| CRIMINAL JUSTICE By Royal Calkins The medical and correctional staff at the Monterey County Jail had seen young David Sand before, which might explain why they ignored him and his obvious need for psychiatric care. Born into a prominent Carmel Valley family, he fared well while growing up but fell into a hole of […]

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Newly released records detail horrific health care failures at Monterey County Jail was first posted on August 10, 2023 at 8:14 pm.
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MORGAN CITY, La. — Jenna Gros jangles as she walks the halls of Wyandotte Elementary School in St Mary’s Parish, Louisiana. The dozens of keys she carries while she sweeps, sprays, shelves and sorts make a loud sound, and when children hear her coming, they call out, “Miss Jenna!” 

Gros is head custodian at Wyandotte, in this small town in southern Louisiana. She’s also a teacher-in-training.  

In August 2020, she signed up for a new program designed to provide people working in school settings the chance to turn their job into an undergraduate degree in education, at a low cost. There’s untapped potential among people who work in schools right now, as classroom aides, lunchroom workers, afterschool staff and more, the thinking goes, and helping them become teachers could ease the shortage that’s dire in some districts around the country, particularly in rural areas like this one. 

In two and a half years, the teacher training program, run by nonprofit Reach University, has grown from 50 applicants to about 1,000, with most coming from rural areas of Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama and California. The “apprenticeship degree” model costs students $75 dollars a month. The rest of the funding comes from Pell Grants and philanthropic donations. The classes, which are online, are taught by award-winning teachers, and districts must agree to have students work in the classroom for 15 hours a week as part of their training.

“We have overlooked a talent pool to our detriment,” said Joe Ross, president of Reach University. “These people have heart and they have the grit and they have the intelligence. There’s a piece of paper standing in the way.” 

Efforts to recruit teacher candidates from the local community date back to the 1990s, but programs have “exploded” in number over the past five years, said Danielle Edwards, assistant professor  of educational leadership, policy and workforce development at Old Dominion University in Virginia. Some of these “grow your own” programs, like Reach’s, recruit school employees who don’t have college degrees or degrees in education, while others focus on retired professionals, military veterans, college students, and even K12 students, with some starting as young as middle school.

“‘Grow your own’ has really caught on fire,” said Edwards, in part because of research showing that about 85 percent of teachers teach within 40 miles of where they grew up. But while these programs are increasingly popular, she says it isn’t clear what the teacher outcomes are in terms of effectiveness or retention. 

Related: Teacher shortages are real, but not for the reasons you’ve heard

Nationwide, there are at least 36,500 teacher vacancies, along with approximately 163,000 positions held by underqualified teachers, according to estimates by Tuan Nguyen, anassociate professor of education at Kansas State University. At Wyandotte, Principal Celeste Pipes has three uncertified teachers out of 26. 

“We are pulling people literally off the streets to fill spots in a classroom,” she said. Surrounding parishes in this part of Louisiana, 85 miles west of New Orleans, pay more than the starting salary of $46,000 she can offer; some even cover the full cost of health insurance. 

Data suggests not having qualified teachers can worsen student achievement and increase costs for districts. An unstable workforce also affects the school culture, said Pipes: “Once we have people here that are years and years and years in, we know how things are run.”

As Gros walks the hallways, she stops to swat a fly for a scared child, ties a first grader’s shoelaces and asks a third about their math homework. Her colleagues had long noticed her calm, encouraging manner, and so, when a teacher’s aide at Wyandotte heard about Reach, she urged Gros to sign up with her. 

Gros grew up in this town — her father worked as a mechanic in the oil rigs — and always wanted to be a teacher. But with three children and a salary of $22,000 a year, she couldn’t afford to do so. The low cost and logistics of Reach’s program suddenly made it possible: Her district agreed to her spending 15 hours of her work week in the classroom, mentoring or tutoring students. She takes her online classes at night or on weekends.

Current employees are also in the retirement system, meaning the years they’ve already worked count toward their pension. For Gros, who has worked for 18 years in her school system, that was an important consideration, she said. 

Pipes said people like Gros understand the vibe of this rural community — the importance of family, the focus on church, the love of hunting. And people with community roots are also less likely to leave, said Chandler Smith, the superintendent in West Baton Rouge Parish School System, a few hours’ drive away. 

His district is the second-highest paying in the state but still struggles to attract and retain teachers: It saw a 15 percent teacher turnover rate last year. Now, it has 29 teacher candidates through Reach. 

Related: Uncertified teachers filling holes across the South 

In West Baton Rouge Parish, Jackie Noble is walking back into the Brusly Elementary school building at 6:45 p.m. She’d finished her workday as a special education teacher’s aide around 3:30 p.m., then babysat her granddaughter for a few hours, spent time with her husband, and picked up a McDonald’s order of chicken nuggets, a large coffee and a Coke to get her through her evening classes. Some Reach classes go until 11 p.m. 

Noble was a bus driver in this area for five years, but she longed to be a teacher. When she mustered the courage to research options for joining the profession, she learned it would cost somewhere between $5,000 to $15,000 a year over at least four years. “I wasn’t even financially able to pay for my transcript because it was going to cost me almost $100,” she said. 

When Noble heard about Reach and the monthly tuition of $75 a month, she said, “My mouth hit the floor.”

Ross, of Reach University, said he often hears some variation of: “I had to choose between a job and a degree.” 

“What if we eliminate the question?” he said. “Let’s turn jobs into degrees.”

Brusly Elementary is quiet as Noble settles down in a classroom. She moves her food strategically off camera and ensures she has multiple devices logged in: her phone, laptop and desktop. Sometimes the internet here is spotty, and she doesn’t want to take any chances. 

It’s the night of the final class of her course, “Children with Special Needs: History and Practice.” Her 24 classmates smile and wave as they log on from different states. They’ve been taking turns presenting on disabilities such as dyslexia, brain injuries and deafness; Noble gave hers, on assistive technologies for children with physical disabilities, last week. 

Reach began in 2006 as a certification program for entry-level teachers who had a degree but still needed a credential. It then expanded to offer credentials to teachers who wanted to move into administration as well as graduate degrees in teaching and leadership. In 2020, Reach University started the program focused on school employees without a degree.

Kim Eckert, a former Louisiana teacher of the year and Reach’s dean, says she was drawn to the program because, as a high school special education teacher, she saw how little opportunity there was for classroom aides in her school to boost their skills. She started monthly workshops specifically for them.  

