California
Rural ranchers face $4,000 proposed fine for violating state drought order
In abstract
The penalty is the utmost the ranchers — who pumped Shasta River water for eight days — might face underneath state regulation. It quantities to about $50 per rancher, which isn’t any deterrent, ranchers and officers agree.
California’s water officers plan to impose a $4,000 effective on Siskiyou County ranchers for violating orders to chop again their water use throughout a weeklong standoff final summer time.
State officers and the ranchers agree: A $4,000 effective isn’t a lot of a deterrent to forestall unlawful water diversions throughout California’s droughts. The proposed effective would quantity to about $50 per rancher.
A rural water affiliation serving about 80 ranchers and farmers — going through mounting prices from hauling water and buying hay to interchange dried out pasture — turned on their pumps for eight days in August to divert water from the Shasta River. State and federal officers mentioned the pumping, which violated an emergency state order, threatened the river’s water high quality and its salmon and different uncommon species.
Rick Lemos, a fifth era rancher and board member of the Shasta River Water Affiliation, mentioned violating the drought order “was the most affordable approach I might have gotten by … If you’re to some extent the place you don’t have any different alternative, you do what it’s important to do.” He mentioned the alternate options “would have price us, collectively, much more.”
The penalty — $500 per day for eight days of pumping — is the utmost quantity the State Water Sources Management Board’s enforcers can search from the group of Siskiyou County ranchers underneath the state’s water code. The proposed effective requires a 20-day ready interval or a listening to earlier than it’s last.
The small quantity and the lengthy delay underscore the restricted powers that the state’s water cops should speedily intervene in conflicts over diversions they’ve declared unlawful.
“They clearly don’t have a lot enforcement energy, as a result of they confirmed up and instructed us, ‘Shut your pumps off proper now.’ And we mentioned no,” mentioned Lemos. “You’d assume they’d get an injunction and shut the pumps off, wouldn’t they?”
Julé Rizzardo, the water board’s assistant deputy director of allowing and enforcement for the division of water rights, mentioned the company’s powers are restricted.
“Sadly, there are circumstances resembling this the place the financial beneficial properties that folk can get by violating curtailment orders are higher than the potential penalties out there to us,” Rizzardo mentioned.
Karuk Tribal Council Member Arron “Troy” Hockaday was disillusioned by the effective.
“The punishment doesn’t match the crime… We’re preventing for the fish. The fish are our life,” Hockaday mentioned.
The penalty, he says, sends a message: “Siskiyou County doesn’t should take heed to what you guys should say — we’re gonna do what we would like. And nothing’s gonna occur to us.“
As well as, the ranchers might face fines of $10,000 a day for future violations.
Underneath the state’s water code, fines could be bigger than $500 a day solely after the water board finalizes a stop and desist order, which requires a 20-day ready interval or a listening to. Within the case of the Siskiyou County ranchers, Lemos and his neighbors shut their pumps off nearly three weeks earlier than the penalty would have elevated to $10,000 a day.
“We knew that was coming. That’s why we pumped the water earlier than it occurred,” Lemos mentioned.
Jim Scala, a third-generation rancher who’s president of the Shasta River Water Affiliation’s board of administrators, mentioned he hopes the affiliation agrees to not pay the effective and struggle it as a substitute.
“I don’t wish to pay them a dime. I wish to take them to court docket,” Scala mentioned. “As a result of if we pay them $4,000 or $10,000, that’s like admitting that we had been within the mistaken.”
The struggle started simmering in August 2021, when the water board adopted emergency rules that enable curtailments of water pumping when flows dip beneath a sure degree to guard the Shasta River’s salmon.
Dealing with dry situations and dwindling flows, the state ramped up curtailments within the spring and summer time of 2022. In early August, the Shasta River Water Affiliation petitioned the board to proceed diverting water to fill inventory ponds.
