Bond is about half as large as current package on November ballot, doesn’t include peripheral canals

by Brian Leubitz

Sen. Lois Wolk has been working for a long time on getting a revised water bond package on the ballot to replace the current $11.75bn bond slated for this November. The legislators and the governor are worried, justifiably, that voters will be scared off by that number when considering authorizing additional debt. However, given the current drought, a strong consensus has emerged that we must do something.

But, of course, there are always stumbling blocks. Like, say, the concept of peripheral tunnels to bring water around the Bay Delta. Sen. Wolk outlines how she sees the three pillars of a deal:

“It has to be a reasonable bond. It has to have the support of the governor. It must be tunnel neutral, and he is very clear about that, and I support that strongly,” said Sen. Lois Wolk (D-Davis), who represents the Delta. (Capital Public Radio / Ben Adler)

As you can hear in Ben Adler’s clip above, the governor is a lot bit gunshy of adding additional debt. In something of a reversal of roles, the Republican caucus is pushing for a higher funding level, arguing that $2B of storage funds are insufficient, favoring a $3B minimum.

But, if the Governor can gather the votes that he needs before next week’s deadline, his plan is likely to be the basis of the bond. While there may be a few changes here and there, one has to suspect that the time pressure will push Republicans toward accepting any deal that can get through the hurdles.

In a letter on his website, the Governor outlined his priorities for the package:

My $6 billion plan provides for water use efficiency and recycling, effective groundwater management and added storage. It invests in safe drinking water, particularly in disadvantaged communities and for watershed restoration and increased flows in some of our most important rivers and streams.

This water bond is tied to our comprehensive Water Action Plan that charts the way for California to become more resilient in the face of droughts and floods. It goes a long way to ensure clean drinking water, protect habitat and free up funding for local water projects.

See the flip for an outline of the spending priorities in the Governor’s bond package as well as his open letter on the subject..

To My Fellow Citizens of California:

Drought conditions in California grow more serious by the day.

Last month, the State Water Resources Control Board issued mandatory conservation measures to ensure that our water supply remains reliable. Whether you’re a rancher, farmer, business owner or an average Californian – it is crucial that you do all you can to conserve water.

State government, of course, has a major role in how we manage and conserve this fundamental resource. In March, I signed legislation to provide over $680 million for drought relief efforts, including money for housing and food for workers directly affected by the drought, bond funds for local projects to capture and manage water more efficiently and funding for emergency drinking water supplies. The recently enacted state budget contains specific funding to lessen the impacts of drought on fish and wildlife across the state.

But the drought shows no sign of letting up, so we must do more.

Five years ago, state legislators and the Governor put a pork-laden water bond on the ballot – with a price tag beyond what’s reasonable or affordable. The cost to taxpayers would be enormous – $750 million a year for 30 years – and would come at the expense of funding for schools, health care and public safety. This is on top of the nearly $8 billion a year the state already spends on bond debt service.

Since being elected governor, I’ve worked with the Legislature to reduce the state’s fiscal liabilities. Together, we’ve made steady progress paying down debt and enacting responsible, balanced budgets and it is no time to turn back now. Therefore, I’m proposing a no-frills, no-pork water bond that invests in the MOST CRITICAL PROJECTS without breaking the bank.

My $6 billion plan provides for water use efficiency and recycling, effective groundwater management and added storage. It invests in safe drinking water, particularly in disadvantaged communities and for watershed restoration and increased flows in some of our most important rivers and streams.

This water bond is tied to our comprehensive Water Action Plan that charts the way for California to become more resilient in the face of droughts and floods. It goes a long way to ensure clean drinking water, protect habitat and free up funding for local water projects.

Water is central to our lives, our wildlife and our food supply. Our economy depends on it. We must act now so that we can continue to manage as good stewards of this vital resource for generations to come. But we can and must do so without returning California to the days of overwhelming deficit and debt.

Respectfully,

Jerry Brown

For more on how you can do your part to conserve water, please visit www.saveourwater.com

Water Action Plan Financing Act of 2014 – $6 Billion Total

Regional Water Reliability – $750M

 Integrated regional water management (with minimum for direct expenditure for

disadvantaged communities) $450M.

 Stormwater Capture $200M.

 Water conservation $100M.

Safe Drinking Water – $400M

 Provide clean, safe and reliable drinking water to all Californians. With minimum to

leverage federal funds for safe drinking water and clean water programs and for

disadvantaged communities.

 Small Community Program $200M.

 Public Infrastructure $200M.

Water Recycling – $450M

 Statewide water recycling projects and activities.

Groundwater Sustainability- $450M

 Prevent and reduce groundwater contaminants.

 Provide sustainable groundwater management support (technical assistance and planning

grants for locals).

