one saw it coming. The state of California devised a program to move some of that water to thirsty cities and fields south of the Delta. The plan made sense on paper, perhaps, but so far it has been hobbled by everything from high rice prices to environmental concerns.
"The state of California did not do its homework with the stakeholders to find out what the impacts of moving a lot of water would be," said Jonas Minton, water policy adviser for the Planning and Conservation League.
Moving water around California is never simple. And the troubles with the state's "water bank" show why.
Fish-related pumping restrictions in the Delta narrowed the window for moving water from north to south, limiting the amount some farmers could sell and scaring off potential buyers.
A collection of environmental groups sued the state for what they claim is a failure to properly assess the impacts of the water sale on everything from local aquifers to the habitat of the threatened giant garter snake. One provision of the bank would allow farmers to sell their river-water allocation but pump ground water for irrigation. That sort of arrangement depleted some rural drinking-water wells during the last state water transfer program in 1994, said Barbara Vlamis, executive director of the Chico-based Butte Environmental Council.
Many farmers were leery of entering into a complex water deal with the state, fearing they might be liable for unexpected environmental damages, become ineligible for federal subsidy programs or simply lose money if the sale fell through. The diesel engines some would have to use to pump water are considered air polluters, subject to a complicated permit process.
What's more, rice prices are at their highest levels in nearly 30 years, thanks in part to a prolonged drought in Australia that has knocked out the California rice industry's biggest international competitor.
"The economics make it a lot better to farm rice than to sell the water," said Brad Mattson, general manager of the Richvale Irrigation District and a Butte County rice grower.
Mattson, like many other Sacramento Valley farmers in districts with strong, historic rights to river water, pays less than $10 an acre-foot for his irrigation supply.
The state water bank offered farmers $275 an acre-foot, a price meant to roughly compete with this year's rice returns. Teresa Geimer, who is coordinating the program for the Department of Water Resources, said it is likely to transfer about 82,000 acre-feet. The target was as high as 600,000.
Even though the irrigation season is well under way, some farmers and water districts are still trying to figure out whether they'll sell.
"If everything can be ironed out, we will participate," said Walt Trevethan, who farms about 500 acres of rice near Pleasant Grove in south Sutter County.
Manuel Massa, who farms about 700 acres of rice with his son near the Colusa County town of Princeton, is one farmer who's selling. Massa, 66, is recovering from quadruple-bypass surgery and decided not to irrigate 100 acres. The farm will likely forgo some profits, Massa said, but he could use the time off.
An acre-foot is 325,851 gallons, enough to serve about two average California households for a year. The roughly 520,000 acres of rice planted in the Sacramento Valley this year will consume about 1.8 million acre-feet of water.
Buyers from the water bank will pay for the state's administrative expenses as well as the cost of transporting the water, on top of the $275 base price.
It can get pricey, but it's in line with other supplies available to Southern California cities this year. In recent years, emergency irrigation supplies for orchards in the San Joaquin Valley have traded for well over $500 an acre-foot.
Economists, many water users and some environmental groups have maintained for years that freer trade in water would lead to better allocation of the resource. In theory, it has the potential to drive improvements in water efficiency, reduce the acreage of low-value crops and enhance the state's ability to cope with drought.
That's one argument in favor of major modifications to the Delta, such as a new aqueduct that would bypass sensitive areas.
"Until you get the plumbing fixed, I think you're going to have a market that can't respond," said Jeff Kightlinger, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.
But environmental groups caution that a market can't cure every ill. Barry Nelson, a senior policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said it's more important for the state to focus on maximizing water conservation and efficiency than on removing barriers to water deals.
S.F. Bay herring population looks in trouble...Matt Weiser 
http://www.sacbee.com/378/v-print/story/1853192.html
Another fish caught commercially in California appears to be in trouble, potentially dealing a fresh blow to the ailing industry.
The herring population in San Francisco Bay is near a historic low, marking a third straight year of poor numbers for the species, one of the last commercial fisheries on the bay.
The California Fish and Game Commission this week will get a report on the herring outlook when it meets in Sacramento and later this year will consider whether to close or curtail the commercial catch.
"The situation isn't very optimistic for herring at the moment," said Tom Barnes, a marine region program manager at the state Department of Fish and Game who monitors herring. "We don't know a whole lot about the cause."
The poor herring outlook comes only one month after state and federal fishery managers closed commercial salmon fishing in both California and Oregon for the second year in a row. The closure was triggered by low numbers in the Central Valley fall-run chinook population, which spawns in the Sacramento River and its tributaries.
Federal researchers blamed the record-low salmon numbers on poor ocean conditions. This also may have affected herring, which spend most of their lives in the ocean, then return to the bay to spawn.
Herring numbers are known to fluctuate and usually drop during droughts.
But the population estimate produced after the most recent fishing season, which ran from December through March, is the lowest in 30 years. And the fishery has not seen a three-year slump this bad since the statewide drought in the 1970s.
