From the California Water Impact Network (C-WIN):
In 2012, California passed the Human Right to Water Law (HRTW), the first state statute that defined water as a basic right. Widely heralded as landmark legislation in the campaign to provide equitable distribution of California’s most fundamental public trust resource, HRTW has improved the lives of hundreds of thousands of state residents.
But as detailed in an analysis by water policy expert Max Gomberg, HRTW has also suffered some dramatic setbacks. Most notably, writes Gomberg in Environmental Law News, a publication of the California Lawyers Association, the legislation has failed to quickly provide safe drinking water to a million state residents; it hasn’t provided promised water bill assistance to struggling families; and it hasn’t assured adequate water and sanitation access to homeless people.
Gomberg, an expert policy consultant to environmental justice advocacy organizations, including the California Water Impact Network, notes these failures are due to state regulators viewing violations of HRTW as mere “policy failures.” Underserved Central Valley communities, for example, have suffered dry wells from excessive groundwater pumping by large agricultural corporations; in other situations, local water districts have disconnected services to residents struggling to pay their water bills, another explicit violation of HRTW.
“Without a narrative of violation, government officials face relatively little pressure to devote enforcement resources toward upholding the law,” Gomberg writes. “Absent enforcement…water and agricultural agencies focus their resources on securing public monies to ‘socialize the losses’ stemming from their actions…administrative, funding, and legal processes drag out over the years.”
Such administrative stalling doesn’t simply reflect inept governance, observes Gomberg; it results in severe, extended human suffering.
“Justice delayed,” he states, “is justice denied.”
HRTW is valuable legislation, Gomberg concludes, but it must be enforced by the state, supported in the courts, and implemented by regulators.”The state is assuming authority over groundwater basin management from local agencies that have failed to submit adequate sustainability plans,” Gomberg says. “One of the key deficiencies in those plans is the failure to maintain supplies for domestic wells – and that speaks directly to the water access component of HRTW. For the courts to exercise effective authority, the state must first be willing to accept accountability and aggressively pursue violations of HRTW. The law means little if it is not rigorously enforced.”
CONTACT:
