Is Obama’s Gain the Great Basin’s Loss?
NOT EVERY American politician happens to be fluent in Mandarin. But Utah Governor Jon Huntsman is; he served his LDS mission in Taiwan. He is also no stranger to international industry. His father founded the Huntsman Corporation, which became a global chemical company whose products most of us know in the form of the Big Mac clamshell container. So President Obama’s choice of the Republican governor of Utah for ambassador to China is no surprise.
But regionally in rural Utah, Nevada and California, Gov Huntsman has an arguably rarer fluency — with western water. Utah’s West Desert counties running parallel to the Eastern Nevada valleys targeted by the Las Vegas pipeline plan have no more influential ally than the Mormon Governor. Those counties staunchly oppose the Las Vegas pipeline. In a tour of the West Desert last year, Gov. Huntsman told ranchers assembled in Delta, Millard County, “I want you …
Welcome to Met, Mr. Fleming
The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California sent out a press release Tuesday announcing the formal seating of its newest board member, David W. Fleming, an attorney with Latham & Watkins. Among his credentials to join the board of the country’s largest water wholesaler outside of the US Bureau of Reclamation, Mr Fleming has served as (or in some instances still serves as):
- a director of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority
- chair of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce
- chair of the Los Angeles County Business Federation
- co-chair of the Southern California Leadership Council
- chair of the Economic Alliance of the San Fernando Valley
- member and chair of the Executive Committee of the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation
- chair of the Valley Industry & Commerce Association
- member of the Los Angeles Police Foundation
- member of the Children’s Bureau of Los Angeles
- member of the Los Angeles County Children’s Planning
“Quenching Las Vegas’s Thirst” wins Best of the West Award
The Las Vegas Sun series “Quenching Las Vegas’s Thirst,” has won first place for Environmental and Natural Resources Reporting in the 2009 Best of the West Awards. From the announcement:
“Emily Green’s series on water was smartly conceived, deeply reported and compellingly written. Water itself isn’t a new subject; the fact of water scarcity and the political battles it causes have been reported extensively elsewhere. But Green’s series brought the issue home. Her series’ structure — profiling five figures — reinforced a key collective insight of the stories: that the state of water in and around Las Vegas is largely a function of the personalities who, over decades, made water-policy decisions.
Green avoided easy preaching, instead telling the tale of a desert metropolis’ water fight in all its moral complexity, which made for much more interesting reading. And yet she uncovered plenty of disturbing facts — particularly, in …
Is AB 1881 Too Wet?
Call Bob Galbreath a drip, and he’ll thank you. The recently retired Outdoor Water Resource Specialist for the City of Santa Monica is Southern California’s pre-eminent expert on drip irrigation. In April 2008, Santa Monica passed its own version of AB 1881, and so I sought out his opinion on what the California Department of Water Resources is proposing as the state-wide irrigation water use standards for 2010.
Not a blogger (or a blowhard) by nature, Galbreath took the plunge and posted a response about AB 1881. It is a picture of polite skepticism, largely to do with the hopelessness of enforcing the regulations. He also directed me to some key differences between the upcoming statewide model and the one already in force in Santa Monica: The Santa Monica code applies to all landscapes in the city, and restricts the precipitation rate of all irrigation devices to 0.75”/hr, which excludes …
De-sal for San Diego
San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board grants final approval for Carlsbad Desalination Project, reports Aquafornia.…
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