Several years ago, the state decreed that fishermen could harvest no more than 10 percent of the herring population in a season. It was a means to ensure a sustainable catch.
Barnes said the herring season has never been closed before. But that's one option that will be presented to the commission later this year, along with continuing the 10 percent harvest and several options in between.
Ernie Koepf, a bay herring fisherman for 32 years, said the state should maintain the 10 percent harvest level.
Koepf said the bay's herring catch is sold mostly in Japan, where it demands a higher price than in the United States.
One reason to maintain that level, he said, is that the number of herring boats working the bay continues to decline, partly because it requires specialized gear. About 30 boats worked the season that just ended. Also, he said, the herring catch usually falls well below the 10 percent quota.
One factor that may be at work this year is lingering effects of the Cosco Busan oil spill in 2007. The cargo ship struck a Bay Bridge abutment in heavy fog and spilled 53,000 gallons of fuel oil.
Studies revealed that herring eggs collected in the spill area showed abnormalities that could lead to death, while those outside the spill area did not.
A more complete analysis of the spill's environmental consequences is expected this fall.
Public Eye: Sacramento County managers bank sick leave, cash in at retirement...Robert Lewis
http://www.sacbee.com/626/v-print/story/1840419.html
If you're a manager in Sacramento County, it pays to not take sick days.
Actually, it pays a lot – when you retire.
Sacramento County paid out $1.9 million for unused sick time to retiring managers from January 2008 through March of this year, according to figures the county provided.
County workers continuously accrue sick leave. For most, the time is counted as service credit for the pension calculation. Managers, however, can cash out half that time and use the rest as service credit.
Union leaders – whose members are facing layoffs in light of a projected $180 million general fund shortfall – expressed anger at the benefit's cost.
"It disgusts me. They're willing to give those benefits to management who dug us into this hole, then want line workers to give back," said Ted Somera, executive director of United Public Employees Local 1.
Nearly 50 county managers who retired since January 2008 received payouts for unused sick leave, including William Kelly, former chief deputy sheriff, $114,000; Wendell Kido, water quality chief, $126,000; and Penelope Clarke, former head of the Countywide Services Agency, $113,000.
"We serve at will, get no overtime. We work until the job is done," said Clarke, who retired after 25 years with the county.
Other localities have similar if not better benefits, said Phil Fischbach, president of the Sacramento County Management Association.
The county is going to have a hard time competing for talent given management already has given back through furloughs and wage freezes, he added.
Sacramento County managers are allowed to take "management" time off. This is supposed to be time off for the long hours they put in.
Such time off is informal, and the county doesn't keep records of its use.
UPE's Somera wondered if managers use this informal time off in lieu of taking sick leave.
Clarke acknowledged there is no formal record keeping. However, she said she kept track of such time and always used sick leave when she had to miss work because of illness.
Supervisor Roberta MacGlashan said she was surprised to learn how much the county was spending for the sick leave cash-out perk.
"This is the kind of thing we don't see as a budget line item," she said. "I would call these 'hidden costs.' "
MacGlashan said she would be interested in reconsidering the benefit.
Nav Gill, chief operations officer, said everything will be on the table during budget discussions through June.
For a list of retiring managers from January 2008 through March 2009 and their payouts, view www.sacbee.com/links
Sacramento River Watershed
State of the Sacramento River Watershed Forum: Creating a Shared Vision
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Capital Plaza Ballroom
1025 Ninth Street
Sacramento, CA
http://www.sacriver.org/education/training/200905_
watershedconf.php
“The future of California is joined at the hip with the Sacramento River” say UC Davis geologist, Dr. Jeff Mount. 
Join Dr. Mount and the State’s top water leaders including DWR Director Lester Snow and USBR’s Regional Director Don Glaser, and others to learn about the state of the Sacramento River Watershed and its role in California’s future. 
Event agenda and registration information is available at www.sacriver.org
Lodi News-Sentinel
State official: Local residents will have say in new Bay-Delta plan...Ross Farrow
http://www.lodinews.com/articles/2009/05/12/news/7_delta_
090512.txt
Karla Nemeth made no bones about it when she addressed the Walnut Grove Rotary Club on Monday.
She works for the Schwarzenegger administration, which wants to ship more Delta water to the southern San Joaquin Valley and to Southern California.
"A lot of people really hate this," Nemeth told what she envisioned to be a hostile audience full of residents of the Highway 160 corridor. "I get this."
Rotarian Larry Emery, pastor of Walnut Grove Presbyterian Church, complained about Northern Californians, and especially Delta residents, not having sufficient representation in deciding the Delta's future.
"We don't have any representation except at these kinds of meetings (like Rotary)," Emery said. "When it comes to decision making, we're not at the table."
Nemeth, communications director for the California Natural Resources Agency, the lead agency in developing the Bay-Delta plan, said the plan will involve input from local jurisdictions.
Daniel Wilson, a sixth-generation Delta farmer, said he has trouble understanding how Delta and other regional interests can be represented on committees related to the peripheral canal proposal, considering that the only way to get the canal built will be to get rid of Delta-area interests.
Bay-Delta Conservation Plan timetable
Late summer-early fall: Public workshops on draft plan.
December or early 2010: Public review and hearings throughout the state on draft environmental impact report/environmental impact statement (EIR follows state regulations; EIS is a federal document).
June 2010: Hearings on final EIR/EIS.
December 2010: Final decision on plan by California Department of Fish & Game, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service. Other agencies will be involved in the permitting process.
Source: Karla Nemeth, California Natural Resources Agency
Nemeth focused her presentation at Wimpy's Marina on the controversial Bay-Delta Conservation Plan, which is centered on preserving fish and land animals and their habitats while delivering water to 25 million Californians to the south.
Nemeth acknowledged the conflict between water flows and protecting endangered species over the years.
"We haven't done a very good job at it," she said.
Delta waters, especially the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, have nine endangered fish species and 37 land species, Nemeth said.
"If this was just a water project, it would look a lot different," she added.
Salmon, near and dear to the hearts of many in the Lodi area, is getting the most attention, especially when it comes to fighting off predators.
Wildlife biologist Chuck Hanson, a consultant for the Bay-Delta Conservation Plan, said after the meeting that to goal is to keep juvenile salmon going through the Delta and out the Golden Gate. Instead, many of them go south in Old and Middle rivers to Clifton Court Forebay northwest of Tracy, where some of them are eaten by predator fish like small-mouth, large-mouth and striped bass, white catfish and Sacramento Pike Minnow.
The goal is to protect native fish that are state or federally listed as endangered or threatened, especially salmon, Hanson said.
The Bay-Delta plan will also focus on helping salmon as they head downstream from the confluence of the Mokelumne and Cosumnes rivers east of Thornton, Hanson said. This part of the plan helps juveniles migrating to the Golden Gate and adult steelhead salmon heading upstream to Lake Camanche by trying to control parts of the Mokelumne River subject to tidal influences, he said.
San Francisco Chronicle
Judge denies motion to dismiss grazing challenge...TODD DVORAK, Associated Press Writer
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/05/11/state/n120108D80.DTL&type=printable
A judge has refused to dismiss and break apart a sweeping lawsuit accusing federal land managers of giving livestock grazing and energy development priority over protecting sage grouse habitat across millions of acres of public land in six western states.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge B. Linn Winmill marks an initial victory for the Idaho-based Western Watershed Project in a lawsuit against the Bureau of Land Management. The conservation group is challenging 18 BLM land use plans covering more than 25 million acres in Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, Montana and northern California.
In a lawsuit filed last year in Boise, the group accused the agency of violating environmental laws and its own policies in the management plans. Specifically, the lawsuit claims that at the direction of the Bush administration, federal managers failed to consider a no-grazing option and or the cumulative effects of grazing and climate change on sage grouse and its dwindling habitat.
Last month government lawyers, joined by members of the Wyoming livestock and petroleum industry, asked Winmill to dismiss the lawsuit or split it apart to be argued separately in federal courts in each state.
Government lawyers argued that the court in Boise lacks jurisdiction over challenges of policy developed in other states and that keeping case consolidated undermines the local public input used to craft each of the 20-year plans.
Winmill dismissed that notion he lacked jurisdiction to settle environmental claims in other states, citing a recent example of how a federal judge in Montana has handled lawsuits over delisting wolves in Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.
"Resolution of environmental actions often affects areas far outside the judicial district of the resolving court," Winmill wrote.
The judge did dismiss challenges to two BLM plans, one for the Pocatello District in southeast Idaho and the other in the Kemmerer District in southwest Wyoming. Neither plan has been officially approved, so legal challenges to them are premature, Winmill ruled.
The case is one of several filed in recent years by Western Watershed on behalf of the sage grouse, a chicken-sized bird whose numbers across the West have dwindled significantly in recent decades.
"I think this shows the judge recognizing that the BLM needs to look at the sage grouse on a West-wide basis," said Laird Lucas, a lawyer for the group. "This is a big-picture lawsuit that tries to force the BLM to take a big-picture view."
Government scientists say as many as 16 million sage grouse lived in western states in the early 1800s, thriving in sagebrush stands stretching from Kansas to Nevada and northward into Canada.
Conservationists and biologists attribute the population drop to loss of habitat from urban and energy development, wildfires, the spread of invasive weeds, global warming and livestock grazing.
Pesticide carbofuran banned for food crops...H. JOSEF HEBERT, Associated Press Writer
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/05/11/financial/f152622D33.DTL&type=printable
The Environmental Protection Agency issued a final rule Monday banning the use of the pesticide carbofuran on food crops, saying it poses an unacceptable health risk, especially to children.
