Month: February 2016

Increasing On-time Graduation Rates at CSU

Just 19% of California students at California State University (CSU) campuses graduate in four years. A bill introduced this week is aimed at improving these graduation rates by addressing two commonly cited issues important to graduating on time: getting access to necessary classes and taking a full course load.

The bill would guarantee that students’ tuition is frozen at freshmen-year levels and provide priority registration for classes—as long as they take enough units to stay on track to graduate in four years and carry a certain minimum GPA. In order to graduate in 4 years, students need to average 15 units a semester (about 5 classes). However, students can take 12 units a semester (about 4 classes) and still be considered full-time by university standards and for financial aid purposes. While it does not cost any more money for students to take 15 units, many students choose to take 12 units so they can work or because they feel that 15 units would be too challenging. It’s also possible that some students just don’t know that taking only 12 units pushes them off-track to graduate on time.

Would a promise of frozen tuition be enough to cause more students to graduate in four years? After all, there has always been a financial incentive to do so. The fifth (and sixth) year of college is expensive, and later graduation also keeps student from entering the workforce full time and earning income. For example, a student starting in 2007 who graduated in 4 years would save $5,472 in tuition alone by not attending a fifth year—when including a year’s worth of room, board, books, and other related expenses, this number is closer to $20,000,and likely even more when considering the foregone earnings a student could be making during that year. Under the proposed bill, SB 1450, that student would save an additional $3,198, thanks to frozen tuition. If a vast majority of students do not finish in 4 years in light of the significant savings, would the promise of additional $3,000 in eventual savings push them to take more classes each semester?

It is possible that by highlighting near-term savings on yearly tuition the bill could convince some students to stay on track and graduate on time. How much it could move the needle for on-time graduation remains to be seen. If few students are moved to participate, the state could end up just partially subsidizing the degrees of students who were already going to finish in 4 years.

It makes sense for legislators and the higher education systems to work together to remove the barriers for on-time graduation for California’s students. This would cost students and the state less money, increase the number of CSU graduates, and makes space for more students at the university.

Linking Land Use and Water Decisions

In nature, water and land are intimately entwined. But in the human landscape, we’ve created divides. Communities across the state separate water and land use, and this can lead to inconsistency, inefficiency, and conflict. The Governor’s Office of Planning and Research (OPR) recently convened a series of workshops in rural California on aligning land and water planning for long-term sustainability. Debbie Franco is OPR’s community and rural affairs advisor and local drought liaison, and a member of the PPIC Water Policy Center’s advisory council. We talked to her about this ongoing process.

PPIC: What was the purpose of these workshops, and what common themes did you hear?

Debbie Franco: We’re seeking ways to ensure that water and land use decisions are informed by each other and ultimately are driving toward the same goal. As a first step, we organized six regional workshops in rural parts of the state to talk to folks working in water and land-use planning, with the goal of better understanding how locals see optimum alignment, where there are gaps or barriers, and opportunities to close the gaps and overcome the barriers. We logged more than a hundred ideas, and now we’re working to figure out what actions would move us toward more resilient water and land systems.

Themes that emerged included:

  • The need for strong political leadership, supported by mechanisms to help leaders balance competing priorities and to achieve equity across our various water divides;
  • Institutional drivers that lead to good choices for water and land management—such as eliminating the pressure small local governments feel to embrace development as a way to fund community services;
  • The value of using common data and metrics across land use and water planning, and focusing on measurable outcomes.

PPIC: What are the most pressing issues you heard about?

DF: The biggest idea that came up over and over was the need to have watershed-scale water accounting. The idea needs a lot more discussion and research, but basically, such a process might for example document how much water everyone gets, what water rights pertain, and where you have lands with high potential for stormwater capture or groundwater recharge. You might end up with a watershed map showing lands with high potential for storing water, where everyone benefits from ensuring they are used for that purpose. Sharing such information with land use authorities could lead to better analysis of land options for new developments. We heard from participants that California’s “show me the water” requirements and environmental review process under CEQA (the California Environmental Quality Act) happen too late, when proposed developments are far along in the planning process. If developers got water information to inform site selection, it could make it easier for them and result in water benefits, too. Some jurisdictions are already taking this approach.