In growing the Reach program, Eckert drew from her teacher-of-the-year class, hiring people who understood the realities of classroom management and could model what it’s like to be a great teacher. She shied away from those who haven’t proven themselves in the classroom, even if they have degrees from top universities. “Everybody thinks they can be a teacher because they’ve had a teacher,” she said, but that’s not true. 

The 15 hours a week of “in-class training,” which can include observing a teacher, tutoring students or helping write lessons, is designed to allow students to test out what they’re learning almost immediately, without having to wait months or years to put their studies into practice. Michelle Cottrell Williams, a Reach administrator and Virginia’s 2018 teacher of the year, recalls discussing an exercise in class about Disney’s portrayal of historical events versus the reality. One of her students, a classroom aide, shared it with the fifth graders she was working with the next day. 

Noble says she’ll carry lessons about managing students from the bus to her classroom. She was responsible for up to 70 students while driving 45 miles an hour — so 20 in a classroom seems doable, she said. 

She can’t wait to have her own classroom where she is responsible for everything. “Being with the students approximately eight hours a day, you make a very, very larger impression on their lives,” she said. 

Related: In one giant classroom, four teachers manage 135 kids — and love it 

In May, Reach graduated its first class of teachers, a group of 13 students from Louisiana who had prior credits. The organization’s first full cohort will walk across the stage in spring 2024. 

There are promising signs. Nationwide, about half of teacher candidates pass their state’s teaching licensure exam; more than 60 percent of the 13 Reach graduates did. All of them had a job waiting for them, not only in their local community, but in the building where they’d been working. 

But Roddy Theobald, deputy director of the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research and researcher at the American Institutes for Research, says far more research is needed on “grow your own” programs. “There’s very, very little empirical evidence about the effectiveness of these pathways,” he said. 

One of the challenges is that the programs rarely target the specific needs of schools, he said. Some states have staffing shortages only in specific areas, like special education, STEM or elementary ed. “Sometimes they result in even more teachers with the right credentials to teach courses that the state doesn’t actually need,” he said. 

Edwards, one of the first researchers to study “grow your own” programs, is investigating whether teachers who complete them are effective in the classroom and stay employed in the field long term, as well as how diverse these educators are and whether they actually end up in hard-to-staff schools. 

“States are investing millions of dollars into this strategy, and we don’t know anything about its effectiveness,” she said. “We could be putting all this money into something that may or may not work.” 

Ross, of Reach University, says his group plans to research whether its new teachers are effective and stay in their jobs. In terms of meeting schools’ specific labor needs, Reach has agreements with other organizations such as TNTP (formerly The New Teacher Project) and the University of West Alabama to help people take higher-level courses in hard-to-fill specialties such as high school math. But while Reach staff look at information on teacher vacancies before partnering with a school district, they don’t focus on matching the district’s exact staffing needs said Ross: “Our hope is the numbers work themselves out.”

In Louisiana, Ross said he believes the organization could put a serious dent in the teacher vacancy numbers statewide. Some 84 percent of all parishes have signed on for Reach trainees, he said, and 650 teachers-in-training are enrolled. That amounts to more than a quarter of the teacher vacancy numbers statewide, 2,500.

“We’re getting pretty close to being a material contribution to the solution in that state,” he said. 

His group is also looking to partner with states, including Louisiana, to use Department of Labor money for teacher apprenticeships. At least 16 states have such programs. Under a Labor Department rule last year, teacher apprenticeships can now access millions in federal job-training funds. Reach is in talks to use some of that money, which Ross says would allow it to make the programs free to students and rely less on philanthropy.  

A straight-A student since her first semester, head custodian Jenna Gros expects to graduate without any debt in May 2024. She expects to teach at this same elementary school. At that point, her salary will almost double.

She said she loves how a teacher can shape a child’s future for the better. “That’s what a teacher is — a nurturer trying to provide them with the resources that they are going to need for later on in life. 

I think I can be that person,” she said. She pauses. “I know I can.” 

This story about grow your own programs was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post To fight teacher shortages, schools turn to custodians, bus drivers and aides  appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

| YOUNG VOICES Article and photos by Richard Rojas Salinas, nestled in the heart of California’s agricultural landscape, has been a magnet for murals for several decades. Breathtaking new ones reflecting the diverse spirit of the community have just been added to three freeway underpasses, either covering bare walls or enhancing murals that have existed […]

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Mural Magic was first posted on August 2, 2023 at 9:52 am.
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The state is sending millions to farmers throughout the San Joaquin Valley to keep water in the ground.

The money, paid through the LandFlex program, goes to groundwater sustainability agencies (GSAs) and then directly to farmers, paying them for every acre foot they don’t pump.

On July 24, the Department of Water Resources announced awards to the Lower Tule River and Pixley GSAs of $7.7 million and $5 million, respectively, and $4 million to the Westlands Water District GSA.

This is the second round of LandFlex funding. In February, DWR recommended awards of $9.3 million to Madera County GSA, $7 million to Greater Kaweah GSA and $7 million to Eastern Tule GSA.

The LandFlex program has now depleted its funding and it’s unclear if more will be forthcoming.

LandFlex is separate from the Multibenefit Land Repurposing Program, run by the Department of Conservation. That program aims to find other uses for farmland in order to reduce pumping. In June, three valley groundwater agencies including Westlands, Turlock and agencies in the Merced subbasin, received $35 million in grants from the Multibenefit program.

Unlike other incentive programs, LandFlex is more of an immediate drought relief solution for at-risk drinking water wells and vulnerable communities, said Teji Sandhu, DWR’s LandFlex program manager.

Program aims to keep thousands of acre-feet of water in the ground

The program requires all participating landowners to fallow their crops for a year. The state pays farmers up to $350 per acre foot of water saved during that time. 

After that, there is a permanent elimination of all groundwater overdraft, meaning landowners in the program can only pump the allotted sustainable amount in their area. Farmers in this stage are paid $1,000 per acre foot of overdraft eliminated. 

Lastly, the program will pay anywhere from $250-$2,800 per acre of land that is transitioned to more sustainable uses such as less water intensive crops. 

LandFlex could save anywhere from 100,000-200,000 acre feet of water, said Sandhu. 

As the name suggests, the program is flexible, she added. 

“We were able to kind of turn some of this program, not only as a drought tool, but as a flood tool,” said Sandhu. “We opened up the program to make sure these guys could recharge, especially floodwaters.” 

For Pixley and Lower Tule, the land targeted was nearby scattered domestic wells, said Eric Limas, general manager for both districts. Those clusters of domestic wells scored higher on DWR’s assessments, he said. 

“The domestic wells that are scattered out and about are drilled pretty shallow and those are the ones that are more susceptible to going dry,” said Limas. “We’re glad to see the state investing in this program because it eliminates overdraft sooner and protects those domestic wells.”

Landowners are in the process of signing contracts and should receive money 45 days later, said Aubrey Bettencourt, CEO of the Almond Alliance which is a contracted technical assistance provider for LandFlex. 

In the Westlands GSA, eight landowners are moving forward in the program. That’s out of 75 who qualified initially, said Bettencourt. 

Westlands added additional criteria for DWR to assess. Subsidence-prone areas were also considered in the process since Westlands has many areas that have sunk significantly due to overpumping. 

The program focuses not only on protecting domestic wells, but moving landowners to compliance with the state’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), which aims to bring groundwater basins into balance by 2040.

LandFlex will, “bear hug SGMA, create that certainty and create that financial backing that allows the farmer to see themselves into a post SGMA world,” said Bettencourt.

Farmers in the San Joaquin Valley have relied more heavily on groundwater as surface water supplies from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta have dwindled for environmental needs and after multiple years of prolonged drought.

As a result, aquifer levels plummeted causing shallow domestic and community wells to go dry throughout the San Joaquin Valley. The effects have lingered, with more than 1,000 wells going dry in the valley even during this very wet year.

The post California pays San Joaquin Valley farmers millions to keep water in the ground appeared first on Fresnoland.

A draft resolution before the Shasta County Board today says that Supervisors believe California has passed gun laws that will later be determined to be unconstitutional by the courts and that infringe on rights under the Second Amendment. 

That’s why, the draft resolution states, they “may use all lawful means to prohibit any Shasta County Department, Officer, or Employee acting in their official capacity, from applying for grants, spending county public funds, using County public resources or County public employees, that directly or indirectly support any past, present, or future, state or federal infringement on the Second Amendment.”

The Board will also “use all lawful means at its disposal,” the draft resolution says, “to support and defend the Second Amendment,” including considering drafting or amending county policies, procedures, or ordinances in defense of it.

The draft resolution leaves the decision on what passes constitutional standards when it comes to the Second Amendment, in the hands of the Board itself. That is problematic, according to clear feedback from the Board’s legal counsel over the last draft of the resolution which came before the Board in February.

In a redlined version of the last version of the resolution, the County’s legal counsel at the time, Rubin Cruse Jr., noted a 2004 California Supreme Court ruling that confirmed that public officials may not decide for themselves whether or not laws are constitutional. 

Instead, the Court said, public officials must “faithfully uphold the Constitution by complying with legal mandates and leaving it up to the courts to decide whether they’re valid . . . A public official does not honor his or her oath to defend the Constitution by taking action in contravention of the restrictions of his or her office and justifying such action by reference to his or her personal constitutional views.”

That 2004 ruling confirmed what’s already clear in the California Constitution, that power is separated among three branches of government: the legislative branch which makes the laws, the executive branch which enforces them, and the judicial branch which interprets them. 

When it comes to local decision-making the Board does have some power in multiple branches of government according to the California State Association of Counties, which says that county boards have some executive and legislative roles in running local government as well as limited quasi-judicial power. 

None of those roles would allow county boards to determine what laws meet constitutional standards. 

The draft of the resolution in support of the 2nd Amendment, which will be considered by Supervisors today, July 25, was contributed to by the California Pistol and Rifle Association or CPRA. 

Only minimal revisions have been made to this second draft resolution despite the fact that it repeats some of the concerns with the last heavily red-lined version. 

Since February, both Rubin Cruse Jr. and his successor James Ross, have left their roles as County Counsel. The position is currently vacant. The staff report for the draft resolution says it was approved by the newly-appointed County CEO, David Rickert. 

The community college system is falling short of one of its most important benchmarks: the number of students who transfer to a four-year college or university. It remains well below the system’s own goal, and lawmakers have taken notice.

“Although most students intend to transfer to a four-year university, few do,” wrote a group of state legislators this year as they asked the state to audit community college performance.

Set in 2017, the goal was to increase the annual number of community college students who transfer to the University of California and California State University from nearly 89,000 to more than 120,000 by 2022. In the 2020-21 academic year, the most recent data available, nearly 99,000 community college students transferred to a UC or Cal State.

The Community College Chancellor’s Office responded to questions regarding the transfer goal by forwarding a letter that former interim Chancellor Daisy Gonzales wrote to legislators in March as part of an internal negotiation regarding the audit. In it, she wrote that the goal “has not been fully achieved.”

She wrote that the UC and Cal State system rejected nearly 30,000 eligible community college applicants in fall 2020 — more than enough transfers to meet the community colleges system’s goal. She wrote there was “insufficient capacity” at the UC and Cal State campuses and asked the auditors to include equal scrutiny of those systems, since everyone is mutually responsible for coordinating successful transfers.

However, there are many ways to measure transfer. To get a clearer picture, CalMatters looked beyond the chancellor’s office goal and analyzed the raw number of students who transferred every year, which includes but is not limited to those who transfer to a UC or Cal State. Those numbers are reported by four-year institutions across the country and analyzed by the California Community College Chancellor’s Office. Undocumented students are not counted because they lack a Social Security number. It’s the methodology that most closely aligns with the state’s funding formula, which pegs the transfer numbers to the amount of money a college receives.

CalMatters then compared those numbers to the total number of students who, upon starting community college, said they eventually wanted to get an associate degree or transfer.

Of the students enrolled in a community college in California who said they wanted to transfer to a four-year university, an average of 9.9% went on to enroll at a four-year institution in 2021, the most recent data available.

There are many reasons why students never transfer. The state’s roughly 1.8 million community college students are predominantly low-income, first-generation students of color. Many students, especially older students, must juggle work, children, and for some, even homelessness while attending school.

But certain populations and colleges have a harder time with transfer than others. CalMatters found:

• Students at rural community colleges are less likely to transfer to a four-year university than students who attend school in affluent parts of Ventura County, Orange County, the San Fernando Valley, and Bay Area suburbs like San Bruno, Pleasant Hill, and Redwood City.
• Colleges separated by only a few miles show stark contrasts in transfer rates. In 2021, the most recent year available, the transfer rate at Irvine Valley College was 16.7%, but just 10 miles away, at Santa Ana College, the rate was 5.4%.
• Younger community college students were most likely to transfer, and  the rates drop off the older a student gets. In 2021, students over the age of 50 were more than four times less likely to transfer than their peers between ages 20 and 24.