The insecticide, sold under the brand name Furadan, has been under EPA review for years. Its granular form was banned in the mid-1990s because it was blamed for killing millions of migratory birds. The agency began its effort to remove the pesticide completely from the market in 2006.
Furadan is manufactured by Philadelphia-based FMC Corp., which has fought the ban. In March, the company voluntarily scaled back its uses, in hopes of heading off broader restrictions.
FMC Corp. officials could not immediately be reached for comment. The company said on its Web site that Furadan "remains a useful product, vital to the sustainability of agriculture " and that its proper use "does not create a risk to human health, wildlife or the environment."
The EPA said it was revoking all allowable tolerance levels for carbofuran on food crops, including those imported, and in the coming months will move to ban the chemical's use altogether, including on nonfood crops, because of risks to farm workers and to the environment.
Even though the manufacturer said it would cut back its U.S. use of carbofuran to a smaller number crops, the EPA said the chemical still poses "an unacceptable dietary risk, especially to children, from consuming a combination of food and water with carbofuran residues."
The ban goes into effect at the end of the year.
In a fact sheet, EPA says carbofuran "can overstimulate the nervous system, causing nausea, dizziness, confusion and, at very high exposures, respiratory paralysis and death."
The chemical gained some notoriety recently when it was reported that herdsmen in East Africa were using the chemical to poison lions. Officials at FMC Corp. denounced the practice and said they were taking "aggressive action" to stop shipments to Uganda and Tanzania, and were beginning a buy-back program in Kenya.
The American Bird Conservancy on Monday hailed the EPA action to halt the use of the chemical in the United States.
Michael Fry, director of the group's pesticide monitoring program, said that while the granular form of the chemical — largely ended in the mid-1990s — was especially devastating to bird populations, "we know the liquid form has been killing birds, not as many as the granular form, but still in significant numbers."
On the Net: Environmental Protection Agency: www.epa.gov
EPA to oversee cleanup of TVA coal ash spill...DUNCAN MANSFIELD, Associated Press Writer
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/05/11/national/a124806D78.DTL&type=printable
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will oversee the cleanup of a massive coal ash spill in Tennessee that brought national attention to the environmental risks of storing the power plant byproduct.
New EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said Monday the federal agency is taking charge and "bringing to bear its resources and expertise" under the federal Superfund law.
So far, the EPA has been assisting state regulators with the cleanup of 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash that spilled Dec. 22 from a retention pond at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kingston Fossil Plant.
The spill covered 300 acres with grayish, toxic muck, destroyed or damaged 40 homes, and stirred a national debate on regulating ash facilities around the country.
Washington Post
White House memo challenges EPA finding on warming...DINA CAPPIELLO, The Associated Press
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/12/AR2009051201629_pf.html
WASHINGTON -- An Environmental Protection Agency proposal that could lead to regulating the gases blamed for global warming will prove costly for factories, small businesses and other institutions, according to a White House document.
The nine-page memo, released Tuesday by Republican senators, is a compilation of opinions made by numerous federal agencies prior to the EPA determining in April that greenhouse gases pose dangers to public health and welfare.
That finding set in motion the regulation of six heat-trapping gases from cars and trucks, factories and other sources under the Clean Air Act for the first time.
The document, which is labeled "Deliberative-Attorney Client Privilege," says that if the EPA proceeds with the regulation of heat-trapping gases, including carbon dioxide, factories, small businesses and institutions would be subject to costly regulation.
"Making the decision to regulate carbon dioxide ... for the first time is likely to have serious economic consequences for regulated entities throughout the U.S. economy, including small businesses and small communities," the document reads.
Republicans and business groups immediately used the document to bolster their arguments that controlling greenhouse gases would harm the economy.
They also highlighted parts of the document that find fault with how the EPA arrived at its conclusion that greenhouse gases endanger human health and welfare, since the gases by themselves do not pose any harm.
The memo says the EPA could have been "more balanced" in its analysis by also highlighting regions of the country that would benefit from global warming, such as Alaska, which would have warmer winters.
"It really appears to me that the decision was based more on political calculation than on scientific ones," said Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., who called the document "a smoking gun" during a hearing Tuesday on the Obama administration's proposed budget for EPA.
"The counsel in this administration repeatedly questions the lack of scientific support that you have for this proposed finding," he said.
EPA administrator Lisa Jackson responded by saying that the finding by the EPA in April was required by law, stemming from a 2007 Supreme Court decision that said the EPA could classify greenhouse gases as pollutants. Jackson also said the agency's determination was preliminary and would not necessarily result in regulation.
The administration has said it prefers a new law that would limit greenhouse gases and put a price on climate-altering pollution.
"I have said over and over, as has the president, that we do understand that there are costs to the economy of addressing global warming emissions, and that the best way to address them is through a gradual move to a market-based program like cap and trade," Jackson said.
Project launched to fight frog-killing fungus...BRETT ZONGKER, The Associated Press
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/11/AR2009051101900_pf.html
WASHINGTON -- Zoos in the U.S., Panama and Mexico are deploying researchers in Central America to develop new ways to fight a fungus blamed for wiping out dozens of frog and amphibian species as part of a project announced Monday.
The Smithsonian Institution is leading six other zoos and institutes in the Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Project, which aims to raise $1.5 million to fight the fast-spreading chytrid fungus.
Their protection efforts will focus on a small slice of Panama that is the only area in Central America that appears to be untouched by the disease, said Dr. Karen Lips, a University of Maryland researcher. Lips said it's only a matter of time, though, before even that area is hit with the fungus _ perhaps five years.
The speed at which the fungus has spread is "absolutely incredible," she said. "It's probably much worse than we even appreciate."
Scientists say the chytrid fungus threatens to wipe out a vast number of the approximately 6,000 known amphibian species and is spreading quickly. Already, 122 amphibian species are believed to have gone extinct in the last 30 years, primarily because of the fungus, conservationists say.
"We're looking at losing half of all amphibians in our lifetime," said Brian Gratwicke, the Smithsonian's lead scientist on the project.
The fungus has been found in 87 countries, including the United States.
Scientists involved in the project will work on implementing recently published research from James Madison University in Virginia that shows bacteria in frogs' skin can be used to fight the fungal infection.
Frogs bathed in a mixture containing the bacteria and then exposed to the fungus had a 100 percent survival rate in the study published in the International Society for Microbial Ecology Journal, said Professor Reid Harris. The survival rate was low for another set of frogs that didn't get the bath.
Applications for the research could include a spray to help build frogs' resistance to the fungus or a benign, fungus-fighting bacteria strong enough to pass from one frog to another.
"It's a very exciting discovery," Gratwicke said. "It's really the only thing we've got going."
Other groups involved in the project include Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs, Colo.; Zoo New England in Stoneham, Mass; Washington, D.C.-based Defenders of Wildlife; Africam Safari in Mexico; Houston Zoo; and Summit Municipal Park in Panama.
On the Net:  Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Project:http://amphibianrescue.com
Bloomberg.com
Edison’s 230-Mile ‘Extension Cord’ Fuels U.S. Fight (Update1)...Tina Seeley
http://bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601130&sid=aupEXetF55K0&refer=environment
May 12 (Bloomberg) -- Arizona regulators didn’t embrace Edison International’s proposed power line to transport solar electricity across their state to Palm Springs, California, as a triumph for renewable energy.
They called it California’s “230-mile extension cord” and tried to pull the plug. The unresolved dispute over the $774 million project has helped fuel a fight in Washington over whether the federal government should seize more authority from states over the approval of high-voltage power lines.
Fortifying the 211,000 miles of cables that form the core of the U.S. electrical grid raises issues as public as national energy policy and as private as a backyard view. The political fight for control may help determine whether the U.S. fulfills President Barack Obama’s goal of doubling renewable energy use in three years.
“It’s very hard to see how that happens if we don’t have more authority to site additional transmission lines,” Senator Jeff Bingaman, a New Mexico Democrat, said in an interview.
Bingaman, chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said he wants to expand the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s authority to approve high-voltage power lines as part of a measure that his panel is scheduled to take up tomorrow.
State regulators in Arizona and elsewhere want to protect their authority on behalf of homeowners who don’t want 180-foot- tall steel transmission towers sprouting in their neighborhood.
Edison’s Concessions
Placing the issue in the hands of officials in Washington instead of regulators located in Phoenix and San Francisco is “really silencing the voices of a whole lot of people,” said Kris Mayes, chairwoman of the Arizona Corporation Commission, the state’s utility regulator.
Edison International, owner of California’s largest electric utility, proposed in 2005 a power line that would stretch from a substation about 50 miles west of Phoenix to Palm Springs. The company says the line would ensure reliable supplies of electricity for southern California and bring the region renewable energy, including solar power from the Mojave Desert and western Arizona.
When Arizona regulators rejected the idea in May 2007, the company made a preliminary inquiry asking FERC whether it would consider intervening. Since then, Rosemead, California-based Edison has offered concessions such as giving Arizona utilities access to the line.
“We’re working with Arizona stakeholders to reconfigure the project,” said Les Starck, vice president of local public affairs at Edison’s utility, Southern California Edison.
Edison fell 1 cent to $29.84 at 10:05 a.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading and declined 7 percent this year through yesterday.
$80 Billion Investment
The need to upgrade the U.S. electrical transmission system isn’t in dispute. Obama included $11 billion to improve the grid in the $787 billion stimulus package he signed into law in February.
The portion of power lines east of the Rocky Mountains alone needs more than $80 billion in investment in the next 15 years to accommodate new renewable sources, according to a study released in February by the Joint Coordinated System Plan, a group of regional grid operators.
