UCSD Researcher: 'Bee Safe' Label May Not Live Up To Promise And More Local News

Speaker 1: 00:00 Good morning. It's April 12th. I'm Deb Welsh and are listening to San Diego News matters. Uh, San Diego researcher says a recently developed pesticide sold as a be safe product. May still put the winged pollinators at risk. KPBS environment reporter Eric Anderson has details. Speaker 2: 00:18 Savannah is considered a next generation pesticide that doesn't expose bees to the same threat. The most popular pesticides currently on the market do its been in use since 2014 but UC San Diego researcher James Nye says research developed in his lab shows a different outcome when the pesticide is applied at the same time as other chemicals. That control fun guy. Speaker 3: 00:41 Basically this funk aside with flu period. If Round Avanto which is sold as be safe together, they can actually significantly increase these Jeff and also their abnormal behaviors. Speaker 2: 00:54 Nice says he's cautious about any product that claims to be a silver bullet, killing only harmful pasts and preserving good things. The findings are published in the current edition of the Journal, the proceedings of the Royal Society, Eric Anderson, KPBS news, Speaker 1: 01:09 San Diego Mirror, Kevin Faulkner has announced his proposed budget for the next fiscal year. KPB As Metro reporter Andrew Bowen says it represents more than $4 billion of spending. Faulkner wants to continue funding for city homeless programs and keep library hours at current levels. He also says it's the largest infrastructure investment in city history. Speaker 4: 01:29 We've quadrupled our capital improvement program to more than $700 million since I first took office for neighborhood infrastructure projects that will benefit residents across the street city for decades to come. Speaker 1: 01:45 The vast majority of that increased infrastructure spending is related to water and sewage. There's one big issue. Faulkner did not budget for complying with a court order to pay city employees left out of the pension program. It's unclear how much that will cost, but it likely will not be cheap. Andrew Bowen, Kpbs News, the San Diego Fleet football team cut their season short after suspending operations earlier this month. KPBS report or Matt Hoffman spoke with one local business owner who's still looking to get paid for what he did for the team. Speaker 5: 02:17 Iq graphics has been making posters, banners, flyers, and business cards. Since 1996 a mere Rezai and his father run the business and were approached by the San Diego Fleet last October for a number of projects. Speaker 4: 02:29 Well, it all their schedule stuff. Um, but it's small pocket, a pocket signage that is like, um, they just give out to people with fifth day or the day, the roster and the leak information, all of stuff that comes with it. Speaker 5: 02:42 The team paid for its early orders, but as the work began increasing, the payments stopped coming. Then the league suspended operations, Speaker 4: 02:49 we had business about $23,000 and they owe us $22,000. It's massive because we are a small operation where mom pop shop, we have four employees. My biggest thing is like, we pay our vendors, we pay our employees for a service that I provide. Uh, you know, I, they do for me and I expected that back from them and they just didn't. Speaker 6: 03:11 Rezai says he's reached out multiple times to lead contacts about getting paid. He's also talking to a lawyer and weighing his legal options. Matt Hoffman Kpbs News. Speaker 1: 03:21 After suspending operations. The league said it's committed to working on solutions for all outstanding issues. Route 66 was once called the main street of America where people drove cross country to get their kicks, but that all changed in the 1980s when interstate 40 bypass 66 and lots of places along the route turned to ghost towns. A federal grant program has tried to save them, but it's accepting his last grant applications today from the front terrorist desk in Flagstaff. Laura Morales reports in the 1950s and sixties half a million people a year traveled route 66 Williams, Arizona was the last town along the mother road to be bypassed by interstate 40 in 1984 two decades later when entrepreneur Mike Bessler arrived, the town was still depressed. A lot of businesses went out and it was a lot of storefronts over empty. But thanks in part to a federal grant program. Speaker 1: 04:16 Bessler and other business owners have brought back the tourists best learn. His wife owned a souvenir shop and Williams a decade ago. The best lawyers want a $6,000 federal grant to help fix the out of date electricity and their century old store. The grant was part of the route 66 corridor preservation program authorized by Congress. Now it's unclear whether lawmakers will renew it. K Sub r Thuli manages the program for the National Park Service. We've been able to work with mom and pop owners to help restore and bring new life into the community. The program's term is up in September, but congress is considering legislation that would designate route 66 a national historic trail and provide a new funding source. I'm Laurel Morella said Flagstaff, California. Senator Kamala Harris has proposed what she says is a landmark middle class tax cut capital. Public radio is politifact reporter Chris Nichols. As more on how the plan by the Democratic presidential