Vida en al Valle By Rebecca Pelvin FRESNO -- When Assemblymember Anna Caballero, D-Salinas, talks about the state's water challenges, she does not try to simplify the issue. She doesn't take one side, and focus solely on the environment, or take another side, and focus only on how the water shortage has impacted San Joaquín Valley farms and farmworkers. Rather, she describes how California's residents, farms, and environment will all be endangered if the state's water infrastructure is not improved soon. It was with this all-encompassing perspective, combined with a sense of urgency, that Caballero helped craft the five-bill state water package, passed in November, that includes a $11.1 billion bond that must still be approved by voters. "As I started studying the issue, it became very clear to me that there are a whole host of things we need to do at the same time," Caballero said last Friday morning, after speaking at an informational forum on the water package at the Fresno Convention Center. "Unless we came up with a comprehensive plan, we were going to be putting Band-Aids on the issue," she said. Caballero is relatively new to regional and state water politics, but she could become even more involved in both arenas in the future. Caballero, who is serving her second term in the state Assembly, is running for the state Senate in the 12th district, which includes portions of Stanislaus, Merced, and Madera counties. Anthony Cannella, Ceres mayor, is also running for the seat, which is currently held by Jeff Denham, R-Atwater. She has already earned praise from regional legislators and water advocates for her leadership on state water issues. "I truly believe that without Anna's leadership in the state legislature ... it would have been impossible to have gotten this comprehensive water package through the legislature," said Mario Santoyo, of the California Latino Water Coalition. "There had to be somebody to step up to the plate from the (Latino Legislative Caucus) to get engaged deeply in water," he said. "She was leading the pack, in terms of authorship, and in terms of finding reasonable, practical solutions to what a lot of times were controversial components of policy bills and the bond." "Anna has been tireless in her efforts to fix the state's water problems, and she gets it," said Assemblymember Juan Arámbula, I-Fresno. "And she has really been a leader in coming up with solutions." Before getting elected to the legislature in November 2006, Caballero championed many causes impacting her community -- but not water. Growing up in a family of copper miners in the San Gabriel Valley, Caballero said she witnessed how the unions ensured her family safety and fair wages. Without the support of the unions, she said in a phone interview, "my family would have had a very, very rough life." "That experience really inspired me to become an attorney, so that I could help people know what their legal rights were, and make sure they got the best legal representation," she said. After receiving a bachelor's degree from UC San Diego, and a law degree from the UCLA, Caballero moved to the Salinas Valley to work with farmworkers through California Rural Legal Assistance. She worked with CRLA for about two years. She co-founded in 1982 the law firm Caballero, Matcham & McCarthy, which mainly represented working families. Caballero took a leave from her law practice, and served as executive director of Partners for Peace, a non-profit organization dedicated to preventing gang violence. She later served five years on the Salinas Planning Commission and was elected to the Salinas City Council in 1991. She was elected mayor in 1998. One of Caballero's biggest accomplishments as mayor was raising funds -- through the "Rally Salinas!" campaign -- to keep local libraries open after the city council voted to close them, said Zachary Stahl, who covered city hall for The Salinas Californian from 2004-2006. Stahl, now a reporter for the Monterey County Weekly, recalled that Caballero would travel around town with a coffee can to accept contributions for the library. He said she was also dedicated to revitalizing downtown Salinas and targeted gang violence. Caballero was elected to the 28th district assembly seat in November 2006. She said she became involved in water issues after seeing how the state's water shortage impacted San Benito county, which is in her district. San Benito County, like parts of the San Joaquín Valley, has been affected by the long-lasting drought and federal regulations that restricted pumping in the Sacramento-San Joaquín Delta, she said. "That's affected my district significantly and driven up unemployment," Caballero said. "The last thing you need in a downturn in the economy, is to not have water and not be able to put people to work." When Caballero spoke Friday at the Fresno forum on the comprehensive water package, she didn't discuss water as if it were a partisan issue. She framed the water bond -- and its potential to upgrade the delta's failing system of levies -- as a crucial asset to all state residents. The delta conveys water to 2/3 of the state residents, she said. If there was a major earthquake or natural disaster in Northern California, she said, the levies could fail and leave millions of people without clean water. "The modeling shows that all the levies will start to fall, and once that happens, the water gets contaminated and it is anticipated that we will not be able to use any water from the delta for a period of years," she said to the few hundred people who attended the meeting. Later, standing outside the convention center, Caballero said she hopes the state can fix the levies and bring improvements to the delta before it's too late. "We tend to run our state on crisis," she said. "We wait until there is a crisis, and then we deal with it... I think we need to look down the road, and make things right so they work into the future." She stressed that though the Valley has suffered from the current water shortage, conditions could get worse if the bond does not pass, and the delta is not upgraded. "If you think this is bad, wait until a a disaster hits," she said.