The California Water Commission’s recent

Yet after harsh droughts for much of this century, state voters were ready for a new direction in 2014. They approved Proposition 1, a measure placed on the ballot by the Legislature which allowed for the issuing of up to $7.1 billion in state bonds for water infrastructure projects. After a lengthy review process, nearly 40 percent of these funds were allocated by the water commission last week for eight projects with the potential to add enough water capacity to serve more than 5 million households a year.

But skeptics have already made the case that by far the single biggest project – the Sites Reservoir in rural Colusa County north of Sacramento – actually suffered a setback in the water commission’s deliberations.

If built as envisioned, the project by itself would have been responsible for more than 60 percent of additional water storage statewide. Yet after the complex “public benefit” assessments that water commissioners used to decide how much each proposal got in bond funds, only $816 million was designated for the $5.2 billion Sites project – much less than advocates hoped. This means at the least that local water agencies and their ratepayers will have to pony up more more than they had hoped for construction.

This led Jim Watson, general manager of the Sites Project Authority, to tell the Sacramento Bee that it was possible that major changes lay ahead. If participating water agencies balk at higher costs, in the “worst case, we could build a smaller reservoir,” he said.

Commission, regulators differ on water availability

Yet the Sites Reservoir’s prospects are complicated by other factors as well. Key details of the reservoir’s construction plan have so far faced little direct criticism from environmentalists – perhaps surprising for what would be the biggest new reservoir to be built in California since the 1970s.

But as a Bee analysis noted, some environmentalists question the basic wisdom of the project. They cite the schism between the Water Commission’s conclusion that Sites could divert 500,000 acre-feet of water from the nearby Sacramento River each year and warnings from some state regulators that less water – not more – should be diverted from the river and the ecologically fragile Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta (pictured).

One more obstacle also has less to do with Sites itself than the state’s fraught water policy fights. Critics of Gov. Jerry Brown’s California WaterFix plan – meant to shore up the state’s north-south water conveyance system – see Sites as an integral and thus objectionable part of Brown’s proposal.

The $17 billion project would build two 40-foot-wide tunnels to pump water from the Sacramento River some 35 miles south, where it would reach the water distribution network that allows wetter Northern California to provide much of the water used in desert-like Southern California.

The project appeared to be on the ropes until April, when the giant Metropolitan Water District of Southern California voted to commit its member agencies to covering $10.8 billion of the WaterFix tab – nearly two-thirds the total cost.

Brown is trying to win final approval of the project before leaving office in January. But Northern California environmental groups, local water agencies and farming industry groups are in a pitched battle to stall any final decision until after a new governor is elected.

Both remaining gubernatorial candidates – heavily favored Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, and Republican businessman John Cox of Rancho Santa Fe – are highly unlikely to embrace WaterFix if elected. Newsom thinks a smaller project makes more sense, and Cox is flatly opposed, according to the Restore The Delta website, which tracks candidates’ remarks on Delta issues.

Years of lobbying for what the Brown administration dubbed the WaterFix project had produced more indifference and outright opposition than support. The $16.7 billion plan would build two 35-mile-long, 40-foot-high tunnels to take water south from the Sacramento River to the State Water Project pumps in the town of Tracy. The governor argued that this would sharply reduce the intermittent heavy pumping that played havoc with endangered species in the fragile Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and would firm up supplies both for Central Valley farmers and the 20 million-plus residents of Southern California.

But in September, the board of the Westlands Water District – which serves 600,000 acres of farmland in King and Fresno counties and is the largest U.S. agricultural district – voted 7-1 against providing about $3 billion for the project. Westlands officials trashed claims made for WaterFix, questioning whether it would actually stabilize the Delta ecosystem and predicting cost overruns.

In November, the Trump administration announced that the federal government would not provide any financial assistance to get the project built. While the Interior Department statement was not unexpected, it contributed to the sense the WaterFix proposal was foundering. By February, Brown administration officials had put the word out they would accept building only one tunnel under the delta and adding a second later.

MWD backed scaled-back project, then changed mind

The death of the original plan appeared confirmed on April 2 when officials with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California – the giant, politically powerful water wholesaler serving 19 million people – issued a memo expressing support for the one-tunnel option. The rationale: a lack of a consensus for the two-tunnel plan among the water districts south of Sacramento that would need to pay for the project.

But after intense lobbying by the Brown administration, on April 10, the MWD board voted by a 3-to-2 margin to endorse the two-tunnels project and to agree to pay for about two-thirds of the tab – about $10.8 billion. The weighted vote, based on the size of individual agencies, came over the objections of the MWD board’s single largest member, the San Diego County Water Authority.