Legislation proposed by Bingaman and other lawmakers would expand authority that Congress previously granted FERC. A 2005 law said companies could petition the federal agency for approval of transmission lines if states in regions with a congested power grid “withheld approval” for more than a year.
FERC interpreted the law to mean it could override a state rejection. The U.S. Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia, ruled in February that the law applied only when a state failed to make any decision within a year.
Working With States
Even those who support giving Washington a greater say over new transmission lines disagree about how broadly the new authority should apply.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, wants to give FERC authority over new high-voltage lines only if they are used primarily to transport electricity from renewable sources such as wind and solar power.
“You can’t run over the states,” said FERC Chairman Jon Wellinghoff, who supports Reid’s approach. “There is a way to work with states in a collaborative and cooperative way.”
Bingaman and utilities led by Columbus, Ohio-based American Electric Power Co. say greater federal authority over transmission lines is needed to make the electrical grid more reliable and less at risk of brownouts, not just to help shuttle renewable power.
West Virginia
“It’s like having the interstate highway system with nothing but Chevrolets on it,” said Michael Morris, chief executive officer of American Electric, the biggest U.S. producer of coal-fueled electricity.
“Why would you do that?” Morris said in an interview. “Building something and running it at a decreased capacity just because you don’t want anything to come on it but some kind of power is just silly.”
Bingaman’s plan would give the federal government backup jurisdiction if state regulators reject a proposed line or fail to act within a year.
American Electric’s 90-mile Wyoming-Jacksons Ferry project across West Virginia shows why the federal government needs the right to intervene, Morris said.
“It took 16 1/2 years to get authority to build, and a year and a half to build it,” he said. “Until that legislation comes, you’re truly banging your head against a wall.”
Power-line location presents a dilemma for environmental groups such as the Sierra Club. The San Francisco-based organization supports “an expanded federal role, properly balanced with state authorities,” Carl Zichella, Western renewable projects director for the group, said in an interview. “Obviously we need to do something different than we have been doing.”
Pickens, Turner
The group’s Grand Canyon chapter opposed Edison’s project, saying it wasn’t necessary and would harm a national wildlife refuge in Arizona.
Supporters of expanding the grid include oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens, chief executive officer of Dallas-based BP Capital LLC, and CNN founder Ted Turner, who have both put money into renewable energy projects.
“We have to be able to get the power from these remote locations, where it’s best to put the wind and solar installations,” Turner said in an interview in Washington. “We’ve got to get them to the major cities.”
Turner, an investor in First Solar Inc., the largest U.S. maker of thin-film solar power modules, said he would make his own land available for line construction. That doesn’t mean he’ll have transformers in his backyard: Turner is the largest individual landholder in the U.S., with more than 1.9 million acres, according to his closely held Turner Enterprises Inc.
“I want power lines on my property, because I want what’s best for my country,” Turner said.
CNN Money
The public pension bomb
For years, states all across the country have been starving their retirement plans. Here's a look at how the crisis is playing out in New Jersey, where the bill is coming due, and the state doesn't have the money to pay it...Katie Benner. REPORTER ASSOCIATE Lawrence Delevingne contributed to this article.
http://money.cnn.com/2009/05/12/news/economy/benner_pension.
fortune/index.htm?postversion=2009051212
(Fortune Magazine) -- Even as the nation's economy is showing some tentative signs of bottoming out, another calamity looms: the public pension bomb.
For years, states nationwide have shortchanged the retirement programs that cover teachers, police, and other public employees; now the stock market plunge has wiped out billions of dollars from already underfunded plans. California, New York and Illinois are among the states scrambling to plug multibillion-dollar holes in their pension systems. The growing obligations raise the specter of higher taxes, diminished services, or even another round of costly federal bailouts.
"States have long needed to reduce their unfunded liabilities, and widespread investment losses have made it even more necessary to put money in," says Lance Weiss, author of a 2006 Deloitte study of state pensions. "But the market crash also means there's less money available to use for contributions. Everything is coming together to create a crisis."
To better understand this ticking time bomb it helps to focus on a single state, and New Jersey makes a compelling case study. For one thing, its situation is dire. In June 2008 the state estimated that the plan - one of the nation's largest, covering teachers, state employees, firefighters, and police - had $34 billion less than it needed to meet its obligations. Since then the market value of the plan has dropped from $82 billion to $56 billion (a new estimate of underfunding is due in July).
Also, New Jersey is in some ways ahead of the pack in trying to deal with the crisis - Gov. Jon Corzine, a Democrat, made addressing the problem a central theme of his 2005 campaign - and the obstacles it is encountering shed light on the hard choices facing other states.
"The pension obligations could spark a huge problem for New Jersey," says Thomas Kean, a former Republican governor. "They must be paid because they are absolutely an obligation of the state, but as it is, the budget is balanced with chewing gum and sealing wax."
***
To figure out how such a wealthy state (with a median household income of $65,933, New Jersey ranks No. 1) dug itself into this hole, set the clock back almost 20 years.
