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In what Gov. Gavin Newsom hailed as a major milestone, his $20 billion Delta tunnel largely cleared another chokepoint last week — but it still faces obstacles of a different magnitude.
For more than half a century, California’s leaders have debated rerouting water around, rather than through, the network of rivers, farmland and marshes of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Newsom’s version would pipe Sacramento River water through a 45-mile bypass to a reservoir on the California Aqueduct, in an effort to shore up state supplies and send more water south.
Delta communities call the plan a water grab that would devastate one of the country’s largest estuaries and destroy towns, wildlife and generational farms. State officials and major water suppliers say it’s necessary to safeguard water for two-thirds of Californians against the threats of climate change and natural disasters.
Tasked with refereeing the fight, a state agency called the Delta Stewardship Council weighed opponents’ many challenges to the project and last week voted six-to-one to require the Department of Water Resources to address just two of them.
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Newsom declared victory, saying “we are closer than ever to seeing this important piece of infrastructure completed.”
Maybe closer than ever, California water watchers say, but still far from complete. Far bigger obstacles loom: court rulings that have upended California’s financing plans, critical water rights decisions still to come from state regulators, and water agencies that have yet to decide whether the tunnel’s water will be worth the cost.
“These are all existential,” said Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. “You’ve got some pretty tough hurdles ahead.”
A dying Delta
The Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta is the heart of California’s nature-defying water systems, where state and federal pumps send Northern California river water coursing to cities and farms in the lower half of the state.
Yep. Slick and his boys (notice no caps) are doing it to you again.
And you continue to vote for them?
Why?
Are you that dumb. Dumb is the short form for the UC & CSU idiots teaching the failed centuries of Communism. It comes in flavors of the environment,, homeless, we need to save the world with illegals, and more.
Geez you types really are easy.