However earlier than the board had responded, the ranchers notified state water officers in an Aug. 17 letter that they deliberate to violate the curtailment that day.
The river’s flows dropped by practically two-thirds and stayed there for every week till the farmers and ranchers turned the pumps again off — a “precipitous drop” that state officers mentioned might jeopardize the river’s fish.
The state company mentioned that it recommends the utmost allowable effective because of the “important quantity diverted in a brief time frame, … the impacts to the watershed, the delicate timing of this violation” earlier than salmon migration, and the continued pumping even after a violation discover and a draft stop and desist order had been despatched.
The river empties into the bigger Klamath and is residence to key spawning and rearing grounds for fall-run Chinook salmon and threatened Coho salmon. The water board’s discover Friday mentioned that violating the curtailment resulted in decrease flows that would “exacerbate unfavorable water high quality points” and “restrict fish mobility and survival.”
“This motion has direct impacts on extra senior water proper holders and delicate fisheries that the Emergency Regulation intends to guard,” the discover mentioned.
Such skirmishes might flare extra typically as local weather change brings extra extreme and frequent droughts to the state. However consultants warn that the state’s powers don’t match the urgency of stopping illicit water use.
“The system nonetheless permits one rogue consumer to determine to pay a effective relatively than adjust to the regulation,” mentioned Jennifer More durable, a regulation professor on the College of the Pacific’s McGeorge Faculty of Regulation. “California is a world-class economic system with world-class pure assets. The state company charged with defending its water assets ought to be given world-class instruments.”
Rizzardo mentioned the state doesn’t have the assets or information essential to police 40,000 water rights holders, significantly throughout a extreme drought.
“We empathize. We acknowledge the hardships. We now have been out within the subject, to attempt to perceive the state of affairs extra holistically,” Rizzardo mentioned. “However we additionally aren’t going to disregard the blatant violations.”
California
Caitlyn Jenner says she'd 'destroy' Kamala Harris in hypothetical race to be CA gov
SAN FRANCISCO – Caitlyn Jenner, the gold-medal Olympian-turned reality TV personality, is considering another run for Governor of California. This time, she says, if she were to go up against Vice President Kamala Harris, she would “destroy her.”
Jenner, who publicly came out as transgender nearly 10 years ago, made a foray into politics when she ran as a Republican during the recall election that attempted to unseat Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2021. Jenner only received one percent of the vote and was not considered a serious candidate.
Jenner posted this week on social media that she’s having conversations with “many people” and hopes to have an announcement soon about whether she will run.
Caitlyn Jenner speaks at the 4th annual Womens March LA: Women Rising at Pershing Square on January 18, 2020 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Chelsea Guglielmino/Getty Images)
She has also posted in Trumpian-style all caps: “MAKE CA GREAT AGAIN!”
As for VP Harris, she has not indicated any future plans for when she leaves office. However, a recent poll suggests Harris would have a sizable advantage should she decide to run in 2026. At that point, Newsom cannot run again because of term limits.
If Jenner decides to run and wins, it would mark the nation and state’s first transgender governor.
California
Northern California 6-year-old, parents hailed as heroes for saving woman who crashed into canal
LIVE OAK — A six-year-old and her parents are being called heroes by a Northern California community for jumping into a canal to save a 75-year-old woman who drove off the road.
It happened on Larkin Road near Paseo Avenue in the Sutter County community of Live Oak on Monday.
“I just about lost her, but I didn’t,” said Terry Carpenter, husband of the woman who was rescued. “We got more chances.”
Terry said his wife of 33 years, Robin Carpenter, is the love of his life and soulmate. He is grateful he has been granted more time to spend with her after she survived her car crashing off a two-lane road and overturning into a canal.
“She’s doing really well,” Terry said. “No broken bones, praise the Lord.”
It is what some call a miracle that could have had a much different outcome without a family of good Samaritans.
“Her lips were purple,” said Ashley Martin, who helped rescue the woman. “There wasn’t a breath at all. I was scared.”
