By Sonia Diermayer, Katja Irvin, and Kyle Jones
A critical phase in the campaign to stop Governor Jerry Brown’s proposed giant tunnels under the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta has begun.
The two tunnels, measuring about four stories in diameter, are proposed to move huge quantities of water from Northern California rivers to points south by bypassing the San Francisco Bay-Delta, through which the water would naturally flow. The proposal resembles the peripheral canal idea pushed by Governor Brown during the 1980s that was resoundingly defeated by voters in a statewide ballot.
The Sierra Club is actively working on multiple fronts to oppose the California “WaterFix” (the latest name proponents have adopted for the tunnels project) because of the harm it would cause to the already critically stressed Bay-Delta ecosystem. While the proposal does not have to come before the voters this time around, there are a number of major regulatory and financing hurdles that it must overcome to move forward. Several of those challenges will be playing out in the next months.
One hurdle currently under consideration by the State Water Resources Control Board (the Water Board) is the water-rights change petition for a new point of diversion to serve the State Water Project and Central Valley Project. The intake points for these two systems of canals and pumps that deliver Northern California water to the south Bay Area, the San Joaquin Valley, and Southern California are currently located at the southern end of the Delta; the proposed new diversion point would siphon off high-quality Sacramento River water headed for the Delta before it can get there. In order to issue the diversion permit, the Water Board must determine that the change would not substantially injure another legal user of water, and that it would not unreasonably impact fisheries, wildlife, recreation, or other values.
Sierra Club California joined with Friends of the River and numerous other organizations and individuals in formally protesting the water-rights petition. The quasi-judicial hearings to consider these protests before the Water Board began at the end of July and are ongoing. The Sierra Club and the many other protesting parties are presenting detailed evidence and cross-examining the project planners to convincingly demonstrate the negative impacts of the tunnels on other water users, Delta fish species, fisheries, and Delta recreational and agricultural interests. Due to the highly technical and legalistic nature of the hearings, they have been divided into two parts and will likely continue far into 2017.
The Water Board hearings are just one obstacle the tunnels face. The project would also need permits from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Marine Fisheries Service. Additionally, federal wildlife and fisheries agencies have decided to review the current Delta pumping rules because of serious declines in key fish species. That review process could take a couple of years to complete.
Meanwhile, the voluminous environmental documents for the project continue to be challenged. The draft environmental impact report and other documentation prepared by the tunnels’ proponents, as well as independent analyses, have clearly shown that pulling increasing amounts of fresh water out of the Delta will destroy the largest watershed and estuary on the West Coast. The partial redo of the environmental documents is unlikely to satisfy the many doubts raised, including how much water the tunnels could actually supply, flaws in the modeling, and lowball sea-level-rise assumptions that unrealistically prolong the project’s useful life expectancy.
In addition, there are financial challenges facing the tunnels proposal. The likelihood of being on the hook for the $15-billion-plus price tag of a project which may not reliably provide predictable amounts of water is giving potential customer agencies serious pause. Those customers would include Bay Area water suppliers like Santa Clara Valley Water District, Alameda County Zone 7 and Alameda County Water District, as well as large agricultural districts in the San Joaquin Valley and the Metropolitan Water District in Southern California.
Deliberations are still proceeding behind closed doors about how the project costs would be allocated between and among the urban and agricultural agencies served by the State Water Project and Central Valley Project. The financial burden may ultimately be prohibitively high for agricultural irrigation districts. Westlands Water District—the largest agricultural water supplier in the country and a major proponent of the tunnels—is dealing with fiscal strain and Securities and Exchange Commission penalties for improper accounting practices.
Urban agencies are also under pressure to explain how the added costs for the tunnels will affect water rates for their customers. Santa Clara Valley Water District currently bills for State Water Project system maintenance through property tax assessments. Whether that mechanism can be legally used to pass on their share of tunnels construction costs to customers is being questioned by various parties, including the legal watchdog group Howard Jarvis Taxpayer Association.
So far none of the major beneficiaries of the tunnels have fully committed to paying for the project. The Sierra Club’s Loma Prieta and SF Bay Chapter Water Committees are monitoring events, opposing the tunnels, and advocating for better alternatives at the Santa Clara Valley Water District, Alameda County Zone 7, and Alameda County Water District. The boards at those agencies will soon be deciding whether or not to commit their financial support.
Meanwhile other challenges to the tunnels continue to mount. In June, a Sacramento Superior Court judgement concurred with environmentalists in invalidating the Delta Plan (on which the tunnels are based) for not including measurable, enforceable targets to restore freshwater flows and reduce reliance on Delta water, among other insufficiencies.
On August 10th, Delta legislators Lois Wolk and Susan Eggman requested and got the state legislature’s Joint Audit Committee to launch an audit of how the state is funding the quarter-billion-dollar cost associated with years of planning, modifying, and defending the tunnels proposal—with no end in sight. Opponents want to ensure that the tunnels’ financial burden, which is supposed to be carried entirely by project beneficiaries, does not ultimately fall on California taxpayers.
And the list goes on! It may be a clear sign of the shaky ground the tunnels find themselves on that former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbit was recently brought in by the Brown administration, ostensibly to help save the project. While the final outcomes of the many legal, financial, and bureaucratic challenges facing the tunnels project over the coming months are not at all certain, it appears that the tide may be turning on Jerry Brown’s Peripheral Canal Part 2.
WhatYouCanDo
Please consider writing Senator Wolk and Assemblymember Eggman a note thanking them for intervening on behalf of California taxpayers and the Delta:
If you would like to help with the Sierra Club’s advocacy work against the destructive and costly twin tunnels project at local water agencies, please contact:
- Sonia Diermayer, co-chair of the Bay Chapter Water Committee: sodier@mindspring.com
- Katja Irvin, chair of the Loma Prieta Chapter Water Committee: katja.irvin@sbcglobal.net