Several regions discussed the potential for marijuana to be legalized, and the crop possibly shifting from the forests to conventional farmlands. There’s a huge opportunity to be forward-thinking on solving water issues that might arise from this shift.

Every workshop included a discussion about how under-resourced local government planning is. There are so many barriers—no dedicated funding source for this kind of planning, out-of-date general plans, plans trapped in litigation for years. We need sufficient resources for local governments to do good planning.

Learn more

More on this topic: “Video: Water and Growth in the West” (PPIC Blog, February 18, 2016)
Read the California Water Action Plan, which was a motivation for these meetings
Visit the PPIC Water Policy Center

Video: Senator Dianne Feinstein in Conversation

Underscoring her role in three contentious policy issues, California’s senior senator spoke to a Sacramento audience last week about filling the vacancy on the US Supreme Court, the dispute between Apple and the FBI, and drought relief.

Senator Dianne Feinstein urged speedy consideration of a nominee to replace the late Antonin Scalia on the court, saying that Senate can consider and confirm a new justice within 69 days—the average time for the process has taken in the past. She acknowledged that it would not be easy.

“I wish we could go back to the days when I first went to the Senate when the belief was that every president deserves his nominations,” she told Mark Baldassare, PPIC president and CEO, at the PPIC event.

Asked about the Apple controversy, she called on the company to reconsider its position and cooperate with the FBI to access data on a phone used by one of the San Bernardino killers. “Apple is not above the laws of the United States,” she said.

She said her position on the Senate Intelligence Committee—which occupies most of her time—gives her a perspective not shared by many on the dangers posed by terrorists.

Feinstein also detailed some of the provisions in her drought-relief bill, which would fund recycling, desalination, and water storage projects, as well as ease water trading.

She closed by describing her leadership style, saying she tries to “use the time to get things done. If I can’t do them through legislation, I’ll do them another way.”

Testimony: Bail and Pretrial Detention

The Alameda County Board of Supervisors Public Protection Committee, along with Assemblymember Bill Quirk, chair of the assembly Public Safety Committee, held a special hearing on the bail system on Friday, February 19, 2016, in Hayward. They invited Sonya Tafoya, PPIC research associate, to testify about the impact of bail on the jail system in California. Here are her prepared remarks:

Bail Overview

The purpose of California’s bail system is to ensure that defendants appear in court and to protect public safety (Cal Const. art I § 28(f)(3)). With the exception of capital crimes and certain felony offenses, bail is a right for most offenders (Cal Const. art I § 12, PC § 1271). If the court finds that defendants do not pose a risk of flight or a risk to public safety, it has the discretion to release them on their own recognizance.

The most comprehensive data source available, the State Court Processing Statistics (SCPS), indicates that for felony offenses, California’s large urban counties have had high rates of pretrial detention (59%) relative to the rest of the United States (32%). Some of this difference can be attributed to California’s high bail amounts. California’s median bail amount was $50,000, five times higher than the rest of the United States. Yet, even with relatively high rates of detention, California has had higher failure-to-appear rates (6.6% versus 2.9%), and higher rates of non-violent felony rearrests (12.4% versus 10.1%) than the rest of the United States. Re-arrests for violent felonies are only half a percentage point lower in California (1.4%) than the rest of the United States (1.9%) (Tafoya, 2015).

It should be noted that data collection for the SCPS was discontinued in 2009, and in the absence of more recent SCPS or other statewide data, we cannot determine whether these rates of detention, failure to appear, and re-arrest have persisted. The effect of Proposition 47 on median bail amounts is also unknown. But, as a practical matter, these results suggest that California has not gotten a very good return on its investment in high pretrial detention rates.

Jail Capacity Overview

A brief overview of jail capacity in California helps quantify the scope of this issue.

  • The average daily population of California jails was about 73,000 (2nd quarter, 2015, Board of State and Community Corrections). Most jail inmates (46,000) are unsentenced; the remaining 27,000 are sentenced.
  • California’s jails hold mostly those charged with or convicted of felony offenses (84%).
  • California’s jail system as a whole is operating near its rated capacity of about 80,000 (Board of State and Community Corrections, April 2015). Overall, the system is operating at about 91 percent of rated capacity.
  • The extent of jail overcrowding varies across counties; 37 facilities in 19 counties are operating under court-ordered population caps.
  • Facilities with population caps are required to release inmates when their populations reach a specified threshold (often 90% of rated capacity). In the 12 months following realignment, these facilities averaged about 12,000 capacity releases a month. In the wake of Proposition 47, the average has declined to about 10,000 per month.

