Katie Porter

Last week my wife asked me if I would like to see ex California congresswoman and current gubernatorial candidate Katie Porter speak.

I eagerly said yes, as I have always liked her style and savvy and thought it was a shame she went up against Schiff in the last senatorial election.

It balkanized two excellent candidates. 

I didn't follow the race very closely but I guess it got pretty ugly in the end. 

Losing can be tough for any of us.

The meet and greet was put on by the Fallbrook Democratic Group of which I was once a member, about forty years ago when we had roughly ten people in the club. 

I left decades ago when I started hearing anti semitic comments and felt it was time to make my exit.

Truth be told I relinquished my Democratic party membership about a year ago and am greatly dissatisfied with both the right and the left. I guess I am a mostly liberal centrist that will rarely if ever tilt right.

Now the club has over three hundred members and I am told is one of the most robust clubs in the state.

There was one ticket left, seventy five bucks at the door and I claimed it.

The event was held at a beautiful home overlooking Fallbrook Winery, a place that as a teetotaler, I have never visited. 

We were brought up the steep drive in a golf car, past a lot of vitriolic signs castigating the current regime.

I love to see a little liberal passion in our notoriously conservative community.

I saw several people I knew and enjoyed talking to our host, Pepper, who used to be acquainted with my father in San Diego.

We met Katie and then heard her speak.

A Harvard and Yale educated lawyer, Porter originally hails from a farm family in Iowa.

She graduated magna cum laude and clerked for the eighth circuit court of Appeals under Richard S. Arnold.

She currently lives in Irvine and teaches law locally.

Porter is a self professed numbers nerd and has a penchant for getting into the economic nuts and bolts.

And this is where she lost me.

You see she started out her talk describing the underlying crisis in California as being the fact that our mean demographic is getting older.

We need more young people to take care of the old people and they are currently priced out of affordable housing.

We need to streamline permitting and regulation and build more units, environment be damned. Because there are too many forty year olds still living at home.

I waited for the question and answer period and asked her a question. We are facing a water crisis in Southern California, which is basically a high desert, have two pending rate increases on Colorado River water, where will we get the water for these new housing units?

She said that she is from Irvine and that they ar a model city. They evidently have purple pipes for recycling up there and better recycling and purple pipes would solve the problem.

Which is total malarkey.

The reality is that we have reached a tipping point for water, our California ecosystem and roads can only support so many more humans and that not everybody will be able to live in California. Unfortunately, the old people will have to fend for themselves. 

She says that we need more water pipeline projects. Sounds like the right wing signage I read up and down the central valley this weekend, screw the fish and the indians, give the water to corporate farms instead. 

In addition, our snowpack is reduced every year due to climate change and megadroughts. Aquifers have been depleted throughout our state and are not being recharged,

Interesting, her college thesis at Yale was titled The Effects of Corporate Farming on Rural Community. I wish I could have asked a follow up question. Because here we have a person from Orange County, trying to impose an Orange County solution on a rural community that would like to keep its character and generally loathes Orange County density. Frankly, if we wanted to live in Irvine we would.

At least the people here who have a clue who live on this side of Interstate 15. 

Katie Porter is a hammer who sees the rest of the world as a nail. I fear for our rural area's lifestyle and environment if her build at all costs mentality is allowed to transform and destroy our state and rural residents' quality of life. 

Where exactly will the water come from? One must be quite careful when trying to impose a malthusian economic solution to a quintessentially environmental problem.

What works in Irvine won't necessarily work in Fallbrook, Garberville, Santa Paula, Ramona or Ojai. And of course will never be seen in Rancho Santa Fe or Tiburon.