In 1990 the country was hit by a recession, and the new Democratic governor, James Florio, responded with a wildly unpopular $2.8 billion income and sales tax increase to balance the budget. Two years later, facing another budget shortfall, he turned to the state pension system for help. With almost unanimous support in the legislature, he pushed through the Pension Revaluation Act of 1992.
We'll spare you the minutiae of pension accounting and just say that the law permitted the state to recognize investment gains in the fund more quickly than under previous rules. It also lifted the projected rate of return on the fund's investments to 8.75% from 7% (since lowered to 8.25%). These "adjustments" had a big impact: According to an official Benefits Review Task Force report published in 2005, they allowed the state to cut its pension contributions by more than $1.5 billion in 1992 and 1993.
Republican Christine Todd Whitman, running on a tax-cutting platform, defeated Florio in the 1993 governor's race. To help pay for her promised tax cuts, Whitman, like her predecessor, turned to the pension fund. In 1994, at her urging, the legislature adopted another pension "reform" act that allowed her to reduce state and local contributions to the plan by nearly $1.5 billion in 1994 and 1995, according to the task force report. Florio's and Whitman's accounting changes were "the one-two punch from which the retirement system has never recovered," says Douglas Forrester, who was the assistant state treasurer under Kean.
***
Seeking to make up lost ground without putting up more money, the state's leaders looked to the magic of the stock market. In 1997 New Jersey sold $2.75 billion of bonds paying 7.6% interest, putting the proceeds into the pension fund to be invested for higher returns.
At that time Whitman said the ironically named Pension Security Plan would save taxpayers about $45 billion. It hasn't worked out that way. The fund has earned less than 6% annually since the bonds were issued.
"This is classically referred to as arbitrage," says U.S. Rep. Leonard Lance, a Republican who served in the New Jersey legislature from 1991 through 2008. "It's a questionable strategy in the private sector, and it's certainly not acceptable as a matter of public policy."
That wasn't the state's last venture into high finance. The system, along with almost every other investor, suffered sharp losses after the dotcom bust of 2001. Democrat James McGreevey, who became governor in 2002, hoped that professional money managers would improve the plan's returns. At the time New Jersey was the only state other than Texas to run its pension fund without outside help.
McGreevey appointed Orin Kramer, a money manager who had been finance chair of his unsuccessful 1997 gubernatorial campaign, as head of the State Investment Council, which sets policy for the pension plan. Kramer pushed the council to turn over some of the fund's assets to Wall Street professionals and to diversify into alternative investments such as hedge funds and private equity. But it took time for Kramer to devise a strategy and put it into action, so money didn't flow to alternative investments until 2006, on the eve of the bear market that would crush nearly all asset categories.
"Our asset-allocation model was based on the idea that there was no correlation between our alternatives and bonds and equities," says James Marketti, retired president of Communications Workers of America Local 1032, who has been a member of the state's investment council since September 2008. "It turns out they were perfectly correlated."
For all the miscues, New Jersey's pension woes can't be blamed on particularly poor investment results. An examination of state reports shows that the fund's returns have more or less tracked the broad stock market's. The real problem has been the underfunding.
Meanwhile, the obligations keep mounting: Even while they were neglecting pension contributions, New Jersey politicians were sweetening the pot. In 2001 benefits for the state's two largest groups of workers, government employees and teachers, were increased by 9%, creating an additional $4.2 billion in liabilities. In 1999 the state approved a "20 and out" measure that allowed firefighters and local police to collect pensions equal to 50% of their pay after 20 years of service - a perk previously available only to the state police. Benefits added since 1999 have increased liabilities by more than $6.8 billion, according to official estimates.
Today New Jersey seems locked in a downward spiral. "New Jersey and many other systems have negative cash flows, meaning that contributions are less than the benefits we pay out," says William Clark, director of the New Jersey Division of Investment, which manages the pension fund. "You can't make your money back when it's flowing out of the system."
***
Gov. Corzine's efforts to prop up the plan have had mixed results. After taking office he boosted contributions, injecting about $1 billion in 2007 and a similar amount in 2008. He planned to add another $1 billion in 2009, but in response to budget pressures now wants to spread that money over two years. And the legislature just passed a "pension holiday" bill that allows municipalities to skip their pension contributions for 2009.
Corzine has also imposed reduced benefits on state workers. Since 2007 he has raised the retirement age to 62, increased the salary requirement for pension eligibility, increased employee contributions, and capped pension income. But unions are fighting his request that members take unpaid furloughs and give up some or all of the wage hikes they are due.
"We believe reopening contracts should be a last resort as we seek to find other ways to free up money," says Anthony Miskowski, secretary of CWA Local 1033. "If we budge on the contracts, the unions are dead." But after a pause, he acknowledges that something has to give: "We'll be forced someday to be more flexible."
