Random Jottings - 7/26/07

1. Peter Schrag at California Progress Report has a good editorial on the ongoing debate on water issues and the Delta. Apparently Schwarzeneggar's plan is to try to force the Delta peripheral canal once again, and bond finance a bunch of dams to send water to San Joaquin farmers (one of the reasons for his insistence of repaying loans early for this year's budget). As Schrag points out, though, conservation is a cost-effective way of doing the same thing without spending all that money building huge construction projects (with bids, no doubt, going to campaign donors), and California has actually seen its total water usage decline from 1975 to the present, even with a population increase of 60% and economic growth of 250%. We can do it again, if the will is there to act (and if this dry year turns into a multiyear drought, we'll likely have that will). Additionally, the importance of planning water infrastructure with global warming factored into the discussion is critical; no sense building dams that catch rainfall and snowmelt that's moved somewhere else or just dried up. As it is, there is so much water inefficiency in the system that there ought to be a lot of slack to be taken up, in a pinch (starting with all those unused water-hog lawns in front of office parks, government offices, malls, etc)

2. This Enterprise article on UC undergrads is pretty interesting, and sounds about right to me. A large number who are immigrants or second-generation, about equal time spent working, studying, and wasting time online, and often having a hard time focusing. How students ever manage to get distracted by facebook, however, utterly escapes me. The vast world of blogging and the internet, sure, but facebook?

3. The Enterprise reports that new DPD police chief Landy Black has been personally walking a downtown beat, which i think is a great idea. Get the cops out of their cars, get them to know the neighborhood a bit, and the distance between citizen and law enforcement should be closer to what it ought to be. I've been pretty impressed with Black so far, here's hoping he keeps moving the police department in a positive direction.

4. Surprise, surprise. PG&E sucks for power outages when compared with other California power utilities such as...you guessed it...SMUD. PG&E's excuse? They have a really big area over which they have to to maintain all their infrastructure. Their extremely extremely valuable, grossly underappraised, infrastructure, going by their arguments against Measures H and I last election. Anyone interested in floating a new Yolo municipal power bid?

5. Rexroad has an interesting post up on possible Yolo County redistricting alternatives in 2011. Still pretty early to call much of anything this far out, but I would be curious to see how the partisan balance is changing, if at all, in the county's various centers of population growth, and how that might affect which sorts of candidates might be able to win the various arrangements he's talking about. The real redistricting drama in 2011 is likely to be not specifically in Yolo County but in the Central Valley congressional and state districts, depending on how the lines ultimately get drawn (and by whom). Just a glance at the weird puzzle of the 1st, 3rd, 10th and 11th congressional districts in the Valley gives a taste for how creative lines can get when you've got strong partisan differences in adjacent communities and counties (by contrast, there's no way anyone could gerrymander the Bay Area to make it much less Democratic).

6. The Bee reports what a walk around one's neighborhood already reveals, that the real estate market is hurting, not just in slow home sales, but more ominously with record numbers of mortgage defaults and foreclosures, as people who could barely afford the loans to buy houses in the overheated bubble are now getting crushed by rising adjustable rates and no hope of selling the house and getting out unscathed in a bearish market. The irony in this is that housing still remains out of reach for most people, and that we still have a housing shortage in this state, even as we have a real estate glut that threatens to melt down as completely as the Japanese market implosion in the 90s. The bitter irony is that all those folks who have just been foreclosed upon because of their lack of ability to pay their mortgage are going to be headed into a tightening rental market, as landlords snap up the cheap housing. Man, what a mess.



(image from the Sacramento Bee)