Momentum continued to build last Wednesday when the board of the Santa Clara Valley Water District – the biggest water agency in Silicon Valley – voted 4-3 to commit its 2 million ratepayers to pay up to $650 million for the project, or nearly 4 percent of the total tab. Santa Clara officials had previously narrowly opposed providing funding.

On Thursday, Brown hailed the decision in a speech to a conference of the Association of California Water Agencies in Sacramento. But the governor also warned that the project still had big obstacles that went beyond getting more water districts to agree to share construction costs. He noted that state and federal regulators still had yet to issue required permits.

On this front, WaterFix may face more skepticism in Brown’s backyard than in Washington. As CalWatchdog reported last year, the Trump administration gave a key senior Interior Department post to Colorado lawyer David Bernhardt, a veteran of California water wars and a critic of the federal government’s traditionally high-profile role in land-use decisions in Western states.

Meanwhile, the California Water Resources Control Board has sided with environmentalists in a long list of previous decisions. In filings with the state board, Restore the Delta and several other environmental groups have challenged the governor’s project on its central claim: that it improves the health of the Delta ecosystem.

Even if the state and federal permits are granted, the tunnels plan still faces hurdles. The Bay Area News Group reported last week that more than two dozen state and federal lawsuits had been filed against the project.

With a seeming vote of confidence from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California – the giant agency that supplies water to about half the state’s 38 million residents – Gov. Jerry Brown appears set to soldier ahead with his $17 billion plan to build two 35-mile-long tunnels under the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

Brown’s view that the tunnels are crucial both to stabilize the Delta ecosystem and to shore up the state’s water distribution system was rejected last week by the board of the Westlands Water District, which voted 7-1 against joining in the “California WaterFix” project. Westlands – the nation’s largest agricultural water district with 600,000 acres of farmland in Fresno and Kings counties – had been counted on to cover about $3 billion of the project’s total cost.

But Westlands officials voted “no” after expressing concern both about the high price-tag they’d have to pay and about whether WaterFix truly would make water supplies more consistent and reliable. The water district was the first in the state to decide on whether to sign up for the project, and its decisive early opposition appeared to stun some supporters.

This led to reports that Brown’s legacy project could be all but dead by Oct. 10, when the MWD is scheduled to vote on whether to participate. The agency is expected to cover $4 billion of the project’s cost.

But on Tuesday, MWD leaders indicated that at least for now, they were still supportive. Board member Larry McKenney said it was in MWD’s interest to try to promote confidence in the project going forward, according to a Sacramento Bee report. MWD shares Brown’s view that the project is crucial for long-term water distribution reliability.

Brown’s would-be successors cool to his plan

Yet the MWD reprieve might not save the day for WaterFix. For months, Sacramento insiders have noted that Brown appears far more enthusiastic about the project than other significant players in state politics – including those running to succeed him as governor next year.

Los Angeles Times columnist George Skelton reported Tuesday that Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, state Treasurer John Chiang and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa had each expressed doubts about the project. Newsom and Chiang worried about its environmental impact on the Delta and beyond, while Villaraigosa suggested bold new conservation programs should be tried to see if they could save enough water to make the tunnels unnecessary.

But even if the Westlands district, Newsom, Chiang and Villaraigosa were all on the WaterFix bandwagon, its future would hardly be assured. Environmentalists have a long history of suing and winning over California water policies. In June, they filed the first two of what could be several federal lawsuits targeting Brown’s project in response to a preliminary go-ahead given by the Trump administration.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, the Defenders of Wildlife, the Bay Institute and the Golden Gate Salmon Association alleged that the project would wipe out salmon, smelt and other fish and would worsen water quality not just in the Delta but the San Francisco Bay.

While the Trump administration gave initial approval to WaterFix, it too could prove a wildcard. House Republican Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield and other GOP lawmakers from California have urged the White House to challenge water allocation policies they have long argued favor Delta fish over human beings.

While it didn’t register as significant news in California, Trump’s nomination of David Bernhardt to the No. 2 job in the Interior Department this spring suggested changes in how the federal government deals with water in the Golden State could be in the offing.

As CalWatchdog reported in June, Bernhardt is a Colorado-based partner in Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, a law firm which has represented the Westlands Water District in federal lawsuits targeting Interior Department policies. This background and other concerns led 43 Senate Democrats to vote against his confirmation in July.