Rural, unprepared students face biggest hurdles

Lassen College has one of the lowest transfer rates in the state — 4.5% in 2021. It’s more than 10 percentage points below the highest performer, Irvine Valley College.

The reason is easy to see, said Roxanna Hayes, the vice president of student services at Lassen College in Susanville: The nearest four-year institution is over 80 miles away at the University of Nevada in Reno.

“It feels like we’re 2 hours from anything…when you come up to Susanville and you look around, there’s no other educational institution besides us.”

“We don’t have the sort of income that other counties have,” Hayes said. “It’s not just getting accepted to school: I’ve also got to live there and afford it.”

Among the community colleges with the lowest transfer rates, 60 percent are rural, and some are hours away from the nearest four-year institution.

Because of its proximity to numerous four-year institutions like UC Irvine and Cal State Fullerton, students at Irvine Valley College come to school already familiar with their transfer options, and most students don’t have to move if they want to pursue a bachelor’s degree, said Loris Fagioli, the director of research at Irvine Valley College.

The rural-urban divide is part of the problem, but it can’t explain everything, said Darla Cooper, the executive director of the Research and Planning Group of the California Community Colleges, a separate nonprofit organization that is funded in part by the chancellor’s office. The income of the student body, the focus and “culture” of the school, and even the economics of the surrounding town or city impact the transfer rate at any community college.

In the 2014-15 academic year, Los Angeles community colleges had some of the lowest transfer rates in the state, but that’s because many of its students were coming to community college unprepared, said Maury Peal, the community college district’s associate vice chancellor for institutional effectiveness.

The colleges enrolled those students in remedial courses, which can take years to complete and can reduce the likelihood of graduation. Backed by research that shows remedial classes to be ineffective, a law passed in 2017 and another in 2022 asked colleges to start placing students directly in college-level courses. Pearl said these reforms, plus other efforts like special degrees that guarantee a transfer to a Cal State or UC, have led to an uptick in transfer rates across the L.A. colleges.

West Los Angeles College, for instance, had a 5.4% transfer rate in 2015, among the lowest in the state. But by 2021, it was up to 12.3%, well above the statewide average.

“The fact that it’s improved is something we’re proud of, but it’s still not where we want to get to,” said Jeff Archibald, vice president of academic affairs for West Los Angeles College.

‘Swirl,’ prisons, and ‘transfer-oriented culture’ set schools on different paths

Unlike four-year institutions, which are often singularly focused on bachelor’s degrees for young adults, community colleges offer a range of educational opportunities depending on the demographics in the surrounding towns or cities, which can make it hard to compare one community college to another.

Located in Blythe, a rural town near the Arizona border, Palo Verde College has consistently had the lowest transfer rate of any community college. In 2021, just 1.1% of Palo Verde College students who indicated they wanted to transfer succeeded in doing so — but roughly half of the college’s students are in prison. Other rural colleges with low transfer rates, including Lassen College and Feather River College, also enroll a high percentage of incarcerated students relative to other schools.

Rural areas also come with different job opportunities, especially compared to the state’s highly educated coastal cities, Cooper said.

“Do the jobs where you’re located require a bachelor’s degree?” she said. “Because if they don’t, you’re probably not going to have a lot of transfer.”

In dense urban areas like Los Angeles, students tend to take classes at multiple  community colleges, creating a “swirl” in the data that can mask some long-term outcomes,  Archibald said.

But disparities still persist, even within the same city. Los Angeles Pierce College and Los Angeles Valley College, which are located in the San Fernando Valley, consistently outperform other Los Angeles community colleges.

Pearl said Pierce and Valley College have developed a reputation for preparing students for four-year colleges or universities. He pointed to other Los Angeles community colleges, such as Los Angeles Trade-Technical College, which are geared towards career and technical training.

A 2008 Research and Planning Group report found that a “transfer-oriented culture” was a recurring reason why certain community colleges had higher-than-expected transfer rates. The report also said those colleges had close relationships with local high schools and four-year institutions, along with support services for students.

Although the report was done 15 years ago, the transfer rate patterns have persisted. Many of those schools profiled by the Research and Planning Group in 2008, such as Irvine Valley College, continue to outperform their peers today, according to the CalMatters analysis of recent data.

Community colleges in wealthy areas or those with high-performing high schools have higher transfer rates, too. “We know this with almost all educational outcomes, there is an economic or socio-economic driver behind it,” Faglioli said.

Pearl said Los Angeles Pierce and Valley colleges benefit from “high-performing” charter schools nearby, which can boost transfer rates if community college students start school better prepared.

Why transfer still matters

To encourage colleges to meet the system’s goal of increasing transfers to a UC and Cal State, community college officials put forward a new formula that pegged a portion of a community college’s funding to its outcomes. One of those outcomes is the number of people who transfer to a four-year institution.

But Lizette Navarette, interim deputy chancellor of the community college system, said that community colleges with low transfer rates are not getting penalized.

That’s because the new funding formula also takes into account the percentage of low-income students who meet certain benchmarks for success and the number of students who complete career-oriented programs. Navarette said rural colleges and other schools with low transfer rates have the opportunity to make up any potential gaps in state funding.

Lassen College, for example, received nearly $3 million more dollars last year than it would have under the previous funding formula, despite having some of the lowest transfer rates in the system.

However, the greatest impact of low transfer rates is not on the community college but on the student, Cooper said.

“For most people of color, most people who are low-income, community college is their only way into higher ed,” she said. “Even if what they want to pursue requires a bachelor’s degree, not everyone can go straight to a university.”

Four-year colleges and universities are selective and can be expensive, she said. While some community college students can earn more with a certificate or an associate degree than those with a bachelor’s degree, she said those students are the exception, not the norm.

“Everybody wants to bring out Bill Gates,” Cooper said. “He didn’t graduate college….If you can be that, awesome, great, fantastic. But for most people, it’s beneficial for life.”

In the internal letter to the state auditors, former interim Chancellor Gonzales pointed to areas where the community college system has seen significant gains toward its 2017 goals. More students are completing their courses and gaining degrees, for instance.

In general, more students are transferring to a four-year college, according to the CalMatters analysis, which includes upticks in the number of students transferring to a UC or Cal State. But the progress remains less than third of the goal that the chancellor’s office set out to accomplish by 2022.

A spokesperson for the Community College Chancellor’s Office said the system will deliver a new transfer goal “in the coming weeks.”

