Full Transcript

Felicia Marcus:
… but water keeps drawing me back. I didn’t choose to go back to it. I got put on the Delta Stewardship Council, was drawn in to help mediate some legislation that was going through to reform the Delta. And I didn’t ask to be brought in, I got dragged back in and same is true of the state water board. So it just seems to be a place where at least some people think I can add a little bit of value and I like being helpful. I’m fully in now, and focused on it by choice.

Jay Famiglietti:
Hi everyone. Welcome back to Let’s Talk About Water. This is a podcast about the future of our planet’s water and why you should care. I’m your host, Jay Famiglietti. Well, we’re all few weeks into those new year’s resolutions. Now maybe you’re trying to move your body more after a long day at your desk. Stop drinking that fourth or fifth cup of coffee, or you’re trying to make some time for some calm and reflection in your day. For me, I’m trying to jog every other day. Today was my first fail by the way, and it’s only the middle of January. Well, either way, we’re all hoping to improve in some way. Today, I’m asking you to make one quick resolution with me because I know that one thing that really needs improving by everyone is our relationship with water. So let’s make a quick resolution to learn something new about water and water policy this year.

Jay Famiglietti:
Earth is trying hard to keep up with humanity’s water needs, but really, it’s just too much. Every time you turn on the tap or flush the toilet or take a shower or wash your clothes, that water must be treated, transported, heated, and returned back to the system to do it all over again. That process takes a lot of energy. And with climate change, some regions will experience drought and water scarcity, which means less water for people, for the environment and to grow food.

Jay Famiglietti:
The need for integrated and collaborative water management will only become stronger. With me today to talk about water management and policy is an expert, a dear friend and colleague, Felicia Marcus. Felicia is an attorney and consultant who has a very distinguished background in water management and policy. I know Felicia from her time as chair of the California State Water Resources Control Board during the state’s worst drought in recent history. She previously served as regional administrator of the USCPA region nine, the Pacific Southwest region. She is currently the Landreth visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Water in the West program and a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. It’s so great to have you on the podcast, Felicia. I think last time we saw each other back when people were actually traveling, we were in Tel Aviv.

Felicia Marcus:
I think that’s right. That’s correct.

Jay Famiglietti:
And here we are. So you mentioned you’re a part-time academic. So you are a visiting fellow at Stanford University, Water in the West. What are you doing there? How’s that going?

Felicia Marcus:
It’s great. It’s this wonderful fellowship that William Landreth, who’s a wonderful man set up. And the goal is to bring people from the outside world into Stanford to be a part of the mix. To bring in practitioners or people from other academic institutions. And historically it’s been for a three-month full-time or six months halftime. But I’ll be there well over a year, which allows me the chance to do more interesting longer term projects. It’s also a chance to write a thing or to teach a class or whatever you like.

Felicia Marcus:
My main issues for my self study are all climate adaptation and water, regulatory reform, water rights, a little bit on California water specifically, but not as much as you might think. It’s more focusing on the things I didn’t have a chance to deal with when I was dealing with drought and Bay Delta. But the other projects deal with everything from ecosystem restoration and climate and the overlap and the opportunities a land use and water, dam removal of all of those tens of thousands of small dams that don’t get the headlines, but make a big difference and thinking about new tools to protect in stream flows and rivers. So it’s going to be a busy year, but really I think very interesting and challenging intellectually. And hopefully I’ll do some useful work that other people can use.

Jay Famiglietti:
It sounds really interesting. But you were talking about your career and there’s a couple of questions I want to ask you. How did you get into water and water policy? So, you’re going to school, you’re going to law school, you’re going to college. And when did you say, “Wow, I’m going to focus on water.”?

Felicia Marcus:
Well, water kind of found me. I’m more of a expert generalist and in college I majored in East Asian studies, had nothing to do with this. And then I fell into environmental work, which is a longer story, which is why I became a lawyer. And when I [inaudible 00:05:42] clerked and then I was in a fellowship at the Center for Law and Public Interest. And I was just doing intake one day, and someone from the Sierra Club came in on behalf of what they were calling the coalition to stop sewage into the ocean and said they needed a lawyer. And I said, “Well, okay, I’ll go to your hearing at the regional water board, over the city of LA’s application to get a waiver of full secondary treatment.” Which is the treatment standard for ocean dischargers. And I walked down there and one of the people who the main organizer of this coalition was a woman named Dorothy Green, who I had known on the phone from before I went to law school as a water activist.

