New Hope for a Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Fund for California?

Back in July I wrote an "RIP" post commemorating the death of the Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Fund, scuttled on June 8, 2018, during California state budget negotiations.

With the advent of a new governor, this fund has found new life.

Gavin Newsom budget calls for drinking water tax to help poor communities
(D. Kasler et al., Sacramento Bee, Jan. 10, 2019)

Applause for this initiative came from the Community Water Center, a proponent of the fund, per their Jan. 11, 2019, press release.

However, the opposition has not gone anywhere.

Despite record surplus, Gov. Newsom wants new water, phone taxes
(C. Reed, Cal Watchdog, Jan. 14, 2019)

Californians with bad water ask for help while opposition mounts to Newsom’s proposed tax
(M. Ashmun, Sacramento Bee, Feb. 7, 2019)

Neither have the proponents.

Read a Jan. 13, 2019, post "Shared interest in universal safe drinking water" by Dr. Jay Lund on the California WaterBlog, a blog maintained by the UC Davis’ Center for Watershed Sciences. Dr. Lund, Director of that center and UC Davis Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, doesn't explicitly promote the Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Fund, but does lay out the argument for having such a fund:

Prosperity and democracy together seem almost essential to having near-universal safe drinking water supplies.  Prosperity and democracy together bring effective social organization and resources needed to deliver safe and affordable drinking water. [...]  California’s failure to provide safe, affordable drinking water to the remaining roughly 1% of residents is probably the most solvable and affordable of California’s many difficult water problems.  There will always be isolated small systems with vexing problems, but the number of Californians currently without access to safe affordable drinking water is embarrassing and irresponsibly high.

Dr. Lund's Tweet promoting that blog post gives the moral of the story:

All water systems suffer when any drinking water system is unsafe.

The idea of "the human right to water," meanwhile, is progressing toward meaningful implementation in the state. This is taking form partly through a state report following on AB 685, asserting the human right to water in California. When Governor Brown signed AB 685 in 2012, California became "the first state in the nation to legislatively recognize the human right to water" per the California Water Board's web page "Human Right to Water Portal."

Comments on the draft report "A Framework and Tool for Evaluating California's Progress in Achieving the Human Right to Water" are due to the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment  (OEHHA) by 5 PM Feb. 19, 2019. The deadline was extended from Feb. 4 to Feb. 19 at the request of some of the opponents to that original Human Right to Water Bill, a water utility and the professional organization for California water utilities, the Association of California Water Agencies.

I'm pleased to see that comments are to be sent to:

HR2W
Attn: Carolina Balazs
Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment
1515 Clay Street, 16th Floor
Oakland, CA 94612

I saw Carolina Balazs present her impressive research on water quality issues in the San Joaquin Valley when I was a policy Master's student and she was a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley. She worked with the Community Water Center during her research, and then was a staff research scientist at the CWC starting in 2012. Her research was used to support the CWC's campaign to pass the Human Right to Water bill (AB 685). She is uniquely well-suited (well-trained and well-informed) to be the broker of the process by which that bill turns into action.

What is the human right to water? 

The United Nations General Assembly recognized "the ‘human right to sanitation’ as a distinct right, together with the ‘human right to safe drinking water’" on Dec. 18, 2015 (per UN High Commissioner for Human Rights press release). There is an interesting 2016 PowerPoint titled "The Human Rights to Water and Sanitation : Progress in theory and practice" on the website for the High Commissioner for Human Rights. It appears to be from a presentation by Léo Heller, Special Rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation, including slides on the legal basis for the human rights to water and sanitation, and where they stand in regard to the various related UN development goals (MDGs, SDGs).

See my previous post on the passage of AB 685 in 2012.