candidate stacks up, Speaker 6: 05:18 Harris is proposal would give middle and working class families a tax credit of up to $6,000 a year. Single taxpayers would qualify for up to $3,000. Speaker 7: 05:29 I am proposing what economists have described as what would be the most significant middle class tax cut in generations, Speaker 6: 05:39 the most significant and generations. Really. Kyle Pomerleau is chief economist at the tax foundation. He says there's no independent inflation adjusted data that would prove this even so, he and other tax experts told us that Harris has nearly $3 trillion plan would be among the largest bigger even than the bush and Reagan tax cuts from decades ago. Speaker 8: 06:03 Overall, it's a very large tax cut. Um, so she is right when she says that it is significant. Speaker 6: 06:09 Harris has said she would pay for her tax cut by repealing the recent Republican led tax law. She's criticized that as a giveaway for corporations and the wealthy. Without definitive data, we won't place a rating on Harris, his claims about her own plan, but according to the experts, she's on the right track in Sacramento. I'm Chris Nichols. Speaker 1: 06:30 Yesterday we told you about an accidental wetland in the otherwise dry Colorado river delta. Today we visit two sites that were intentionally created as a way to bring both water and life back to that region of Mexico. Luke Runyon has the final part of our series on the final 100 miles of the Colorado River. Speaker 6: 06:50 It's mid morning in the Sonoran desert and already the sun is causing the temperature to rise. All right. Um, so do you just want to take a walk? You don't walk around? Sure. Great. Yeah. Karen slotter and I are in search of a comfortable spot along the Colorado River's historic channel in Mexico. Yeah, it's, it's shady. It's cool. Um, actually I think we're going to go this way. Okay. We head over to a stand of 30 foot cottonwood trees in Laguna Grande Day. It's one of a handful of intensely managed restoration sites in the otherwise dry riverbed. Schlatter helps manage it for the Sonoran Institute, a binational environmental group. You know this, this forest here is probably five years old around us is a sprawling network of irrigation ditches, almost like a farm, but instead of crops, they're growing trees and willows, prime habitat for birds, coyotes, frogs. And so this is the, the beaver trail. Speaker 6: 07:50 We had, beavers arrived to the site, I think like five years ago, two years ago. We had an entire beaver family and they were like little baby beavers running everywhere and you know, everybody's freaking out. This is what the entire Delta used to be when the Colorado river emptied into the Pacific Ocean. But a series of upstream dams in the u s held the river back, leaving the delta as the ultimate collateral damage. Laguna Grande Day is an attempt to write some of that wrong. Both countries have an interest in restoring the Colorado River Delta, um, particularly Mexico. Obviously it's, it's interested in restoring the habitat and some of that economic value that was lost. A series of legal agreements have now cemented that view. The most recent was signed a year and a half ago. It's funding work at site similar to Laguna Grande Day and scientists like Carl Flesch at the University of Arizona, Speaker 8: 08:48 there's a park. Think of them, if you will, as as little green parks scattered along the course, the river Speaker 1: 08:55 as Speaker 6: 08:55 water flows back to areas of the Delta Flsa. And a team of researchers are studying the effects so far they found an increase in the number of birds and other wildlife coming here. [inaudible] says the early results are promising. Speaker 8: 09:09 Rivers dried up. Hello Marillo stamp and restoring some of that flow below the dam even to, you know, small part like restoration areas that's restoring a little bit of environmental justice Speaker 6: 09:23 a few miles upstream. Whitewater is gushing out of an irrigation canal into another restoration site called Chow, say eight 30 on cell. Sado manages the flow of water for restaurant. Amos, El Colorado, a Mexican environmental group. Okay, so let us, he didn't last complex. This site is very complex, maybe more than the other sites because of the water management channels. Say it's meant to replicate a bend in the Colorado River, but it requires a lot more water to do it standing. One that I chose the hour we have the water rights to make this place possible now, but thinking about the future, it could be complicated to restore this kind of habitat at this level because water could be more scarce. Before we leave, I head down to a marsh where tall grasses have taken root in a shallow pool of water. A rarely seen marsh bird called a sora has captured the attention of some of the site staff. One pulls out her phone to mimic the birds call. Speaker 9: 10:23 Yeah, Speaker 6: 10:24 the tiny spindly legs. Stora Weaves through the reeds and calls back. Nobody intentionally tried out the Colorado river delta. Jennifer Pitt is the Colorado River program director for the National Audubon Society, but it happened and it took a recognition from both the US and Mexico. Pitt says to realize they created the problem. It'll take many more years to attempt to fix it. I'm Luke Runyon in Baja, California. Mexico. Speaker 1: 10:59 This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River