Mayoral candidate Nat Bates downplayed Chevron support: “Tom wants to make a big deal about a so-called Chevron slush fund. But them spending money on elections is nothing new; he needs to stop crying about it and worry about his own campaign.” Chevron is the chief supplier of cash to Moving Forward, a political action committee (PAC) which is sitting on $1.7 million and already spending aggressively on ads for Bates.   read more

Statewide flow averages around 70 million acre feet a year, while those holding water rights can claim 370 million acre feet. That’s the bad news. The worse news is that the study did not factor in riparian rights granted to streamside landowners before 1914. “So in many ways our estimate is a substantial underestimate of the total volume of rights,” co-author and UC Merced professor of water resources Joshua Viers told the Los Angeles Times.   read more

Julia Lurie at Mother Jones says if you’re drinking bottled water “there’s a good chance” it came from California. Aquafina, Dasani, Crystal Geyser and Arrowhead all have operations in California, although Lurie doesn’t quantify how much of the nation’s bottled water comes from the state. The reason is an absence of data. Bottling companies don’t have to say where the water comes from, and, for the most part, they don’t on their labels.   read more

Police forces across the country have used the threat of terrorism since 9/11 to justify amping up their purchase of military equipment with federal money to control conventional criminal activity. At least $35 billion worth of equipment had been dispersed by end of 2011. Nationally, local law enforcement has received 93,763 assault weapons, 180,718 magazines of ammunition, 44,900 night vision goggles, 533 aircraft, 432 armored mine-resistant vehicles and 435 other armored vehicles.   read more

More than 20,000 students receive no English language training, and services are skimpy in one out of every four school districts in the state. On Tuesday, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge James Chalfant ruled that was a violation of state and federal law and ordered California to rectify the situation immediately. “You've got to go ferret this out because you can't have even one child that isn't getting their instructional services,” Chalfant reportedly said when issuing the ruling.   read more

After extending a deadline two days to get an $11-billion bond on the November ballot, legislators hacked it down to $7.5 billion and promised that the money wouldn’t be used for tunnels. But environmentalists fear that money could still be siphoned from the water bond to help pay for a $25 billion plan, supported by the governor, that would, in part, build parallel Delta tunnels to divert water south to farmers and thirsty Southern Californians.   read more

The draft plan does not tinker around the edges. The report recommends creation of a nonprofit California Parks Conservancy to round up financial support from donors. It calls for a stable funding structure with “effective fee-collection systems” while encouraging more entrepreneurial schemes. Some critics worry about “public parks with private operators,” the substitution of corporate and community control for state management.   read more

As of March, the state auditor reported, the department had outstanding costs for 1,600 projects totaling $194 million that either hadn’t been billed ($142 million) or billed but not collected ($52 million). Preliminary indications are that 76 of the projects now exceed the statute of limitations for collecting any money from their operators, amounting to $13.4 million that the state will likely never collect.   read more

Bound my nondisclosure agreements and motivated by institutional sneakiness, law enforcement agencies across the country are secretly deploying new technology to track people’s cellphones without court oversight. When the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office was identified by the media months ago as one of the agencies using Stingrays to spy on residents, they refused to comment. But last week they came clean. Or at least tried to spiff up their image.   read more

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky—a slightly mellowed, one-time liberal firebrand who is being termed out of office this year—joined with two conservative colleagues, Michael Antonovich and Don Knabe, to reject the proposal. He said that there were already a number of parties looking into the department and another one could be more hindrance than help.   read more

A study by UCLA researchers in the online journal Health Affairs went a step beyond other studies, which established poor people have lousier access to preventive care, and showed that, perhaps not surprisingly, the medical outcomes are much worse, too. Patients in poor San Fernando had 10 times as many amputations as upscale Hermosa Beach.   read more

Wolk found that, “At least nine top bridge engineers, scientists, and other distinguished bridge construction experts who worked on the project have similar stories of being gagged and banished” for their contrarian opinions. “When silencing people didn't seem sufficient, it appears those top managers ultimately punished dissidents by either dissolving their contracts or transferring them to other assignments.”   read more

The 5-0 vote, with the mayor and vice mayor abstaining, rejected the recommendation of its city planning commission that Chevron put in more pollution controls, replace its piping and contribute a quarter billion dollars to local green projects through 2050. The commission also wanted Chevron to reduce all toxic air contaminants, put domes on its storage tanks and upgrade its tug boats.   read more

The GAO report said that the EPA doesn’t conduct annual on-site evaluations with any regularity and hasn’t updated its guidelines to the states since the 1980s. The result is that “safeguards do not address emerging underground injection risks, such as seismic activity and overly high pressure in geologic formations leading to surface outbreaks of fluids.”   read more

Caltrans would get a couple of revenue-producing “Lexus lanes” and people willing and able to pay for a more luxurious driving experience would have a less-encumbered thoroughfare. Less fortunate Orange County motorists would have the same five free lanes that drove them to pass Measure M2 eight years ago and spend $1.3 billion, when there were fewer drivers on the road.   read more

Critics point to a decline in groundwater in the surrounding Cabazon area, the drought, and the wisdom of pumping and bottling water in the desert for shipment elsewhere. The Morongo, who hooked up with Nestle after paying the Cabazon Water District $3 million for the water rights, aren’t subject to the same oversight or reporting requirements as other entities because they are sovereign.   read more