Gov. Brown aims to aid the poorest

New state budget proposal includes an income tax credit for families earning $13,870 or less a year.

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Jerry Brown, who has faced criticism for not doing more to combat persistent poverty in California, will include a new tax credit for the state’s poorest families in his revised budget plan Thursday.

The change would keep more money in the pockets of 825,000 families and reduce the state’s revenue by $380 million, according to administration estimates.

The proposal, known as an earned income tax credit, would help the state’s poorest residents on a sliding scale, based on their wages and how many children they have. No one earning more than $13,870 a year would qualify.

The average qualifying household would gain $460 a year. The maximum credit, for families with three or more children, would be $2,653.

“In a time when the economy is doing well, we have a lot of people who aren’t doing well,” said an administration official, who requested anonymity because most details of the budget are being kept under wraps until Brown announces them. “We’ve heard a lot from the Legislature … and we know this is important.”

By proposing the tax credit, which would be available for the first time next year, Brown is taking a more active approach to poverty in California. The move aligns him with fellow Democrats in the Assembly, who have made such a credit one of their priorities for budget negotiations this year.

“The governor decided he wanted to take some kind of action in the budget, something that addressed this issue of poverty,” the administration official said. “He decided this was the most effective way.”

The federal government allows an earned income tax credit that applies to people earning up to about $50,000, depending on how many children they have. In 2013,

runs dry. It has the second strongest water flow in the West, behind only the Columbia.

The San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers merge in the delta, east of San Francisco, where water is pumped south through federal and state aqueducts to valley farms and cities, including Los Angeles. What water’s left flows through San Francisco Bay to the sea, often carrying salmon for the coastal fishing industry.

The delta also is part of the Central Valley. But it has about as much in common with the San Joaquin as Long Beach does with Lancaster, although both are in L.A. County.

The importance in all this is that it’s much drier — and more water-gulping for crops — in the southern Central Valley than in the north.

Look how the average annual rainfall increases from south to north: 6.5 inches in Bakersfield, 11.5 in Fresno, 18.5 in Sacramento, 26.7 in Chico, 34.6 in Redding. That’s a 28-inch spread from very dry to very wet.

Temperatures don’t vary as dramatically, but it is hotter in the south than in the north. July high and low thermometer readings in Bakersfield are 97 and 71, in Sacramento 92 and 58, in Chico 94 and 61. That means less evaporation of irrigation water as you move north.

It all calculates to a greater need for irrigation in the south than in the north.

“You and I are going to drink more water in Bakersfield than in Colusa,” says Daniel Sumner, director of the Agricultural Issues Center at UC Davis. “Plants can store up more water in the north.”

Numbers have been compiled by Josue MedellinAzuara, senior researcher at the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences. He figures it takes 4 acre-feet of irrigation water to grow an acre of almonds or pistachios in the Tulare Basin, where nut orchards have expanded the most in the last decade.

In the rest of the San Joaquin Valley, it requires 3.4 acre-feet. But in the Sacramento Valley, these nuts need only 2.4 acre-feet. That’s a difference of roughly one acre-foot, or nearly 326,000 gallons, enough to supply two households for a year.

There are 916,000 acres of almond and pistachio trees in the semi-arid San Joaquin, Medellin-Azuara says, but only 162,000 acres in the wetter Sacramento Valley.

The Sacramento used to be the main producer of these nuts, but when the federal and state water projects brought irrigation to the San Joaquin, the increasingly profitable and exported crops took off there.

Stone fruit — apricots, peaches, cherries — also require more irrigation in the south than in the north, 3.8 acre-feet compared with 2.8. Same with alfalfa, nearly 5 acre-feet contrasted with 4.

There’s also the problem in the south of over-pumping aquifers. In parts of the San Joaquin, the groundwater table has plunged 150 feet in the last 15 years and the land itself is sinking a foot a year.

Not so in the Sacramento Valley.

“It’s in really good shape,” says Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California and former director of the UC Davis watershed center. “When it rains again, that valley will recover much more quickly.”

In past columns, I have suggested that the state consider regulating crops based on their water demands and location. Gov. Jerry Brown flatly rejects that notion.

“You’re not the only person saying that,” Mount told me. “But it’s not said in polite company.”

The regulating will happen indirectly anyway within the next generation, he says, when new groundwater controls are implemented.

That can’t happen soon enough.