State regulators launched Thursday into a year of pivotal decisions on Gov. Jerry Brown’s quest to build two giant tunnels to ferry water from Northern California for Central and Southern California, a $17-billion project that would be one of the largest in decades in the state.

Brown’s administration and the water agencies are slated — but not yet formally committed — to pay for the two, 35-mile-long tunnels from the delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, and the 2016 calendar is full of federal and state hearings and reviews that are required to start digging.

It was nice to see California U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein offer her own legislation to deal with California’s water crisis. Now, let the negotiating begin.

As expected, Feinstein’s bill does not go as far as the House bill in providing relief to San Joaquin Valley farmers who are being starved of water for their thirsty crops. Her bill does address water storage and does call for some flexibility in pumping water out of the San Joaquin Delta.

For eight glorious weeks, from March 23 to May 18, 2014, the Colorado River flowed all the way to the Gulf of California, something it hasn’t done regularly since the 1930s.

Minute 319, a 2012 amendment to the 1944 water treaty between Mexico and the United States, allowed water from the Morelos Dam to run through a 40-mile stretch of parched riverbed to the Colorado River Delta. Scientists designed a “pulse flow” to release 105,392 acre-feet of water to mimic spring floods and “base flows,” which will continue until the measure expires in 2017.