And those are baby steps compared with the sweeping measures recommended by consultants like Deloitte for all states facing pension crises. They include reducing benefits for current and future employees, pegging cost-of-living increases to actual inflation, cutting early-retirement programs, and forcing the states to stick with adequate funding plans. That's more of a wish list than a practical plan of action. "These are all politically sensitive solutions," says Deloitte's Weiss. "The unions are screaming, but states have to stop the bleeding."
If New Jersey reaches the point where one or more of the funds in its system runs out of money, the state will have to pay retirees out of annual revenue, adding another burden to the budget. That's how the state covers retiree health-care costs, expected to hit $1.1 billion this year. (An attempt to pre-fund those expenses began in the 1980s but was sacrificed to budget pressures in 1994.)
It would then have to slash services or boost taxes to balance the budget, a pair of ugly options. The Tax Foundation says New Jersey charges the highest state and local taxes in the country, the highest residential and commercial property taxes, and some of the highest sin taxes in the nation on cigarettes and alcohol.
If union concessions, cost cutting, and higher taxes are not enough, then what? Inevitably, New Jersey and other states would turn to Uncle Sam for help. The pressure on Congress would be great. "How will they say no to state workers when they've said yes to bankers?" asks Marketti.
Even so, Congress might balk at opening the door to a series of multibillion-dollar state bailouts. In that case, we might well see a wave of municipal or even state bankruptcies as pension obligations overwhelm local budgets. To Leonard Lance, the pension blowup is one more consequence of the financial recklessness that defined an era. "In so many areas there has been inappropriate spending," he says. "Now we all have to pay."
Home prices slide 14%
National median home price falls to $169,000 in first quarter, due to market flooded with lower-priced foreclosures and short sales...Les Christie
http://money.cnn.com/2009/05/12/real_estate/first_quarter_
home_prices/index.htm?postversion=2009051212
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The steep slide in home price accelerated at a record pace during the first three months of 2009, according to an industry report issued Tuesday.
The national median home price of single family homes sold during the first quarter fell 13.8% to $169,000 year over year, and 6.2% compared with the last quarter 2008, according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR). That was the largest year-over-year decline in the 30-year history of the report.
NAR attributed much of the loss to two factors: First-time homebuyers, who are often entry-level buyers, accounted for about half of all purchases during the quarter. And many buyers took advantage of the deeply discounted prices of foreclosed properties and short sales. These "distressed properties" typically sell for 20% less than traditional homes, according to NAR. These homes also accounted for about half of all transactions.
"Traditional homes in good condition have held their value much better, so owners shouldn't be overly concerned about median prices," said NAR president Charles McMillan, in a prepared statement.
Sales volume was weak as well. Homes sold at a 4.59 million annualized rate during the quarter, off 3.2% from the last three months of 2008 and down 6.8% from first quarter 2008.
NAR's chief economist, Lawrence Yun, characterized it as a lull before an upturn. "Housing affordability conditions are at record high levels, " he said, "and we expect a measurable increase in home sales during the second half of the year, which would help stabilize prices in most areas."
Pat Newport, a real estate analyst with IHS Global Insight found NAR's state sales volume statistics especially telling - and far from positive. "That tells me the market is still not healthy," he said.
Year-over-year sales volume increased substantially in only a few states, mostly one-time boom areas. Sales were way up in Nevada (116.8%), California (80.6%), Arizona (50.2%) and Florida (25%), as well as Virginia (12.2%) and Minnesota (11.9%). Everywhere else they were down for the year.
"Where prices are down the sharpest, sales volume is up the most," said Mike Larson, a real estate analyst for Weiss Research. "In the post-bubble markets, we've seen more rationality come in."
"Middle income workers can now actually buy a home without having to stretch or get themselves into some crazy mortgage," he added. "Declining prices are not part of the problem, they're part of the solution."
Few cities recorded gains
Among 152 individual metro areas covered by the survey, only 18 reported year-over-year price gains. In Cumberland, Md., prices grew 21.1% to $114,900, the biggest gain of any market.
The second best performance was achieved by Davenport, Iowa, where the median price jumped 13.8% to $100,300 during the quarter. In Columbia, Mo., prices grew 6% to $152,600.
Cape Coral, Fla., posted the biggest drop year-over-year; prices fell 59.1% to $87,300. In Saginaw, Mich., the median cost of a home plunged 53.7% to $30,300, making it the lowest-priced market covered by NAR. In Akron, Ohio, the median priced home sold for $50,100, down 48.7%.
Regionally, prices fell the most in the West at 19.8%. They were down 15.9% in the Northeast, 10.8% in the South and 6.8% in the Midwest.
Despite the increased affordability, Larson does not forecast a return to a normal market until the end of 2010. Until then, he said, "Buyers will continue to have the upper hand."
NAR 1st quarter 2009 home prices:  http://money.cnn.com/2009/05/12/real_estate/first_quarter_
home_prices/index.htm?postversion=2009051212