Current gas-tax revenue covers only about $2.3 billion of the state’s $8 billion in annual highway repair needs, Brown’s plan notes, and so there’s $5.7 billion each year in deferred maintenance.
State Water Resources Control Board officials said Monday that they expect to issue “curtailment orders” soon to the state’s most senior water rights holders, effectively shutting off the flow of river water to some of the major agricultural districts in California.
California’s drought emergency woes have worsened, with a shortage on the Colorado River next year becoming increasingly likely. Odds of a shortage rose from 33 percent to 50 percent from April 1 to May 1, Metropolitan Water District, Southern California’s largest water wholesaler, said Monday.
The labor strife not only slowed shipments through the enormous facility and its network of trains and trucks that transport goods throughout the country, it also created an opening for competitors to show that they could fill the void. As containers sat and goods spoiled during the port slowdown in California in January and February, the ports along the Gulf of Mexico and on the East Coast took advantage by stepping up to handle the cargo with greater efficiency.
Together with officials from the adjacent Port of Los Angeles, “we will look at every possible way to improve that system,” Slangerup said in an interview last week. “The goal is to cut costs and improve speed. When we are done, it will revolutionize the entire marine supply chain.”
Gov. Jerry Brown says critics of his water tunnel plan who haven’t spent 1 million hours studying it — as his administration has — should just shut up. . . only a government could spend that much time on a project and not turn a shovel.
The winter snowpack has mostly melted throughout the West, not just in California, according to data from the fifth 2015 forecast by the United States Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service.
Agriculture, which uses 34 times more water per worker than the average business, is most at risk. Cuts could also pinch the thriving technology and life-sciences sectors, which employ nearly 124,000 workers — who use 45 percent more water than average.
The Golden State has historically led the United States and the world in technology, quality of life, social innovation, entertainment, and public policy. But in recent decades its lead has ebbed. The reasons for this are various. But there is one area of decay whose story is a parable for California’s other plights—that area is infrastructure.
But California, from this drought onward, will be a state transformed. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s was human-caused, after the grasslands of the Great Plains were ripped up, and the land thrown to the wind. It never fully recovered. The California drought of today is mostly nature’s hand, diminishing an Eden created by man. The Golden State may recover, but it won’t be the same place.
The latest version — the third in three years — brought down the cost from $25 billion to $17 billion. But it made the project even more risky politically.
The legislation doesn’t pick a spot for the campus, which Gatto envisions being akin to the private California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and specializing in science, technology, engineering, the arts and mathematics. Gatto has said it might be in an area near Silicon Valley, Hollywood or in a part of the state without a nearby UC campus.
But the floating behemoths are overwhelming many U.S. ports that weren’t built to handle such supersize ships. Of the 10 busiest U.S. ports by container volume, as calculated by the American Association of Port Authorities, at least seven are grappling regularly with congestion.
BART will need voter help to meet more than $9.6 billion in capital needs through 2024, and it has no contingency plan if voters don’t come through to help, California’s state auditor says in a report released Tuesday afternoon.
Truck drivers who haul goods from the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles will vote today whether to launch another strike beginning as early as Monday morning, union officials announced Friday.