Martin and her husband, Cyle Johnson, are being hailed heroes by the Live Oak community for jumping into the canal, cutting Robin out of her seat belt and pulling her head above water until first responders arrived.
“She was literally submerged underwater,” Martin said. “She had a back brace on. Apparently, she just had back surgery. So, I grabbed her brace from down below and I flipped her upward just in a quick motion to get her out of that water.”
The couple said the real hero was their six-year-old daughter, Cayleigh Johnson.
“It was scary,” Cayleigh said. “So the car was going like this, and it just went boom, right into the ditch.”
Cayleigh was playing outside and screamed for her parents who were inside the house near the canal.
I spoke with Robin from her hospital bed over the phone who told us she is in a lot of pain but grateful.
“The thing I can remember is I started falling asleep and then I was going over the bump and I went into the ditch and that’s all I remember,” Robin said.
It was a split-second decision for a family who firefighters said helped save a stranger’s life.
“It’s pretty unique that someone would jump in and help somebody that they don’t even know,” said Battalion Chief for Sutter County Fire Richard Epperson.
Robin is hopeful that she will be released from the hospital on Wednesday in time to be home for Thanksgiving.
“She gets Thanksgiving and Christmas now with her family and grandkids,” Martin said.
Terry and Robin are looking forward to eventually meeting the family who helped save Robin’s life. The family expressed the same feelings about meeting the woman they helped when she is out of the hospital.
“I can’t wait for my baby to get home,” Terry said.
California
California may exclude Tesla from EV rebate program
California Gov. Gavin Newsom may exclude Tesla and other automakers from an electric vehicle (EV) rebate program if the incoming Trump administration scraps a federal tax credit for electric car purchases.
Newsom proposed creating a new version of the state’s Clean Vehicle Rebate Program, which was phased out in 2023 after funding more than 594,000 vehicles and saving more than 456 million gallons of fuel, the governor’s office said in a news release on Monday.
“Consumers continue to prove the skeptics wrong – zero-emission vehicles are here to stay,” Newsom said in a statement. “We’re not turning back on a clean transportation future – we’re going to make it more affordable for people to drive vehicles that don’t pollute.”
The proposed rebates would be funded with money from the state’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which is funded by polluters under the state’s cap-and-trade program, the governor’s office said. Officials did not say how much the program would cost or save consumers.
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They would also include changes to promote innovation and competition in the zero-emission vehicles market – changes that could prevent automakers like Tesla from qualifying for the rebates.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who relocated Tesla’s corporate headquarters from California to Texas in 2021, responded to the possibility of having Tesla EVs left out of the program.
“Even though Tesla is the only company who manufactures their EVs in California! This is insane,” Musk wrote on X, which he also owns.
BENTLEY PUSHES BACK ALL-EV LINEUP TIMELINE TO 2035
Those buying or leasing Tesla vehicles accounted for about 42% of the state’s rebates, The Associated Press reported, citing data from the California Air Resources Board.
Newsom’s office told Fox Business Digital that the proposal is intended to foster market competition, and any potential market cap is subject to negotiation with the state Legislature.
Ticker | Security | Last | Change | Change % |
---|---|---|---|---|
TSLA | TESLA INC. | 338.59 | -13.97 | -3.96% |
“Under a potential market cap, and depending on what the cap is, there’s a possibility that Tesla and other automakers could be excluded,” the governor’s office said. “But that’s again subject to negotiations with the legislature.”
Newsom’s office noted that such market caps have been part of rebate programs since George W. Bush’s administration in 2005.
Federal tax credits for EVs are currently worth up to $7,500 for new zero-emission vehicles. President-elect Trump has previously vowed to end the credit.
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California has surpassed 2 million zero-emission vehicles sold, according to the governor’s office. The state, however, could face a $2 billion budget deficit next year, Reuters reported, citing a non-partisan legislative estimate released last week.
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