Water Number: Here are four key unaddressed issues:

1. The State must still figure out how to measure, monitor, and report every single water use. As stunning as it may seem to outsiders, we still aren't measuring and metering all water uses, and the new legislation doesn't require us to. Imagine that you had a bank account, but you didn't know how much money was in it, you didn't know how much money was going in each month, and you didn't know how much was being taken out. That's our water use situation. And while that ignorance benefits some special interests, it is irresponsible. The modest requirements for comprehensive monitoring groundwater levels in earlier versions of the bill were fatally weakened at the last minute and there are still no requirements for reporting actual groundwater use or all other uses.

2. The State Water Resources Control Board, responsible for overseeing water rights, enforcing allocations, and preventing water theft and unreasonable use is far too weak. I've written about this earlier. The Board is hamstrung by politics and budget constraints. The new bill does not fix those problems and, in the worst case of last minute, back-room dealing, the modest efforts to strengthen the Board's ability to monitor, enforce, and penalize were stripped out or severely weakened.

3. Some bill supporters claim the bill will "implement the Governor's call to improve water use efficiency by 20 percent by 2020." If only that were true. Very modest targets for improving water-use efficiency were set in the bill for urban users only, and even these are not mandatory or enforceable. More outrageously, however, no such targets were set for agriculture, which uses 80% of the water used by humans in California. Agriculture remains largely unaccountable for how they use water.

4. The only sustainable way to support effective water management is through a user fee on water use. In the long run, asking the voters for bond after bond will not work. We pay for electricity; we pay for milk. The more we use, the more we pay. All users should pay a fee for water use based on the volume of water used. This too was stripped out of early versions of the legislation.