Data reporter Jeremia Kimelman contributed to the reporting for this story. 

Adam Echelman covers California’s community colleges in partnership with Open Campus, a nonprofit newsroom focused on higher education.

Dozens of rural Fresno County residents spoke out Wednesday, urging California leaders to address the “urgent need for investment” in local broadband internet access.

“We want, and we need broadband of the highest quality,” said Martha Sanchez, a resident of Selma. “It’s not a luxury anymore; it’s become a necessity.”

Sanchez and others gathered at Washington Union High School in Easton as part of a “digital access conference.” The event included Assemblymember Dr. Joaquin Arambula, the Children’s Movement of Fresno, and All Children Thrive.

Broadband internet access in communities like Easton remains slow and expensive.

Speakers at the events said connectivity issues hamper students, teachers, and business owners.

Broadband internet access in Fresno faces funding challenges

Funding remains one of the largest roadblocks to achieving digital equity.

Some fear the state’s forthcoming Digital Equity Plan won’t reflect the challenges in Fresno County.

In fact, Mike Espinoza, the executive director of The Children’s Movement of Fresno, said funding issues could get worse.

Espinoza said the California Department of Technology relies on maps from the Federal Communications Commission that are “flawed” and “incomplete.”

“We know that the State’s Digital Equity Plan will outline its planned investments by county,” Espinoza said. “Though we fear that the state’s overreliance on the incomplete FCC/CPUC data will motivate them to avoid investing in Fresno’s digital infrastructure.”

Additionally, Wednesday’s gathering came just a day before the Fresno City Council is expected to vote on a resolution to “foster equality for Fresno residents and bolster resources for upward mobility.”

Arambula promised to stand by the affected communities and push for a solution at the state capitol.

“For us to build a stronger future, we need to be listening to residents to address those digital divides and inequities head on,” Arambula. “We need to make sure that every one of our residents feels that ability to connect to internet that’s high speed and that works to address the issues that our economy demands.”

The post ‘Not a luxury.’ Fresno County residents call for major investments in broadband internet access appeared first on Fresnoland.

A new kind of food may soon be arriving on grocery store shelves: climate smart. Under the Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, a nascent U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) program, this amalgam of farming methods aims to keep the American agricultural juggernaut steaming ahead while slashing the sector’s immense greenhouse gas footprint.

This spring, the Biden administration began allocating $3.1 billion to hundreds of agriculture organizations, corporations, universities, and nonprofits for climate-smart projects. These entities will pass most of the money on to tens of thousands of farmers, ranchers, and forest owners, including growers who manage thousands of acres and underserved and disadvantaged farmers who often have much smaller operations. The first agreements have now been signed; the money is starting to flow.

The USDA estimates that the 141 funded projects will, collectively over the project’s five-year lifetime, eliminate or sequester the equivalent of 60 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, on par with removing more than 2.4 million gas-powered cars from the road over the same period. They will achieve this by paying growers to adopt practices thought to either reduce greenhouse gas emissions or capture carbon dioxide from the air. These practices include reducing or eliminating tilling of soil, planting “cover crops” that grow during the off-season and are not harvested, improving how farmers use fertilizer and manure, and planting trees.

More importantly, the agency aims to catalyze new, premium markets for products such as climate-smart corn, soybeans, and beef, which it hopes will spur farmers to continue these practices far into the future. “People want to know that when they’re spending their dollar at the grocery store that they’re not hurting the environment; they want to be helpful,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said last December when announcing projects that received funding. The emerging market for climate-friendly products, he added, represents “a transformational opportunity for U.S. agriculture.”

The idea has enthusiastic supporters. The market that Vilsack envisions “is potentially massive — much bigger than any federal program could be,” says Ben Thomas, senior policy director for agriculture at the Environmental Defense Fund. “And it’ll last as long as the conditions that create the market still exist.”

But the high-profile effort has also come under fire. Some researchers fear that the agency lacks a workable plan for measuring and verifying the impacts of the practices federal dollars will be paying for. Others say science has yet to prove that climate-smart practices truly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. “We don’t have that understanding yet for most climate-smart management practices,” says Kim Novick, an environmental scientist at Indiana University.

“It’s a greenwashing scheme. It’s going to allow nothing to get done.”­

Sylvia Secchi, University of Iowa

The program’s harshest critics assail it as a giveaway to rich corporations that will do little to rein in climate change — and might even exacerbate it. “This program is just pork for big polluters,” says University of Iowa economist Sylvia Secchi. “It’s a greenwashing scheme. It’s going to allow nothing to get done.”­

For decades, efforts to cut fossil fuel emissions have focused on power plants, factories, and automobiles, not farmland. “Agriculture has just not been at the table in a meaningful way,” says Thomas.

But it should be. For all of industrial farming’s success at feeding people and livestock and producing biofuel, the sector is also a major polluter, accounting for roughly 10 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and roughly a quarter of emissions globally. The main greenhouse gases emitted by U.S. agriculture today are nitrous oxide, which comes mainly from soil microbes that digest nitrogen fertilizer, and methane, burped by the nation’s roughly 92 million cows. Both warm the atmosphere far more, per molecule, than carbon dioxide.

Farmland itself was also once a major source of atmospheric carbon dioxide as farmers cleared carbon-rich forests and plowed up prairie soils, releasing carbon from trees and the ground. Now, climate-smart agriculture aims to recapture some of that carbon.

“A voluntary, collaborative approach is the only approach that works here. Regulation isn’t very good at asking people to adopt new practices.”

Robert Bonnie, USDA

Unlike with organic farming, climate-smart farming has no list of allowed or prohibited practices. “There is no single definition of climate smart,” says Omanjana Goswami, an interdisciplinary scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. Instead, it comprises a mélange of practices that, studies show, can either reduce farms’ greenhouse gases emissions or increase the amount of carbon stored in their soils.

Funded projects are receiving up to $95 million over five years to help farmers take up these practices and to create monitoring and marketing programs that, it’s hoped, will keep farmers on the climate-smart track after the program ends. That all-carrot, no-stick strategy is intentional and necessary to reduce agriculture’s climate impact, says Robert Bonnie, under secretary for farm production and conservation at USDA and one of the program’s chief architects and champions.

“A voluntary, collaborative approach is the only approach that works here,” says Bonnie. “Regulation isn’t very good at asking people to adopt new practices.”

The department says the program will deliver benefits to underserved and disadvantaged farmers, a group that includes farmers of color, women, veterans, and small and beginning farmers who have, in the past, struggled to access USDA funding streams and have sometimes been intentionally excluded from them. Many of the projects whose signed agreements have been made public, for example, will direct at least 20 percent of funds to underserved farmers.

