The water crisis requires action, not a new commission – Orange County Register

When a severe economic recession hit California 13 years ago, it exposed a serious flaw in the state government’s revenue system.

Over the past several decades, the state has become increasingly dependent on taxing a relatively small number of wealthy Californians whose taxable income, largely from investments, tends to fluctuate widely.

In times of prosperity, their incomes will skyrocket, generating billions of dollars more in state coffers, but in economic downturns, their incomes and taxes will plummet, leaving huge losses. for the state budget.

The syndrome was called “fluctuation” and then Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state legislators agreed that it needed to be fixed. But instead of acting decisively, they did what politicians often do when faced with seemingly intractable problems – appoint a “blue ribbon committee” to come up with solutions. .

The Economic Committee for the 21st Century, known as the Parsky Committee to its chairman, businessman Gerald Parsky, spent months listening to experts, debating approaches to the problem, and finally compiled drafted a 425-page report that about half of its 14 members despised and was quickly submitted and forgotten about.

Then the state became even more reliant on taxing high-income Californians by increasing their income tax rate. That’s why the state is currently enjoying a good harvest and why it will have big problems if the economy picks up.

The reserves that the state is building up as an alternative to overhauling the tax system, as the Parsky Commission report advocates, will cushion the impact of a rapid drop in revenue, but it will still have a heavy impact on education and other spending categories.

This bit of recent history is given to put Senate Bill 1219 in context.

Introduced this month by Senator Melissa Hurtado, a Sanger Democrat, it will form a blue ribbon committee, made up of officials and political appointees, to propose proposals how to restructure state agencies with water management purposes and dissolve the state’s main water supply agency, the Water Resources Control Board.

Hurtado said the legislation “works to create a sustainable water system that prioritizes conservation and sustainability…”

No it does not.

The creation of a green ribbon committee, the abolition of the state water management board, and the transfer of its mandate to the Department of Water Resources could change the bureaucratic organizational chart. But it cannot address the huge gap between water demand and water supply that has grown over decades of political inactivity and is made worse by climate change.

If enacted – which is highly unlikely – SB 1219 would simply postpone once again the tough policy decisions required by the growing crisis, such as growing supply through deregulation. salt and wastewater recycling, reallocating existing supplies between competing uses, and/or building additional storage to capture winter rains as mountain snow layers shrink.