Watershed Protection, Watershed Ecosystem Restoration, State Settlements – $1.175B

 For statewide water-related habitat, flows and water quality in watersheds ($700M) and

for state settlement obligations including Central Valley Project Improvement Act

($475M).

Storage – $2B

 Continuous appropriation for water storage projects.

Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta – $475M

 For Delta levee subvention programs and delta flood protection projects ($300M) and

ecosystem restoration and science related to the Delta Plan and Delta Reform Act

($175M).

Statewide Flood Management – $300M

 Statewide flood management projects and activities.

General Provisions

 Funding eligibility requires urban or agricultural water management plans and

compliance with 2009 Water Conservation Act.

 Bay Delta Conservation Plan neutral.

 Protects existing water rights and reaffirms area of origin protections.

It’s a slow news day on the Six Californias signature verification front. (You can find my previous updates here, here, and here.) According to Tuesday’s report from the SoS, a total of eight signatures were collected in Alpine County, of which five were valid (no duplicates), for a validity rate of 62.5%. Also, Yolo County apparently found an additional 27 raw signatures during its sampling process, bringing the total raw count to 1,083,380.

We’re still waiting for the raw counts from Alameda, Amador, Inyo, and Trinity, but it may be they won’t report until they finish their random sample. (This surprises me, because EC 9030(b) says they’re supposed to report their raw totals to the SoS within eight days after receiving the petitions. But I guess there’s no penalty for being late.)

In addition to the aforementioned Alpine County, we now have sampling reports from Kings (76.2% valid), Napa (66.0%), Shasta (69.0%), and Yolo (57.2%) counties. The overall validity rate is 66.7%, up very slightly from yesterday’s 66.4%.

Given the slow news, let’s speculate as to how many signatures Six Californias might pick up from the remaining four counties. According to the Statement of Vote from the June election, there are 17,722,006 registered voters(*) in California. The missing counties account for 841,499 of them. 1,083,380 signatures from a pool of 16,880,507 registered voters is a collection rate of 6.4%. If that same rate holds for the missing counties, we can expect Mr. Draper to pick up another 54,000 signatures or so. With two-thirds of them valid, he’ll have about 758,000 good signatures, not enough to qualify or even force a full count.

(*) I use registered voters instead of eligible voters because my admittedly limited experience with signature gatherers is that they ask people if they’re registered to vote; I’ve never seen one register a non-registered but eligible voter.

But 6.4% is just an average collection rate. In some counties he does better, in some he does worse. For example, the collection rate in Alpine County was only 8/766 or 1.0%. But in Stanislaus County it was 23,302/211,330 or 11.0%. Siskiyou was even better: 2,999/24,833 or 12.1%. The best county, unless I’ve made a mistake, was Del Norte, with a collection rate of 2,377/12,398 or 18.8%.

Of the remaining counties, Alameda is the largest, with 803,728 registered voters. It would be reasonable to expect the collection rate in Alameda County to be similar to that in the surrounding counties of Contra Costa (4.7%), San Francisco (4.7%), San Mateo (1.1%), Santa Clara (4.8%), and San Joaquin (9.5%), but let’s be generous and say it’s 20% there and in the other remaining counties, for an additional 168,300 signatures. If the current validity rate of 66.7% continues to hold, then he’ll qualify with about 834,500 signatures (not enough to avoid a full count, however). But if he only collects signatures from 15% of those voters, he’ll only have about 806,400; enough to force a count of every one, but not enough to qualify.

–Steve Chessin

President, Californians for Electoral Reform (CfER)

www.cfer.org

The opinions expressed here are my own and not necessarily those of CfER.

The SoS has released the latest random sample report for Tim Draper’s initiative to divide the state into six Californias.

Calaveras, Humboldt, Kings, Modoc, Mono, Nevada, and Ventura counties have turned in their raw counts, bringing Tim Draper’s total to 1,083,353 raw signatures (it was 1,038,836 in my first report). That lowers the validity rate he needs to qualify to 74.5% (was 77.7%) and to avoid a full count to 82.0% (was 88.5%). Below 70.8% (was 73.9%) and he doesn’t even get a full count. We’re still waiting for Alameda, Alpine, Amador, Inyo, and Trinity Counties to report their raw numbers. If they bring the raw total up to the 1.3 million claimed, then he needs 62.1% to qualify, 68.3% to avoid a full count.

Also, the following counties have completed their random samples (with validity rates as noted): Merced (66.7%), Modoc (65.4%), Mono (81.0%), Placer (72.5%), and San Joaquin (72.7%). The uncorrected validity rate is 71.8%, up from 70.7% in the first report. When one corrects for duplicates, the validity rate is 66.4%, up from 58.1%.

Speaking of correcting for duplicates, I think I’ve convinced myself that I now understand where the “-1” comes from in the correction factor for duplicate signatures. It’s best explained with an example.

