California’s most hotly contested water proposal suffered a setback Monday after a budget deal reached between Gov. Gavin Newsom and state lawmakers dropped a provision that would have put the project on a regulatory fast track.
It means more uncertainty for the Delta Conveyance project, a 45-mile tunnel that would pull water from the Sacramento River and pipe it underneath the environmentally fragile Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta — the water supply source for 27 million people and millions of acres of farmland in the Bay Area and Southern California.
Various versions of the project have been on state drawing boards for decades. The current iteration is staunchly opposed by environmentalists who says it poses a threat to Delta communities and already-endangered wildlife, while proponents are resigned to more years of debate.
“This can is getting kicked farther down the road,” said Jeffrey Mount, senior fellow at the PPIC Water Policy Center. “It has already involved hundreds of millions of dollars in studies, engineering design and everything else. It has involved multiple downsizing. There’s nothing at this point that will appease the opposition, with the exception of just not doing it.”
Last month the governor unveiled a plan to speed construction of major infrastructure projects and added several last-minute bills to the legislature’s budget deliberations. It was a move that, to the dismay of lawmakers, has become a routine policy tactic for Newsom.
By revising the landmark California Environmental Quality Act, he sought to streamline permitting and limit how long courts could hear legal challenges to environmental reviews. Newsom said the changes would help make $180 billion in state and federal funds available for a list of infrastructure projects in the next decade.
But inclusion of the Delta tunnel held up the state’s $310.8 billion budget deal, which included funding for public transit, child care, prison reform and Medi-Cal. It also included cuts to close an estimated $31.5 billion budget gap.
Initially slated to begin construction in 2028, it is estimated to cost $16 billion take 20 years to build. Exclusion from the list of projects to receive permit streamlining and litigation caps is not a promising sign, but Newsom’s office regards the venture as very much alive.
“It will keep going forward as it’s going right now, pretty much,” said Alex Stack, deputy communications director. “Even though it is no longer included in this package, the project remains a priority.”
Decades of plans to replumb the Delta
Currently, water passes through the Delta estuary and into the state’s concrete conveyance system by giant pumps so powerful that they change water currents and harm migrating fish. As fish populations neared extinction, regulators have forced the pumps to cut southbound supplies.
It’s for this reason and vulnerability to major flood or earthquakes that proposals to replumb the Delta have been under consideration in a variety of forms for decades.
Gov. Pat Brown wanted to do it when he began building the pumping stations, dams and canals that make up the State Water Project in the 1960s. Former governors Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jerry Brown both made attempts.
Now Newsom, who released a downsized proposal last year, has said the project is needed to help adapt California’s water system to climate change and make Bay Area and Southern California water supply more reliable.
Proponents say the tunnel would ease stress on endangered fish species in the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers. But the vast majority of California’s environmental advocates warn the project would inflict harm on Delta communities and wildlife, including the threatened Sandhill Crane.
Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, campaign director at Restore the Delta, said Newsom is in a worse position to see the tunnel forward after this budget fight. Her organization is concerned whether existing dams can stand up to sea level rise and catastrophic storms, let alone an underground tunnel.
“We should be working on solving all of those problems instead of building a project that is certainly going to harm the Delta,” she said, lamenting the governor’s political strategy. “They were working on all these bills for a year. For an entire year, they didn’t engage with anyone.”
‘Too dug in for compromise’
After years of debating the size and scale of the tunnel, longtime observers disagree on the impacts of this particular political tussle. But without limits to the amount of time the project can be held up in court, all foresee years of legal battles over the scale of its environmental impact.
Litigation will slow it down and discourage agencies from investing, said Tom Birmingham, former longtime general manager of Westlands Water District serving San Joaquin Valley farmers. He led the agency when it effectively killed Brown’s Delta tunnels plan by refusing to help pay.
“From my perspective, the governor’s effort was to reduce to the extent possible impediments to the project,” Birmingham said. “Those impediments will remain, but they are primarily political impediments and ones imposed by litigation.”
Newsom’s last-minute bid for infrastructure streamlining was a case of smart negotiating, said Jeff Kightlinger, former general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. By including the state’s most controversial infrastructure project, he gave up something and got to keep the rest.
“The project will grind its way forward through the environmental review process, and then you’ll have to grind your way through the litigation,” Kightlinger said. “It’s the nature of doing business in California.”
Opponents are too dug in for compromise, said Jeffrey Mount, who led research in the early 2000s at UC Davis that raised initial alarm about the Delta’s vulnerability to earthquakes and flooding.
The Delta is in longterm ecological decline and is simply too fragile to be the water supply linchpin for the world’s largest economy, Mount said.
He said he has no personal position on the project, but California leaders have to decide whether to re-route water from the estuary and meet the state’s current water needs or strategically reduce demand.
“We still don’t have that gubernatorial push, legislative push, federal involvement to go to war saying ‘This is what the future the Delta Legion look like in 50 years,’” he said. “Let’s get started. Because we don’t have too much time.”
____
