Local ag industry braces for Affordable Care Act [Santa Maria Times]
Local
growers Greg and Donna France live and breathe the 700 acres of strawberries
they oversee in Santa Maria. First-generation farmers, the couple started Red
Dog Management and Mar Vista Berry, LLC in 2004, and it’s their pride and joy.
But lately their business — their passion – is also extremely confusing and
worrisome. “It is the fear of the unknown,” Greg said recently. “We don’t know
what’s going to happen.” Like the agricultural industry in general, the couple
is bracing for the time the Affordable Care Act will require the owners of
businesses like the France’s to offer health insurance plans to employees,
including field workers — a huge workforce that traditionally has mostly gone
without such benefits in the past.
Stanislaus
County Board of Supervisors puts off groundwater rules [Modesto Bee]
Stanislaus
County supervisors won’t take up a groundwater ordinance on Tuesday as
previously intended. The long-awaited ordinance dealing with groundwater
exports has been pushed back to Oct. 29…. The ordinance has been four years in
the making. Proponents maintain it will protect a vital resource by banning
out-of-county water sales and transfers that threaten to deplete aquifers.
Stanislaus would become the 29th county in California to adopt a groundwater
ordinance. The proposal has numerous exemptions for irrigation districts so
they are not restricted from pumping that’s consistent with sound use of
groundwater, officials have said.
Copper
thefts plague Yuba-Sutter [Yuba-Sutter Appeal Democrat]
David
Drown, of Town & Country Air Conditioning & Heating of Yuba City, was
working on a new house in Plumas Lake that was struck three times by copper
thieves. Copper piping and wires installed before the walls were finished had
been cut and stripped out, he said. The amount of copper stolen, by weight, was
probably less than $20 worth, Drown said. However, the crime cost him and the building
owner some $1,500 to re-install. Rising copper prices in the last few years
mean more incentives for people to steal copper.
Californians
want water issues fixed but not enough to pay for it [Los Angeles Times]
Californians
say the state's water supply system has serious problems that require
improvement, but they are unwilling to spend billions of dollars in ratepayer
and taxpayer funds on the task, according to a new USC Dornsife/Los Angeles
Times poll. The results suggest an uphill fight for proponents of a state water
bond and for a proposal to replumb the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the
transfer point for Northern California supplies delivered to the San Joaquin
Valley and urban Southern California. Reluctance to pay for big public works
projects was reflected throughout the survey, which also questioned voters on
the California prison system and the high-speed rail project.
Poll:
Voters turn against California bullet train [Associated Press]
A
new poll finds a majority of California voters want the $68-billion bullet
train project stopped and consider it a waste of money. A USC Dornsife/Los
Angeles Times survey published Saturday (http://lat.ms/14RvJqy
) found that 52 percent of voters say the project to link Los Angeles and San
Francisco by high-speed trains should be halted. Only 43 percent said it should
go forward.
Editorial: Water bond for
state, not North or South [San Francisco Chronicle]
Brown
water is rare in the state yet water quality concerns poll highly among
Californians. Clean water is viewed as a basic right (and no Californian wants
to think he or she lives in a state with Third World-quality water systems).
Clean, drinkable water for disadvantaged communities is the feel-good component
of both of the water bond bills proposed to replace the pork-laden $11 billion
measure now on the November 2014 ballot. The real elephant in the room,
however, is the governor's proposed twin tunnel project to improve the quality
and reliability of water exported from the delta. Should state taxpayers fund
the delta restoration improvements the plan requires, thus eliminating funding
for other kinds of regional water efficiency and improvement projects?
Ag
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