Champions of the program also note that expected benefits go beyond increasing carbon sequestration and reducing greenhouse gases from farm fields. By encouraging farmers to reduce tillage, plant cover crops, and take other measures, “we’re improving water quality; we’re reducing erosion,” says Adam Kiel, executive vice president of AgOutcomes, which is managing a $95 million climate-smart partnership led by the Iowa Soybean Association.

But as the climate-smart commodities program gets underway, many experts are warning that even its most-touted practices often fall far short. For example, some cover crop studies have found that the practice did not sequester significant amounts of carbon in soils, while other studies that did find gains also had gaps or methodological problems that diminished confidence in the results. And an analysis published in May in Nature Sustainability found that yield losses resulting from cover crops in the United States could erase as much as 70 percent of their climate benefits if farmers cut down trees elsewhere or plow up grasslands to compensate for those losses.

“I wouldn’t say we should pause everything, because there are some real benefits to cover cropping,” says David Lobell, a food security researcher at Stanford University and a coauthor of the Nature paper. “But I think we should be much more vigilant about maintaining productivity” as more farmers start using cover crops.

Other projects aim to reduce the greenhouse gas footprint of beef and dairy herds by more carefully managing how these animals graze pastures, so their manure can feed perennial grasses and other plants whose roots pull carbon deep into the soil. But grass-fed cows can also emit significantly more methane over their lifetimes than those that spend more of their lives in feedlots. Some projects plan to feed cows experimental additives that could reduce those methane emissions.

Measuring and modeling nitrous oxide emissions accurately is also notoriously difficult. And practices thought to reduce such emissions — like applying some fertilizer in the spring, just before planting, rather than applying all fertilizer in the fall — sometimes backfire. In fact, few long-term assessments of any climate-smart practices have been conducted on working farms, says Novick, making it hard to tailor practices to particular soil types, climates, and situations.

“It doesn’t appear that funding decisions from this program were necessarily made in a way that maximizes climate mitigation,” says Novick, who led a team that last fall authored a report on how science can inform nature-based climate solutions. “Ideally we would have first invested in the data tools necessary to understand when and where a practice is likely to succeed as a climate solution.”

There’s also the question of how to measure the program’s benefits. Funded groups are required to take measurements that will allow the USDA to assess the impacts of the practices farmers are implementing. But the agency is also relying heavily on a computer model that was designed to estimate greenhouse gases for planning large-scale projects and that cannot accurately quantify emissions and carbon capture from individual farms, notes Jon Sanderman, a soil scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center.

Bill Hohenstein, director of the USDA’s Office of Energy and Environmental Policy, acknowledges that the science behind climate-smart agriculture remains a work in progress. But he says it’s mature enough to take action. “We could wait a decade and probably understand these benefits better,” Hohenstein says. “But our view is that we would end up with generally the same recommendations.”

In addition to the technical challenges of measuring carbon and greenhouse gas changes, the Climate-Smart program will have to get farmers to stick with new practices after payments have ended. Officials say that payments to cover the startup costs for enrolled farmers are essential. “If this stuff was free, folks would already be doing it,” Bonnie says. But once they’ve bought equipment like seed drills for no-till planting and climbed the learning curve, he and Hohenstein say, reduced input costs, yield increases resulting from healthier soils, and premiums for climate-smart products will start to pay for themselves.

Many experts view such projections as overly optimistic. Hanna Poffenbarger, a soil scientist at the University of Kentucky, says it may take a decade for cover crop benefits, such as reduced need for fertilizer and increased soil organic matter, to translate into profits. That aligns with the experience of early adopters like Trey Hill, a farmer in Maryland who says that even after planting cover crops for more than 20 years, he’s still seeing yield losses in some of his corn fields and an unclear impact on his bottom line. “When you talk about improving soils,” he says, “we’re talking about a 10-year commitment before you would really even see anything significant.”

Details on the projects themselves have been slow to emerge. Though the projects receiving the bulk of the funding were announced last September, the USDA has so far shared fewer than a quarter of the signed agreements on its website. For the remaining projects, the department has published scant information. For example, a $61-million project led by the agribusiness giant Tyson to create and market “climate-smart beef” comes with only a two-sentence description that does not explain what practices will make beef climate smart. In response to an interview request, a Tyson representative linked to a blog post lacking substantive information on how the company’s claims will be verified.

The vagueness troubles observers like Goswami, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who says that without clear standards, companies will define “climate smart” in different ways, potentially confusing customers. “If Tyson comes in and says farms and ranches who we’re buying cows from have implemented X amount of cover cropping, does that make their beef climate smart?” she asks.

Even people who received funding fear that the program could overwhelm or confuse farmers who are suddenly inundated with competing climate-smart offers. “In Iowa alone, there are 17 different climate-smart projects” that will be recruiting farmers, Kiel notes. At the same time, another branch of the USDA, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, has been tasked with disbursing nearly $20 billion injected by the Inflation Reduction Act into farm programs, including ones that pay farmers to grow cover crops or set aside land for conservation. Private-sector carbon markets are also courting farmers. And many of these initiatives require that farmers not take money from competing programs, to avoid double counting of climate benefits. “There’s going to be farmer confusion,” Kiel says. “It’s unfortunate, but at least there’s going to be lots of choices.”

Secchi, meanwhile, questions why some of the wealthiest corporations and individuals in industrial agriculture are receiving additional federal money. She would have instead liked to see the government insist that growers already receiving government subsidies through other programs do more to reduce their climate impact. “Why can’t we ask farmers who are getting crop insurance subsidies to plant cover crops at zero extra cost for the taxpayer?” Secchi asks. She’d also like to see more of the funds directed toward minority, Indigenous, and other disadvantaged farmers.

Bonnie, the USDA undersecretary, responds that catalyzing large-scale change requires working with companies big enough to reach thousands of growers farming millions of acres. Building a program that will create new markets rather than new regulations and policies, he adds, insulates climate-smart agriculture from future Congresses and administrations that may be less climate friendly.

One thing is certain: As the government looks to steer the ocean liner that is American farming in a direction that’s climate friendlier yet still highly profitable, a lot of eyes — both hopeful and skeptical — will be watching closely.

The Practical Housing Policy Conference sponsored by the Monterey Bay Economic Partnership (MBEC) brought local housing advocates, government officials and policymakers together at the California State University, Monterey Bay Alumni & Visitors Center on June 27 to discuss ways to reach affordable housing goals set by the state of California.

“You cannot recruit business, retain business or hire folks without thinking about housing that’s mixed-use, single-family, affordable or market rate,” said MBEC president Tahra Goraya. “It’s bringing doctors and teachers and others in, and it’s also making sure that farmworkers are housed.”

The state of California requires cities to create a compliant Housing Element plan every eight years and the next one is due Dec. 15. The plan must include a Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) requirement, an assessment of the number of new housing units that cities will require through the term of the plan. In Monterey and Santa Cruz counties, that number is set by the Association of Monterey Bay Area Governments. The San Benito Council of Governments makes the same assessment for San Benito County, which is determined by the county’s median income.

According to MBEC Director of Housing and Community Development Gabriel Sanders, a recent study by the organization revealed that the deep need for affordable housing in California is the result of historical and cultural trends. 

In San Benito County, the RHNA is based on a median family income of $105,100 and would require the county to build 5,005 new housing units by the end of 2031. Of that number, 2,947 would be required to be affordable housing.

For Hollister, that would mean building 2,350 affordable housing units out of the 4,163 units required. San Juan Bautista would need 50 affordable units out of the 88 required. The unincorporated areas of the county would need 547 affordable units out of the 754 required.

The results of the MBEC study released in June 2023 recommended five major policy changes to expedite the building of homes needed to relieve the crisis. 

Streamline permitting and reduce discretionary reviews  

The study suggested that discretionary reviews by planning commissions, city councils or the San Benito County Board of Supervisors can introduce challenges to housing approval which are subjective and not necessarily written into law. It recommends “right of approval” mechanisms that would require objective standards which, once met, would override the opposition and streamline the steps leading to construction.

Increase allowable densities

The study advocates for more “efficient use of vacant or non-vacant land” by increasing height limits, increasing the amount of area in a parcel that can be used as floor space, removing units-per-acre limits, and creating bonuses for affordable housing projects which take advantage of all allowable density regulations. Under the plan, parking requirements for new housing units would be reduced or eliminated, suggesting that building near local mass transit would reduce car dependency and thereby reduce the need for more parking.

Reform impact fees

Because impact fees for construction are set at the same rates regardless of size, a 4,000-square-foot home is assessed at the same fee as a 400-square-foot apartment. The study recommends scaling fees by square footage rather than by unit, which would create an incentive to build smaller and more affordable units. The plan also recommends deferring all impact fees until units are ready to be occupied rather than when they are in their early stages. This would delay cities collecting the fees for around two years but would save the developer from having to finance those costs.  

Increase funding sources for affordable housing

According to the study, smaller communities do not have equal opportunities for state and federal resources because they do not have sufficient matching funds. Raising funds through bonds typically requires a 66% voter threshold which may be difficult to reach. In an example drawn from Santa Cruz County, a local parcel tax measure received only 55.9% of the vote, leading to a recommendation that the required threshold be lowered to 55%, a point where passage is more readily assured. Other recommendations include locating unused publicly owned land which could be developed as affordable housing and partnering with local agencies to find otherwise inaccessible funds such as those earmarked for educational or public health institutions.

Optimize inclusionary housing ordinances

The study recommends creating incentives for affordable housing projects through offering bonuses, deferring fees, or making concessions on conditions which place a burden on developments that include inclusionary components. This would allow developers to increasethe number of affordable housing units that would fit their projects.

The study concluded that local policymakers who create zoning rules, set fees and approve developments might not be in step with best practices in the drive toward creating more affordable housing. It recommended that all of these issues be revisited regularly to ensure that policies remain suited to the ever-expanding need for affordable housing.

“This is not just a paper exercise we are doing,” Goraya said. “These are not just boxes. These are homes where people will live. There are a lot of rules when it comes to building affordable units and development, but there are ways to optimize them that do incentivize more affordable housing and greater density.”

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The opposite side of the reservoir is dark and so quiet that water lapping on the shore and bats clicking overhead can be heard over the distant hum of boat engines. This is the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe’s reservation in California. The water that rose behind Parker Dam to create Lake Havasu washed away homes and flooded about 7,000 acres of fertile Chemehuevi land, including where tribal members grazed cattle.

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This story is the third story in a series about the Colorado River. See the rest, as well as other great reporting from High Country News by signing up for our newsletter.

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The communities across the reservoir reflect the vast divide in economic opportunities between Indian Country and the rest of the West, which has been perpetuated, in large part, by who received water and who did not.

In 1908, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the federal government owed tribes enough water to develop a permanent home on their reservations, and that their water rights would hold senior priority, meaning they trumped those of others. In the Colorado River Basin, most tribes, even during a drought, should get water before Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and elsewhere.

More than a century later, only a few basin tribes have benefited from this system. Of those that have, some live near federally funded canals and pipelines that can deliver water to their land; others received money to build their own water systems; and some negotiated for the right to market their water to other users. The Gila River Indian Community, for instance, recently struck a deal with the federal government to forgo using some of its water in exchange for up to $150 million over the next three years, depending how much water it conserves, and $83 million for a new pipeline.

But most of the basin’s 30 federally recognized tribes have faced seemingly endless barriers to accessing and benefiting from all of the water to which they’re entitled. The Chemehuevi Reservation fronts about 30 miles of the Colorado River, yet 97% of the tribe’s water remains in the river and ends up being used by Southern California cities. The tribe never receives a dollar for it.

The water that has already been guaranteed to basin tribes but remains unused totals at least 1 million acre-feet per year — nearly one-tenth of the Colorado River’s flow in recent years and nearly four times the Las Vegas metro area’s allocation. If sold outright, this water would be valued at more than $5 billion, according to a ProPublica and High Country News analysis. For the Chemehuevi, a tribe with about 1,250 members, that means the amount of water it has on paper but doesn’t use would have a one-time value of at least $55 million.

Steven Escobar, the Chemehuevi’s tribal administrator, grew up testing his mettle against the Colorado River’s currents, swimming across its cold waters upstream of the reservoir. He still thinks of the river in terms of struggle. But now, it’s a struggle for the tribe to get the same help from the federal government to access water as others have, or, if not, to get compensation for what’s legally theirs.

“All that development and governmental support that they provide every state, that should be the same thing they provide to tribes,” Escobar said. “We’ve had to fight for everything out here.”

As demand on the Colorado River far exceeds its supply, tribes worry that they’ll never receive the water they’re owed.