Felicia Marcus:
And I had done work on things like the ocean and all that, but it wasn’t my core thing. And she pretty much handed me her testimony and said, “I have to leave. Will you give this?” And that’s how I became her lawyer. I’ve read it first of course, before I did it. And I became one of the founders of Heal the Bay. So really, sewage was my entry drug into the water world pretty much. And it’s fascinating actually. So we were captivated by the issue, but also by the complexity. And then that led to being involved in other things. In some ways I got more involved in the water supply issues when I went to USCPA and we had to set standards for the Bay Delta, which someone had to draw on a napkin for me when I took the job to let me know what I was getting into.

Felicia Marcus:
So, you never know. I’ve done air and toxics and land use. I mean, I’m pretty much ecumenical on issues. I’m more like solving problems and issues. But water keeps drawing me back. I didn’t choose to go back to it. I got put on the Delta Stewardship Council, was drawn in to help mediate some legislation that was going through to reform the Delta. And I didn’t ask to be brought in, I got dragged back in and same is true in the state water board. So it just seems to be a place where at least some people think I can add a little bit of value and I like being helpful. I’m fully in now and focused on it by choice.

Jay Famiglietti:
No, I know you’re fully in. I know that you’re a huge supporter of equity, diversity and inclusion, and of getting more women involved in environmental careers and water related careers and water leadership. So what advice do you have for young women who, say they’re in high school or college, and they’re thinking about what to do for their careers?

Felicia Marcus:
Well, the environmental field, I think is an important one to be in because it’s about us. It’s about everything. It’s connected to everything, whether you’re interested in science or business or advocacy or being a lawyer or being in communications, we needed it all. And so being involved, there are a lot of different pathways. I think 30, 40 years ago, when a lot of us were getting into the field, we had to kind of invent it ourselves. Now there are majors that are mindbogglingly interesting in terms of combining different things. Geographers and geologists and hydrogeologists. And so you can sort of create a life where you take the kinds of things you like to do and marry them with the real world. And I’m a big fan of doing something where you can have an impact in your community and in the world, both because we certainly need the help, but also because it’s very empowering and enriching in one’s life.

Felicia Marcus:
And so, that mix of what you do for the world and what you do for yourself can come together really well in this field. And I think you’re going to start seeing real opportunities for creative, flexible thinkers, to figure out how to improve their communities by figuring out how to get what Ellen Hannick at PPIC calls, more pop per drop from the top of the watershed to the bottom, which of course is an ancient concept. Historically, it’s only in the last, I don’t know, 100 years that we’ve divorced ourselves from reality so much that we look at water in silos of the flood control people, the drinking water people, the wastewater people and others. If you look holistically at it, you can get way more good for society and the earth out of the same drop of water than the paradigm we’ve been operating under where the flood control folks try to get it out to sea as fast as possible.

Felicia Marcus:
And it ends up carrying all the pollutants on all our city streets. And meanwhile, you’re importing water through pipes and pumping it from hundreds of miles away to get it to a given city, when in fact you can capture it, reuse it, sink it back into the ground, green your city, slow the flow for flood control and have a much better quality of life. That’s all opening up. The one place where I think the world is getting more complex in the long run is for people who want to keep things narrow and just do their one set of widgets and hope that if they do their widgets perfectly and everybody else does, it’ll get clean out there, which it won’t.

Jay Famiglietti:
So maybe we need a new saying, like away with widgets.

Felicia Marcus:
Away with widgets, yes.

Jay Famiglietti:
Away with widgets. Let us now talk about your work as chair of the California State Water Resources Control Board. And I always marveled at the work that you did because you were doing it through this epic drought of the last decade. And I just saw tremendous output from you in terms of energy, enthusiasm, and a positive attitude, way more positive than mine. I want to know when you look back at it, how you feel about the work that you did, maybe talk to us about some of the accomplishments and have you recovered? I mean that must’ve taken a tremendous toll on all of Felicia.

Felicia Marcus:
That’s very thoughtful and thank you for the compliment. Yeah, but I planned for that. The key thing in that that was good was we went straight to the public and we put out all the data. I was very proud of how we put out the data. So it wasn’t just us holding the data and making decisions, everybody could see our data, which I think is a really important way to democratize a conversation and people could see how their own city was doing, which their own city might not have been telling them in comparison to other cities they felt like comparing themselves to. And the public responded very well. And some agencies really did a great job. Metropolitan Water District put out over $400 million in lawn rebates to help work a paradigm shift. And those got snapped up, every batch of that got snapped up in weeks. Because folks realized they didn’t need that much lawn and other folks who realized that it was hard to kill a lawn.