Suppose I have 100 signatures, and I pick 25 of them (one fourth of 100) at random to check. Of the 25 signatures, I find that one person (Mary) isn’t registered to vote, and one person who is registered (John) has signed twice. That means I have 23 valid signatures and 2 invalid ones (Mary’s and one of John’s). The uncorrected validity rate, before the extra accounting for duplicates, is 92% (23/25).

Remember that these signatures were picked at random, so if I found two signatures from John in the 25 I picked, it’s likely that there are three others from John in the other 75. (Well, maybe not likely, but that’s the best estimate.) So John really accounts for 4 duplicate signatures, not just one. But we already accounted for one of those duplicates by calling it invalid in our sample, so we just have to account for the 3 extra duplicates in the unsampled portion.

Also, if John signed more than once in this sample of 25, we can suppose that there are probably three other people in the other 75 who also signed more than once, and the best estimate is that they each also signed five times (one of which is a valid signature in our sample). So a factor of 4 (100/25) for the four people (John plus an estimate of three others) who signed more than once, times 3 (4 – 1) for the fact that one of each duplicate is already accounted for by the uncorrected calculation, means John’s duplicate signature should be given a weight of 12. 12/100 is 12%, so the corrected validity rate is 80%.

Of course, if we found two people in the sample of 25 who signed twice, or if we found three signatures from John in that sample (one that we consider valid and two that we consider invalid), we’d have twice the correction factor (24%), etc.

Now before you start thinking “Gee, if I’m against a petition, I should sign it as many times as I can instead of not signing it at all so as to drive up the duplicate rate, since duplicate signatures hurt more than plain invalid ones”, I have to point out that this is illegal. Election Code section 18612 says “Every person is guilty of a misdemeanor who knowingly signs his or her own name more than once to any initiative, referendum, or recall petition ….” Deliberately signing a false name, while hurting the petition less than signing twice, carries a harsher penalty. Election code section 18613 says “Every person who subscribes to any initiative, referendum, or recall petition a fictitious name […] is guilty of a felony and is punishable by imprisonment pursuant to subdivision (h) of Section 1170 of the Penal Code for two, three, or four years.” So don’t do it.

–Steve Chessin

President, Californians for Electoral Reform (CfER)

www.cfer.org

The opinions expressed here are my own and not necessarily those of CfER.

While the SoS hasn’t posted a new report since Wednesday (there was a tantalizing broken link yesterday that implied there was an update, but that was a false alarm), I did find out why there was a discrepancy between my numbers and hers. It has to do with how one accounts for duplicates. And it isn’t simple.

The regulations that describe how to verify signatures (a pdf version is available here) specify how this is done, and the SoS’s office sent me a nice one-page summary of the formula. They couldn’t provide me with the mathematical background for the formula, however, so I did a web search on the phrase “sampling petitions for duplicate signatures” (I prefer Yahoo! but you can use whatever search engine you like) and that led me to this paper. It’s pretty heavy sledding unless you have a good background in statistics (which I do not), but the takeaway is that duplicates affect the validity rate in approximate inverse proportion to the square of the sample size. That is, if you sample 10% of the signatures, while each invalid signature in the sample represents 10 in the total, each duplicate in the sample represents 90 in the total. (This is using the SoS’s formula, which may or may not be identical to the one in the paper.)

The exact formula goes like this:

Let V = (raw count) * (valid signatures in sample) / (sample size).

This is the uncorrected projected valid signatures. Note that

(valid signatures in sample) / (sample size) is the uncorrected validity rate; this is what I reported in my previous post.

Let A = (raw count) / (sample size). They call this the “value of each (sampled) signature”; it’s the inverse of the sample fraction. You’ll note that V is A * (valid signatures in sample).

Let B = A * (A – 1). This is the “extra value” of each duplicate. (I’m not sure where the “-1” comes from, but I’ll take their word for it.)

Let C = B * (number of duplicate signatures). This is the correction factor due to the duplicate signatures.

Then V – C is the corrected projected valid signatures,

and (V – C) / (raw count) is the corrected validity rate.

In any event, when I use the SoS’s formula, I do indeed get the same results. For the four counties reported so far, we have corrected validity rates of 76.4% (Sierra),  54.8% (Solano), 57.8% (Sonoma), and 75.8% (Sutter). The overall validity rate so far (calculated by adding the corrected projected valid signatures from each of those four counties and dividing that sum by the sum of the raw counts of the four counties) is 58.1%.

We’ll have to wait for more counties to report their results to see if Six Californias is likely to make it to the ballot. I can’t guarantee I’ll report on every update the SoS releases, but I’ll try.

