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Posts By: Dave Puglia

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Elections in a Deep Blue State

Into yet another election year we lurch. In California, battle lines are being drawn in key races and around key ballot measures. Perhaps well over $1 billion will be spent on political campaigns large and small across the state, with obscene sums thrown at the marquee contests for governor and U.S. Senator. Having been in ...

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California Legislature Reflects on June Election Signals

In June, California voters made the first cuts among a multitude of candidates seeking statewide and legislative offices in both Congress and the state legislature. Under the state’s relatively new top-two election reform, the term “primary election” is no longer quite accurate, as that term refers to a closed process whereby partisans of each party ...

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The Case for Political Action

Every issue of this magazine includes a column on government affairs, known less formally as lobbying. There is good reason for this; while members of Western Growers look to the association for a variety of business services, at its core Western Growers is here to advocate for its members on public policy issues. Many, if ...

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Implementing California’s Groundwater Management Law in a Silo

Across California, landowners, water managers and local government officials are struggling to develop sweeping plans to bring more than 100 groundwater basins and sub-basins into compliance with the most dramatic change to the state’s water laws in over a century. In the few short years since the passage of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), ...

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From One Very Interesting Year to Another

As I complete my 15th year with Western Growers, I am filled with gratitude and anticipation. On February 1, I take over as President and CEO. In just about every way possible, 2020 will be an unusually interesting year, and I am eager to jump in. The last year was also unusually interesting, as I ...

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To Push California Forward, Pull Back from the Brink

Once again, the State of California has launched a legal assault against the federal government, this time over the latter’s modernization of the failed regulatory policies that have, since 2008, hobbled the state’s water storage and conveyance systems by basing diversion decisions in the Delta on static and scientifically-flawed rules. Those rules have failed the ...

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Through the Looking-Glass

In his sequel to Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll depicts a fantastical world in which his heroine finds that, like a reflection in a mirror, everything is reversed, including logic. Since Through the Looking-Glass was published in 1871, the idiom has come to describe situations where you find the opposite of what is normal or ...

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Change is Upon Us; Change is Elusive

“Change is inevitable.” Like many clichés, this one suggests a certainty of outcome, but is it? Is change—in the aftermath of a historic global pandemic that took many thousands of lives and crashed a vibrant economy—really inevitable in all sectors of our society? We know with certainty that the COVID-19 pandemic will change our industry ...

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Welcome, President Biden

What is the Biden Administration’s agenda and how will our industry fare? Here’s a short and unsatisfying answer: We’ll all find out together. Often, an incoming President’s priorities are discerned from the campaign. Presidential candidates can create a governing mandate by defining their candidacy around a clear and unambiguous policy agenda. While the Biden campaign ...

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Words Matter

“Words matter,” begins Michael Mandelbaum, professor emeritus of American foreign policy at Johns Hopkins University, and former faculty member at Harvard University, Columbia University and the U.S. Naval Academy. He continues on, “especially words defining complicated political arrangements, because they shape perceptions of the events of the past, attitudes toward policies being carried…

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An Aisle or a Wall?

In American politics, the term “aisle” refers to the ideological and partisan differences that separate the two major parties. Interestingly, the term is rooted in the actual physical division of Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. Senate, where the desks are arranged in a semicircle with a wide central aisle. As viewed from the presiding ...

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The Enviros’ Water Paradox

Two things struck me recently as I thought about the water headaches that afflict many California farmers, especially those in the San Joaquin Valley. First up, the matter of “drought.” We all noted with concern the dry fall season, which understandably raised concerns about another drought, and predictably journalists and environmentalists who focus on water ...

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Big Leagues for California Ballot Initiatives

Remember Big Green? Probably less than 1 percent of all Californians do. But I bet many of you remember the 1990 ballot initiative sponsored by environmental activists. The Big Green Initiative (Proposition 128) proposed an aggressive suite of far-reaching regulations and restrictions on several sectors of California’s economy—especially agriculture. Whether you remember Big Green or ...

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President’s Notes: Lessons Learned?

Business owners and their employees are constantly seeking to learn from successes and mistakes in order to improve their products, processes and service. Adaptation to get better is a never-ending commitment. Those who fail to make that commitment are likely to fall by the wayside as competitors charge ahead. Government, on the other hand…well, let’s ...

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President’s Notes: Build it, Dam it!

By Dave Puglia, Western Growers President/CEO I recently wrote of the rhetorical shift in California water policy from “water supply reliability” to “water resiliency.” With more than 88 percent of the state in extreme or exceptional drought and many of our reservoirs hitting historic lows just two years after being completely full, we see what ...

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PRESIDENT’S NOTES: About the “California Exodus”

Raise your hand if you know someone who has moved out of California in the last several years. I see a lot of hands out there. Over the last year or so, there has been an interesting bit of back-and-forth over whether California is in the middle of an “exodus,” more specifically a quickening flight ...

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President’s Notes: The Case for Optimism

By Dave Puglia, President & CEO How do we keep our spirits up in times like this? How does one find reasons for optimism when so much is going wrong? Over the course of my nearly 17 years at Western Growers, I have learned that being around farmers long enough will temper even the most ...

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President’s Notes: A Resilient American Food System

By Dave Puglia, WG President and CEO Back in July 2020, I wrote in this column about the increasing use of the term “resilience” in water policy circles. Looking back at that column, I wondered if I had been a little snarky and dismissive. After all, we all want and need a water infrastructure and ...

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President’s Notes: Dewatering California’s Central Valley… Don’t Laugh; They’re Serious

In a recent blog post, the respected Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) suggests a startling future for the Central Valley. Noting that “a significant amount of irrigated farmland… will need to come out of production over the next two decades” due to drought and implementation of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), the writer ...

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President’s Notes: A Sharper Focus on American Food and Farm Policy

By Dave Puglia, President and CEO, Western Growers Among the more irritating adages used in political discourse is: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” It is often applied inappropriately, kind of like: “Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting over,” which is both painfully overused and mistakenly attributed to Mark Twain. And ...

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