The Chemehuevi are left in a bind: The tribe doesn’t have the pumps or other infrastructure necessary to deliver its full allotment of river water to its reservation. While the federal government gave the tribe a grant to build a small reservoir, neither it nor the state of California has allocated money to build a larger delivery system.

“All that development and governmental support that they provide every state, that should be the same thing they provide to tribes.” 

Even as a backup option, the tribe is unable to lease its water to other users, such as rapidly growing cities, or earn money by leaving it in the river to preserve the waterway. Antiquated laws and court rulings typically allow tribes to be paid to conserve only water they previously used. Any changes to how a tribe could market its water would take an act of Congress.

“This is a long-standing problem,” said Mark Squillace, a professor at the University of Colorado’s law school. “From the perspective of the people using that water, why would they pay when they’re already getting it for free?”

 

 

The Law of the River at work

A half-century ago, the Bureau of Reclamation began construction on a massive canal called the Central Arizona Project to send the waters that flooded the Chemehuevi’s land 336 miles across the desert to Phoenix and Tucson. The pumps that power the system, which help deliver the state’s share of the Colorado River, are the largest single consumer of electricity in the state.

Meanwhile, the Chemehuevi rely on a single diesel pump to draw water six stories up to the plateau where they live above Lake Havasu.

For at least 50 years, the river’s decision-makers have recognized this disparity in water access. In 1973, a body called the National Water Commission submitted a report to Congress: “In the water-short West, billions of dollars have been invested, much of it by the Federal Government, in water resource projects benefiting non-Indians but using water in which the Indians have a priority of right if they choose to develop water projects of their own in the future.”

For tribes, the first challenge is securing their water rights. After the Supreme Court’s 1908 decision confirming tribes’ right to water, two paths emerged to quantify and settle the amount and details of those rights. Tribes could, with the backing of the Department of the Interior, negotiate with the state where their reservation is located. Or they could go to court. Fourteen basin tribes are still in the midst of this process, but either path they choose presents trade-offs.

Tribes that negotiate typically need to trade some of the water they believe they’re owed in exchange for money to build water-delivery infrastructure. They can also trade their water priority — leaving them more susceptible when allocations are cut, a reality that’s already threatening to curtail their water amid the West’s ongoing drought.

For tribes that choose to go through the courts to get their water, there’s no opportunity to negotiate for funding for canals, pipes and pumps, meaning there’s no way to move the water they’re awarded onto a reservation.

“It’s not enough to have the right to the water,” Squillace said. “You also have to have the infrastructure.”

“It’s not enough to have the right to the water. You also have to have the infrastructure.”

Highlighting the difficulties in converting rights to water on paper into actual water on a reservation, tribes around the West that secured a negotiated settlement only increased their agricultural land use by about 9% and saw no increase in residential or industrial development, according to estimates from a recent study published in the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.

And if a tribe can’t move water, it often can’t monetize it.

Laws passed between 1790 and 1834, known as the Indian Non-Intercourse Acts, have the effect of prohibiting tribes from leasing water beyond the borders of their reservations without congressional approval. Settlements also typically bar them from permanently selling their water and often prohibit them from leasing it.

“This is what’s left”

Politicians packed a conference room at the Arizona Capitol in April, where they unveiled an agreement to pay the Gila River Indian Community millions of dollars to leave its water in Lake Mead. Officials took turns at the lectern extolling tribes for their role in preserving the Colorado River.

“We don’t have any more important partners in this effort than in Indian Country,” Deputy Secretary of the Interior Tommy Beaudreau said.

When the Gila River Indian Community negotiated its water rights, the Central Arizona Project had begun carrying Colorado River water near its reservation south of Phoenix, and the tribe had some political clout after spending millions of dollars on lobbying. Those advantages allowed the tribe to negotiate tens of millions of dollars for infrastructure to deliver its water and the right to lease tens of thousands of acre-feet to nearby cities and a mining company. Its settlement has now made the tribe a well-compensated partner in conservation efforts.

“These are truly historic investments in directly tackling the challenge presented to our state and our region by the historic drought,” Gila River Indian Community Gov. Stephen Roe Lewis said during the April news conference announcing the deal to trade more water for money. The tribe declined requests for additional comment, as it is negotiating further water deals.

The Chemehuevi, by contrast, can’t access or lease most of their water. Their rights were quantified and settled via the courts in the 1960s, at a time when the tribe didn’t have federal recognition. So it didn’t receive infrastructure funding.

Escobar, the Chemehuevi’s tribal administrator, would prefer to use his tribe’s water, not lease it. He wants to expand pumping capacity and construct a cascading series of reservoirs. Once the Chemehuevi access the water, they could use it for more houses to bring enrolled members back to their land, new businesses to provide jobs and increased farming to grow the reservation’s economy.

Escobar talked about his dreams and the difficulty in developing Indian Country as he drove past the frames of unused greenhouses, evidence of a failed venture. Near a field where the tribe’s single tractor was working the soil, Escobar described the Chemehuevi’s agricultural plans. Behind him, Lake Havasu covered soil that could have been productive fields or pastureland. In front of him stretched sandy desert where the federal government said the tribe should harvest crops.

“We want to be a benefit to the system, but right now, they’re making it hard.” 

“This is what’s left,” he said of the tribe’s potential farmland that wasn’t submerged by the reservoir. “It’s sad.”

After the once-nomadic Chemehuevi fought for recognition of their tribe and their reservation, they partnered with the University of Southern California to develop a plan to farm 1,900 acres using the 11,340 acre-feet of water per year, about 3.7 billion gallons, that the government allotted them — at least on paper. But, in a good year, the Chemehuevi farm only 80 acres, growing melons for food, devil’s claw for basket weaving and cottonwoods for a riparian restoration project.

If it can’t transport more water to expand the farm, Escobar said, the tribe could accept leaving water in the river in exchange for compensation. “We want to be a benefit to the system,” he said, “but right now, they’re making it hard.” Many non-Indigenous people and a few tribes around the basin earn money limiting their water use, whether by fallowing farm fields or ripping out lawns.

Why shouldn’t all tribes be paid? Escobar asked.   

Anna V. Smith is an associate editor of High Country News. She writes and edits stories on tribal sovereignty and environmental
justice for the Indigenous Affairs desk from Colorado. @annavtoriasmith

Mark Olalde is an environment reporter with ProPublica, where he investigates issues concerning oil, mining, water and other topics around the Southwest.

Umar Farooq is an Ancil Payne Fellow with ProPublica, where he reports on national issues. @UmarFarooq_

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