Thanks and a tip of the hat to Katherine Montgomery of the Secretary of State’s office for providing me with both the regulations and the one-page “cheat sheet”, and to former CfER Board member David Cary for alluding to the inverse square dependency and suggesting the keywords to use in a web search.

The Secretary of State has begun posting the random sample updates for Tim Draper’s initiative to divide the state into six Californias. You can find the most current update at http://www.sos.ca.gov/election… but I’ll summarize today’s for you.

According to the report, Draper turned in 1,038,836 raw signatures. He needs at least 807,615 of them to be valid for his measure to get on the ballot. That’s 77.7% of his raw count. Keep that number in mind; we’ll need it later.

First the SoS does (or rather, the counties do) a random sampling. Each county verifies 3% of the raw signatures at random (or 500, if greater, or all of them, if fewer) and projects from that a validity rate. If they project that he has at least 888,377 valid signatures (110% of the requirement, and 88.5% of the raw count), then the measure qualifies. If they project that he has fewer than 767,235 valid signatures (95% of the requirement; 73.9% of the raw count), then it doesn’t qualify. If they project a number somewhere in between those two limits, they have to check every signature.

As of 1:24pm today, results are in from Sierra, Solano, Sonoma, and Sutter counties. In Sierra County, they checked all 208 signatures and found 159 (76.4%) to be valid. In each of the other counties they had to check 500 signatures. The validity rates were 67.4 (Solano), 64.6% (Sonoma), and 77.8% (Sutter)(*). Overall, out of 1,708 signatures checked, 1,208 were found to be valid, for an overall validity rate of 70.7%.

Now 1,708 is less than two-tenths of a percent of the signatures Draper collected, and it could be that he’ll have a higher validity rate in the rest of the state. But if Sutter turns out to be his best county, Six Californias won’t be on the ballot.

(*) The right-most column of the spreadsheet reports different percentages but they don’t agree with the simple calculations of 337/500, 323/500, and 389/500, respectively. I don’t know how the SoS got those other numbers and perhaps someone with a day job that allows them that kind of research can contact the SoS and find out what they are doing differently.

by Brian Leubitz

Neel Kashkari seems to be a bright man doing his best Don Quixote for the California GOP. He knows he isn’t going to win without some sort of major Jerry Brown catastrophe. But, the party apparatus is thrilled that he defeated right wing nativist Tim Donnelly. Apparently so much so that GOP scribe George Will took to the pages of the Washington Post to declare that he is Goldwater 2.0:

Today, in this state where one in eight Americans lives, and where Democratic presidential candidates can reap 55 electoral votes without spending a dime or a day campaigning, the Republicans’ gubernatorial candidate has an agenda and spirit similar to Goldwater’s. Neel Kashkari is not, as some careless commentary suggests, an anti-Goldwater, diluting the state party’s conservatism. He is Goldwater 2.0, defining conservatism a ­half-century on.

As Calitics has been down to a DDOS attack on the SoapBlox network, I’ve not been able to respond to this mularkey until now. And in the interim, the CalBuzz folks have taken Will’s argument apart pretty completely.

This is, we report more in sadness than in anger, bullshit.

Maybe George had too many martinis wherever he was staying in Menlo Park when he wrote about Goldwater’s nomination at the “unfortunately named Cow Palace” “fifty Julys ago, up the road near San Francisco.” Or maybe he just had to come up with something to write off his trip out to the hustings. But he has no point, at least not one he shared with his readers.

Because: The widely known political imp Tyrion of Kashkari has not for one minute shown an interest in re-branding his party. He’s desperately trying to make a case against a governor who balanced the budget and calmed the hyperpartisan dysfunction in Sacramento (with the help of voters who passed his tax measure, gave the Legislature the power to pass a budget with a majority of votes and approved measures to boost centrism).

To be honest, at many points it seems like Kashkari is running to get famous more than anything else. Not that I begrudge a campaign on a low budget, but after the fourth time guest hosting KFI’s John and Ken Show, shouldn’t somebody say something? I’m not sure Kashkari has the it in him to become a flamethrowing media personality, but you could see him landing a gig somewhere on TV or radio after all this is over. He hasn’t really made any effort to change the hearts and minds of the still very much right-wing GOP base. He just was a slightly better option, and was able to squeak past Tim Donnelly by gathering 19.4% of the vote in the primary. There are a lot of people who voted for Donnelly, and they aren’t going anywhere.

In the end, Kashkari is basically running around trying to do whatever he can to get noticed. The latest polls have him down 52-32, and he will never have the money to compete with the governor on the air waves. So, he goes where he can find a bit of free media and tries to maximize whatever he can get. That’s about all you can do in a race like what he’s facing. It is a daunting and thankless task, but he signed up for it.

Hey, Charlie Brown knew Lucy was going to move that football, but he still went for it, right?