With help from Alex Nieves
WARD-WALLER SPEAKS: A top Caltrans official who was demoted last month says it was because she objected to highway expansions that will increase driving.
Jeanie Ward-Waller, Caltrans’ former deputy director of planning and modal programs, was taken off the job Sept. 14 — three weeks after she said she notified agency officials that she would file a whistleblower complaint about Sacramento-area road construction projects allegedly circumventing environmental rules.
Ward-Waller said in an interview — her first since her termination — that she had objected to two construction projects on Highway 80 because, she said, Caltrans’ state and federal permits improperly understated their environmental impacts.
“My job at Caltrans headquarters was really to help move us in a direction where we’re not widening highways so much anymore,” she said. “We care about climate, we care about equity, so we’re trying to move towards more multimodal options and do less widening.”
She said the projects in question, both over the Yolo Bypass between Davis and Sacramento, were improperly carved into two separate activities in order to downplay their impacts and minimize public awareness. She also said they were illegally using funding from the State Highway Operation and Protection Program, which is only supposed to pay for road maintenance, not widening.
Ward-Waller also alleged in a whistleblower complaint she said she filed Sept. 16 that such moves are commonplace in Caltrans’ District 3, which oversees the Sacramento area. The widening of the American River Bridge and the Sac 5 Corridor Enhancement Project on Interstate 5 are other examples, she said.
“This was somewhat their way of doing business,” she said.
Ward-Waller had been serving since 2020, when she was appointed by then-Caltrans Director Toks Omishakin, who’s now California transportation secretary. She was hired at Caltrans in 2017 as sustainability program manager and before that was policy director for the California Bicycle Coalition.
Caltrans offered Ward-Waller her old job back or one administrative level higher, which would still be a demotion. Her attorney, Christian Schreiber, said she’s still weighing her next steps, which could include a lawsuit.
Caltrans officials declined to comment on specifics but said they would “cooperate with any independent investigation into these claims.”
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PLAYING WITH FIRE: One of California’s most promising tools to limit catastrophic wildfires is facing the same troubled future as everything else in an era of rising temperatures.
Climate change is shrinking the number of days it’s safe to do prescribed fires, according to a study published today by UCLA scientist Daniel Swain and others.
The practice, long used by Indigenous peoples, lowers the risk that a spark ignites a catastrophic wildfire by eliminating unwanted and flammable brush. Conditions have to be just right: not so damp that it puts out the ignition, but not so dry or windy the fire blazes out of control.
Rising temperatures could reduce the number of days in this Goldilocks window by 17 percent overall by 2060, especially during spring and summer, according to the scientists’ calculations. Winter could see a 4 percent increase in the right conditions.
The forecast could help state, federal and tribal governments optimize the right window, especially as they start increasing their use of prescribed fire. Because it turns out newfound policy support isn’t enough to reverse a century of opposition to the Indigenous practice: Nature has to also be on your side.
Take this year as an example. This was supposed to be a banner year for prescribed fire. The Newsom administration funneled $70 million into the strategy in last year’s budget. It also set a goal to nearly quadruple the number of acres in the state that see prescribed fire every year.
But despite the momentum, there just wasn’t that much prescribed fire done this year, Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot recently told POLITICO. That’s because a record-breaking snowpack was still covering much of the forest this spring and early summer when weather conditions were prime for prescribed fire.
MYSTERY TO GREENS: Laphonza Butler, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s pick to finish out the rest of Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s term, is a cipher to most green groups, reports Timothy Cama of POLITICO’s E&E News.
“As far as I can see she has never said anything on climate,” R.L. Miller, president of Climate Hawks Vote, told E&E News in an email.
Still, many green groups like California Environmental Voters and League of Conservation Voters are welcoming Butler, reading her support for labor and abortion rights as indication that she will align with liberals on climate.
Agriculture and water advocates in California, accustomed to Feinstein’s record of working with farmers on water issues, might be disappointed. Joe Del Bosque, a cantaloupe farmer and high-profile advocate for the state’s agriculture sector, cited “concern” in the farming community that Butler is not a lifetime Californian and most recently lived in Maryland.
OIL SKIRMISH: Los Angeles regulators were scheduled this afternoon to consider modifying rules aimed at reining in an oil company that’s bankrolling next year’s ballot initiative to allow new oil and gas wells near homes and schools, but they pushed the vote to Oct. 17 after a commissioner recused themself due to a conflict of interest and a quorum couldn’t be established.
The South Los Angeles Area Planning Commission is considering an appeal to a March decision requiring E&B Natural Resources Management to build a 45-foot-tall structure around a South Los Angeles oil-drilling site and run all of its equipment on electric power, among other measures. The Murphy Drill Site is next to homes and a convalescent hospital.
The Bakersfield-based company has contributed nearly $3 million to the November 2024 referendum, which would repeal SB 1137, a law signed last year to ban new oil and gas wells near sensitive sites.
Today’s proposal would have slightly modified the original decision that E&B is appealing. Environmental groups, however, are raising concerns over new language that would allow the company to truck in natural gas to power microturbines on site in addition to using on-site supplies.
— Bay Area support for public transit isn’t quite what it used to be, according to a new poll.
— Another poll shows Americans might not be such NIMBYs after all.
— The U.S. military is one of the world’s largest carbon emitters — and one of the largest buyers of microgrids, like this one in Miramar, San Diego.