Moving Forward

Demands for lower bail amounts are generally based on assertions that low-risk defendants are being held in jail solely because they lack the financial means to post bail. Lowering bail across the board would increase California’s rate of pretrial release (Tafoya, 2013). From a public safety perspective, however, this may not be the most prudent approach. A county jail population assessment would be a straightforward first step toward understanding the resources that are being devoted to detaining low-risk defendants. The assessment takes a snapshot of the jail population at a point in time and describes who is being held in jail, for how long and and why. It examines such factors as demographics, current offense, criminal history, status as a sentenced or unsentenced inmate, immigration or other agency holds, bail amounts, and length of incarceration.

Video: Water and Growth in the West

When water supplies are tight—as during the latest drought—discussions often turn to the question of whether state and local governments should be limiting growth. How western states are managing this issue—and areas where improvement is needed—was the topic of my presentation at a recent conference on sustaining western water. The event, which also featured presentations from three members of the PPIC Water Policy Center’s research network, was sponsored by the Renewable Natural Resources Foundation.

Most western states have laws to ensure adequate water supply for new developments. These laws generally require that developers—or the city and county governments that approve new construction on their behalf—ensure the availability of long-term supplies before the projects can go forward. In rural areas, the concern is often to prevent individual consumers from being sold a “dry lot,” lacking basic services. In larger communities, the concern is more often about making sure that new projects don’t reduce the reliability of community-wide supplies, ultimately requiring costly new investments for existing residents. California’s law falls somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. We require new developments of 500 or more units to demonstrate at least 20 years of water supply availability. (Arizona’s law requires 100 years of supply in major metropolitan areas; Colorado usually leaves this decision up to local utilities.)

Our research has found that these laws are working fairly well in cities and suburbs, where utilities can provide good oversight and draw on multiple tools to ensure water availability. For instance, in California, utilities generally require supplies well beyond the 20-year requirement of state law. Investments in conservation, recycled wastewater, new storage, and water trading have all enabled communities to accommodate growth.

Things are more likely to fall through the cracks in smaller rural communities. As California has seen during the latest drought, some well-dependent rural homes are facing water supply shortages; many also have inadequate sanitation and other services.

Western states also need to devote more attention to agricultural land use. On average, farms use 85 percent of total business and residential water use in the West, so farming needs to be part of any equation addressing water scarcity. Pressing issues right now include making sure there’s enough water to support long term investments in tree and vine crops, which now account for more than 40 percent of crop acreage in the water-scarce San Joaquin Valley. And as we move to implement the new Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, there’s great interest in making sure that communities manage both urban and farm development in ways that protect lands with high potential for groundwater recharge. This means not paving over these lands in cities and managing farmlands so that these fields can be flooded during winter and early spring.

Learn more

Watch these video presentations from other PPIC Water Policy Center researchers who spoke at the conference:

About the PPIC Water Policy Center

Preliminary Data Show Higher Crime Rates in 2015

Preliminary data from the FBI offer discouraging news about crime trends in California’s largest cities. A number of cities—such as Los Angeles, Sacramento, and Riverside—reported increases in violent crime in 2015. The recently released FBI data also show that California cities are seeing property crime increases. These increases, particularly in property crime, are widespread and not trivial in magnitude. However, the data also show that cities in other states are also experiencing increases, especially in violent crime.

The FBI crime numbers cover January through June 2015 and are limited to cities with populations of at least 100,000 that report crime data to the FBI. In total, the data allow us to calculate year-over-year changes for 245 cities in 41 states throughout the country. The 66 California cities included in the FBI data contain about half of the state’s total population. The most recent statewide crime numbers showed that California’s crime rates continued to drop in 2014 and were at historic lows.

Comparing January through June 2015 to the same months in 2014 reveals that many US cities included in the preliminary FBI data saw increases in crime. Of the 66 California cities in the data, 49 saw increases in violent crime and 48 experienced increases in property crimes. Many of these cities saw double digit percent increases—34 in violent crime and 24 in property crime.

Violent crime rates went up in 24 of the 41 states included in the FBI data, and property crime increased in 14 states. However, the property crime rate for the included US cities with populations of 100,000 or more decreased by 29.6 per 100,000 residents, while the property crime rate for the California cities increased by 116.9. The increase in property crime in California cities stands in sharp contrast to the other four states with the highest populations: large cities in Texas, New York, Florida, and Illinois saw decreases of between 111.1 (Texas) and 47.7 (New York) property crimes per 100,000 residents.

Among the 41 states with cities that are included in the FBI data, California’s property crime increase ranked 6th, while its violent crime increase ranked 12th. Most of California’s larger cities (46 of 66) were among the 100 cities nationwide that saw the largest property crime increases. Close to half (32, to be precise), were in the top 100 in violent crime increases. When we look at the data for the 25 largest US cities, we see that the biggest increases in violent and property crime rates occurred in Sacramento and San Francisco, respectively. California has six cities in this group, and all are among the ten that saw the largest increases in the property crime rate.

Again, these FBI numbers are preliminary, and they cover only about half of the state’s population. But they are a strong indication that recent crime increases have occurred across the state. They underscore the importance of monitoring crime trends and the need for careful analysis to identify key causes. If we can identify the factors that are contributing to higher crime rates, we can implement effective crime-preventive strategies.

Chart note: Changes in the number of violent and property crimes per 100,000 residents, January–June 2015 compared to January–June 2014. The table includes the 25 largest US cities included in the FBI data with crime statistics for both 2014 and 2015, ranging from New York City, with a population of 8,473,938, to Kansas City, MO, with a population of 468,417.
Chart source: FBI’s Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report, January–June, 2015.

Steyer Fellowship to Focus on Groundwater

A new fellowship will enable the PPIC Water Policy Center to explore solutions to some of California’s toughest groundwater policy challenges. This three-year program is supported with funding from the TomKat Foundation, established with funding from Tom Steyer and Kat Taylor. PPIC has appointed Richard Howitt, an adjunct fellow at the center, as the 2016 Steyer Fellow.

Howitt is one of the state’s leading thinkers on how drought, land-use changes, and economic factors are affecting California’s agricultural sector. As an emeritus professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Davis, he’s devoted years to researching the agricultural economy and water markets. He’s played an important role in a number of major research projects looking into drought’s impacts on the farm economy and water management solutions for the long term.

“We are grateful for this support because it advances the water center’s programs and priorities,” said Ellen Hanak, center director.

Howitt will explore solutions to excess groundwater pumping the San Joaquin Valley—the state’s most important agricultural region and largest water user.

“Farmers significantly increased pumping to weather the latest drought. At the same time, they’ve been increasing acreage devoted to perennial crops—which can’t be fallowed as easily when water supplies are short,” Howitt notes.

The state’s new groundwater law requires the valley’s water users to develop sustainable groundwater management plans by 2020. Howitt and a team of PPIC Water Policy Center researchers will undertake a comprehensive analysis of possible sustainable water management solutions for the region.

Video: Reforming Federal Drought Management

The federal government is a key partner in just about every aspect of western water management. It’s the West’s largest landowner, chief environmental regulator, major supplier of irrigation water and hydropower, key provider of water information, and an important source of water-related funding. The vast scale of its involvement has brought big challenges to how it manages the drought that has affected the entire 11-state region in recent years.

The fed’s role in managing droughts in the West was the topic of a seminar in Washington, DC, last week, a joint effort of Resources for the Future and the PPIC Water Policy Center. Along with a panel of prominent national experts, we discussed how to improve policies and practices to build drought resilience at the federal level, with a focus on pragmatic changes that are doable in the near term. I introduced recommendations from our new report, Improving the Federal Response to Drought: Five Areas for Reform, to help structure the conversation.

A panel discussion followed, with my colleague Jeffrey Mount moderating. He asked panelist Ann Mills, deputy under secretary for natural resources and environment at the US Department of Agriculture, about how USDA’s vast array of programs could be better coordinated for drought.

Noting that there are 15 agencies just within the department that have some influence on water management, Mills said, “We’ve started to create USDA water teams at the senior policy level … to make sure we’re coordinating our work as effectively as possible. There are real challenges in breaking down silos in the USDA and the federal family.” Mills noted that USDA is also seeking to improve its data and make it actionable and more available to customers. “And we’re building on the really great work that’s already happening on the ground,” she said.

Panelist Mark Kramer of The Nature Conservancy was asked about the lack of a “drought plan” for the environment during the latest drought, which might have reduced the crisis now facing some species.

“The pressure to squeeze more water out of the system is enormous,” Kramer said. Water has been framed as an “either-or” proposition—either it goes to the environment or to human uses. But, he noted, it can be managed in ways that address environmental needs without harming other users. The Nature Conservancy has been working on pilot projects that help farmers put water “when and where it’s needed”—for example, to create temporary wetlands for birds during drought. To scale up these efforts, some agencies may need more funding and other tools.

These are tough, multidimensional problems, and solving them will require a heavy lift. But increasingly, people in the West realize we can’t continue with “business-as-usual” water management. Tom Iseman, deputy assistant secretary for water and science at the US Bureau of Reclamation, noted that westerners are already experiencing the impacts of hotter, longer droughts, and realizing some things will need to change. “We’re trying to get ahead of these problems, to promote long-term drought resilience.”

Learn more

Read a summary of policy recommendations from Improving the Federal Response to Western Drought (February 2016)
Read “There’s Always Drought Somewhere in the West” (PPIC blog, February 4, 2016)

Public Opinion and Sentencing Reform

Governor Brown has proposed a ballot initiative that would reform prison sentencing in California, increasing parole opportunities for non-violent felons. Our January PPIC Statewide Survey findings show a public opinion environment that may be favorable to the governor’s proposal.

Our survey shows that many Californians believe—incorrectly—that prisons and corrections account for the largest share of state spending. When asked to select the largest spending area of the state budget, California likely voters are most likely to choose prisons and corrections (41%)—this is consistent with our findings over the past several years. In fact, the allocation for prisons and corrections in the governor’s 2016–17 budget proposal ($10.6 billion) comes in behind higher education ($14.6 billion), health and human services ($33.7 billion), and K–12 education ($51.2 billion).

If the governor’s sentencing reform proposal is perceived as a way to reduce spending on prisons and corrections, it could benefit from this overestimation of state corrections spending. The proposal could also benefit from a contrasting opinion: only 3 percent of likely voters say that prisons and corrections should be the highest spending priority.

Californians’ current attitudes toward crime may also bode well for sentencing reform. Just 3 percent of likely voters name crime, gangs, or drugs as the most important issue for the governor and legislature to work on this year. And only 15 percent of likely voters say violence and street crime are a big problem in their communities today—down somewhat from January 2015 (22%). Furthermore, a solid majority of likely voters (63%) say that the criminal justice system is biased against blacks and other minorities, a share that is somewhat larger than it was last January (55%).

Given these attitudes toward crime and the criminal justice system, along with Californians’ desire to see less spending on prisons and corrections, the governor’s proposal for sentencing reform could be well received.

There’s Always Drought Somewhere in the West

Thanks to the January rains, hopes for an end to the latest drought are rising along with reservoir levels. But the reality is, drought is occurring somewhere in the West practically all the time.

Over the past decade, except for a few brief wet periods, more than a quarter of western lands have been in drought. Since 2012, more than half of the West has been hit, with large areas facing extremely dry conditions.

To get a better sense of how drought conditions vary across the region over time, we created a time-lapse animation using the maps released weekly by the US Drought Monitor.

The 10-year span shows strong regional differences. Droughts in California and the Pacific Northwest tend to develop and end relatively quickly. In contrast, parts of the Colorado Basin have been dry for much of the past decade or longer—a situation that is proving difficult to manage.

The rain and snow we’ve experienced already in this wet season have made modest dents in the latest drought. And there’s been a pronounced turnaround in the Pacific Northwest, where unusually severe storms have moved much of the region out of drought.

California’s above-average snowpack in is encouraging, and it seems that the outlook for 2016 is improving. But these graphics remind us that droughts never truly leave the West. As we highlight in our recent report, Improving the Federal Response to Western Drought, California—like its western neighbors—must continue to strengthen its water management to better cope with ongoing drought and prepare for the next.