Felicia Marcus:
And it’s bounced back a little, which is not inappropriate, but it’s still down 15, 20, still 25% in some places. So once you learn, you don’t need to use that much water you don’t. And then we got legislation passed to kind of formalize a more thoughtful way of doing it in the long-term. The other thing that I’m proud of is what we did on recycling and that I give Gary darling from then from Delta Diablo, a lot of credit for coming to us and then working with the Water Reuse Association to give us estimates of how many projects were out there on the drawing board that could get into construction if we gave them a lower interest rate. And we ended up, make a long story short, we put a billion and a half dollars out in grants and loans during the drought to incentivize actually doing those projects.

Felicia Marcus:
And on stormwater, we are experimenting with some flexibilities to help incentivize that really hard multi-benefit work on the ground. And all eyes on LA County, larger than the city in their passage of a $300 million a year measure that you’ll see LA transform, in terms of far more green space, recharge urban resilience with the city of LA and Mayor Garcetti, really being leaders in setting goals for 100% recycling of their wastewater and reducing their dependence on imported water by 70%, all in the next 15 years. So, it’s going to be massive. So from a Malcolm Gladwell tipping point standpoint, we’ve got enough early adopters that are going to do a good job, that they can bring their peers along and you can leave government to deal with the true laggards, rather than government having to implement everything from on high, which may feel righteous, but isn’t going to get you the same result as you will, if you empower local leadership.

Jay Famiglietti:
So, let’s talk a little bit about the transition to the new administration in the United States. By the time this show goes out, President-elect Joe Biden will be the president. What do you foresee happening in water policy under President Biden?

Felicia Marcus:
I have a lot of optimism that we will see a greater focus on water and water policy than we’ve probably ever seen. I think the time is now. Flint has something to do with that. I think you’ll see attention to that. There’s already more attention to the issue of drinking water on tribal lands, which is close to my heart and something some of my friends are working on very actively right now. I have great hopes in the infrastructure arena for a few reasons. One is when he talked about the infrastructure bill in one of his talks lately, he said an infrastructure bill for water, transportation, whatever. Not only is the first time I ever heard water used when people talk about an infrastructure bill that would be holistic, as opposed to when you’re just doing the Corps of Engineers budget or things like that.

Felicia Marcus:
But he put it first. And I tweeted, “He said water first.” And a lot of people knew what I was talking about. That’s all I said, I didn’t attach it to anything. And he had an infrastructure working group co-chaired by the head of the US Water Alliance, Radika Fox, who’s one of the bright stars of the next generation of environmental leaders, who’s an integrative thinker. The whole organization is geared around progressive water agencies that want to do one water. Drinking water, flood control, wastewater, recycling the whole gamut. So I’m hoping that will influence what they do. And my big hope is that because he’s making climate a number one priority across all agencies, that this will be our opportunity to finally bring climate adaptation to the fore, which is way overdue. I think in the environmental world and elsewhere we made a mistake of focusing on climate mitigation, meaning reducing emissions to the exclusion of adaptation, because I think some people looked at it as capitulation.

Felicia Marcus:
And I think that’s a mistake for two reasons. One is people are going to get hurt. They’re going to die and their property damage and all of that from this. So delaying in adapting is wrong. Number two, I think the adaptation stories put a higher real-world visibility on the impacts of climate change, which can drive and motivate more calls for mitigation. We’ll see. So the opportunity is there. The parallel is that as usual, it doesn’t have the same geopolitical clash of the titans that you have in air quality and climate regulation, or even in toxics. And so it gets left to being an afterthought.

Felicia Marcus:
Oh, wait. One more thing, technology. There is this revolution in water technology just as there is an environmental technology, generally that needs to be accelerated. And the federal government can do that very well, in addition to setting standards again, and the things that haven’t happened in the last administration that can save all of us time and energy, because it’s hard even for California to do all the research on all of these things. But I think there’s this opportunity to do incubation and acceleration and sharing of knowledge about the revolution in sensors for quality and infrastructure repair. We can do way more infrastructure work at less cost today than we could have.

Jay Famiglietti:
Ironically, I was just about to ask you, but they’re on these same topics that you’ve already started speaking to. So what are some examples of key innovations in the water sector that you’ve seen?