produced in partnership with Public Radio Station, K U N C and Colorado with financial support by the Walton Family Foundation. Concerns among Americans about climate change have grown to record levels. A Yale University poll released in January found that 73% of Americans accept that climate change caused by humans is happening and 72% said it's personally important to them. This is roiling our politics, especially among Democrats. And there's a green new deal, a resolution calling for widespread action on climate change and also a climate playbook put forth by San Diego Democratic Congressman Scott Peters. He spoke with mid day edition guest host Mark Sauer. Speaker 6: 11:46 We'll start with the climate playbook. What is it the, why'd you put it together? Who's it aimed at? It's aimed at the climate. A challenge. What Speaker 10: 11:54 we, you know, we've been seeing is that there's a renewed vigor in a climate action in Washington. It comes from a lot of people running on the issue and winning. It comes from a democratic majority where people will be open now to more solutions, but we're off to kind of a slow start and we were starting to talk about a green new deal, which is an aspirational idea. If we pass the green new deal today, tomorrow would, we would be looking for what actions we would take to implement that. And that's what the playbook is, is it's a set of bills that have been in existence in this congress over the last congress from the senator of the House that deal with all aspects of climate change, from a, from mitigation to resilience to energy efficiency to clean vehicles. Uh, and we wanted to collect them and make sure that people knew they were out there and that that was stuff we'd get to work on right now. Speaker 11: 12:45 All right. And there's dozens of bills included here, most proposed by Democrats. So I'm are bipartisan characterize this proposal legislation, uh, how's it organized in the climate playbook? What ways do they go about mitigating global warming? Speaker 10: 12:58 You know, I tried to break it up into different areas. So one is carbon pricing, which is one of the more difficult issues. One is energy efficiency, which is where there's a lot of bipartisan agreement, a lot of opportunity. Uh, there's sections on resiliency, on agriculture, on carbon capture. Uh, there are a lot of ideas that, that a lot of us have been working on for a long time. We don't have to start from zero. So what this is, is it opens up to other legislators, to academics and to the public and to activists, the ability to look and see what's out there, to evaluate what's out there and see, um, uh, you know, what we would like to get behind, what we'd like to act on. Speaker 11: 13:34 And, uh, which in your mind, a show the most promise among these bills, which might have the most popular support across the political spectrum? Speaker 10: 13:43 It's hard to say exactly, but I would say we are in a different position than we were even in the last congress. Republicans have stopped saying, I have stopped denying the existence of climate change in Congress. The administrator of the EPA came to our committee this week, said he recognizes the climate's changing. That and that human activity is a big driver of it. Uh, so we're past that. Um, we've seen also people get elected who run on climate change. We always knew that the voters were sympathetic to it, but they had not previously voted on the issue. It looks like they're voting on it. And so, um, I think we should be open to the possibility that a lot of things will happen. Uh, finally, um, one of the most conservative members of Congress, Matt Gates, see he came out with his own, uh, green real deal. Speaker 10: 14:32 Again, a request for proposals on what to do about climate. He's from Florida. He recognizes that when w and when the streets of Miami are wet on sunny days, um, it has to do with climate and then we have to act. So I'm not handicapping against any of these bills. I think they're all great opportunities. There's a lot of great ideas. Um, the hard thing will be, you know, let's, let's get to work in and actually start passing stuff, but we don't have to be arguing with ourselves about the need to do it anymore. Democrats seem to own this issue now presents opportunity and challenge how to Democrats coalesce around specific plans in a way that can be sold to the public. Um, now the challenge is not to find more Democrats. It's to find Republicans that we know that, um, the rest of the country's not like California. Speaker 10: 15:14 I can tell you that that's, uh, that's pretty evident to me when I get off the plane. Uh, but for climate action to happen and for it to pass and for it to last, it's got to be bipartisan. So that's why I think we should be working on each of these bills. What if we have bipartisan support? We should be pushing that. Uh, we should be hitting a lot of singles right now and getting to work on saving this planet. Um, and to the extent we can find Republicans to work with us, um, that's going to make it make that achievement much more realistic. I've been speaking with Congressman Scott Peters, Democrat of San Diego. Thanks congressman. Thanks very much, mark. To hear the full interview, go to the KPBS mid day edition podcast. Thanks for listening to KPBS is San Diego news matters podcast. For more local stories, go to k pbs.org.