Felicia Marcus:
Well, there’s a whole suite of sort of big data and sensing technologies. The kinds of things that you were doing at NASA that give you a visual. And again, I’m an organizer, there’s huge power in a visual. It’s not just about words. Same thing as why I think the visuals in the stories around adaptation are more compelling than talking about parts per million in the atmosphere or degrees centigrade temperature rise. Because it just makes it real to real people, which has far more power. All those data visualization tools, the ability to use AI to be predictive in a more fine-grained way, as opposed to using management by calendar for everything, whether it’s flood control and flood levels or even ecosystem restoration rate. We’ll be able to manage with far more precision. You have a revolution in taking that data and getting it to people’s iPhones. So you can help farmers put out just the right amount of water as opposed to too much water, which is good.

Jay Famiglietti:
We’re actually working on that kind of stuff. It’s very rich.

Felicia Marcus:
I love that stuff.

Jay Famiglietti:
We’ve talked a little bit about infrastructure, but what do you think are some key infrastructure needs where you live right now or in California?

Felicia Marcus:
Well, I think the most exciting thing and the most important thing is integrating nature-based solutions, because it solves more problems, and one, we don’t have unlimited dollars. But also, we can solve a lot of problems with concrete, for sure, but we’ll live in a gray stale environment and there are downsides. So the most exciting thing happening here is a whole funding measure, Measure AA that was passed to spend $500 million on nature-based solutions, horizontal levies, and wetland restoration, rather than seawalls around San Francisco Bay. All of a sudden you will see better use of water, you’ll see protection of property, but you’ll see more beautiful places for people to take their kids and walk their dogs and connect to nature. We could clean up every micron of pollution and we’d live in a gray dull existence. So unless we connect nature and people, we’re missing a really important part of what it means to be a person.

Jay Famiglietti:
I want to wrap it up as follows, Felicia. For our listeners, you and I have often spoken together sometimes one right after the other, I think maybe the last time almost at the same time, it might’ve been in OHI in California.

Felicia Marcus:
Yeah, probably.

Jay Famiglietti:
Beautiful visit we had there. And Felicia, when the two of us go back to back, sometimes refers to us as a glass half empty and that’s me, and a glass half full and that’s Felicia. And so I want to know, are you still feeling like the glass is still half full?

Felicia Marcus:
Oh, the glass is more full. As much as I’m heartbroken by some of the stasis on the Bay Delta fish versus farmers and other water users arena in California, I see this uptick in technology. I see much more interest in water than we had. And so I’m in the optimist camp. And I’ve had the chance to spend more time, by choice, working with local leaders in both my Stanford work and my consulting work. Southern California, the goals for recycling and stormwater capture are massive. Even with the metropolitan water district proposing what will be even bigger than Orange County, the biggest water recycling project in the world with engagement across all of Southern California and even Las Vegas and potentially Arizona. And so to me, that’s breathtakingly exciting.

Jay Famiglietti:
It’s like your glasses almost overflowing.

Felicia Marcus:
No. There’s so far to go. We’re not at all at … there’s no spillage in my immediate future.

Jay Famiglietti:
Okay. I think maybe I’ve become cautiously optimistic and I’m less pessimistic compared to how I was maybe 10 years ago. And part of that’s just seeing all the progress that was made in particular in California. So thanks very much, Felicia. Felicia Marcus is a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Water in the West program, a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and the former chair of the California State Water Resources Control Board. She’s also my friend and esteemed colleague. It was a pleasure chatting with you today, Felicia.

Felicia Marcus:
Well, it’s always great. And this was really fun. Thank you to you and your team for setting it up. I’m truly honored.

Jay Famiglietti:
Thank you so much. And just like that, we’ve accomplished our resolution, learning something new about water and water water policy.

Jay Famiglietti:
Well, that’s it for another week of Let’s Talk About Water, which is produced by the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan with the Walrus Lab. I’m your host, Jay Famiglietti. Thanks to everyone who helped put the show together, including Mark Ferguson, Laura MacFarlane, Amy Hergert, Jesse Widow, Sean Ahmed, Stacy Demanski, Aaron Stevens, Nicky Manfretti and our producer, Sean Purbeck. And as always special, thanks to Linda Lilienfeld. I know you won’t want to miss what we have in store for you coming up. So why don’t you make it easy for yourself and set an alert, so you’ll know the moment a new episode drops. Remember, we’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and many other quality podcasting platforms. You can also stream us on Facebook at Let’s Talk About Water Podcast, or follow us on Twitter @LTAWpodcast. See you next time.

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