Even a single water tunnel burrowed under the California’s Delta would be worth it for urban ratepayers and farmers who would to pay to build and maintain the project, according to an analysis released recently by Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration. The Department of Water Resources commissioned David Sunding, a professor of natural resource economics at UC Berkeley, to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of Brown’s Delta tunnel project. His report concludes that benefits outweigh the costs to ratepayers in every scenario he analyzed under a one-tunnel approach.

A winter storm is expected to drop several inches of new snow Thursday in the Sierra Nevada, and meteorologists with the National Weather Service are optimistic more systems will follow in the coming days. Thursday’s storm, which could deliver 6 to 10 inches of snow in the higher elevations, comes on the heels of a system Monday that brought as much as 7 inches of fresh powder to Tahoe area ski resorts.

Maybe I was naïve. Back in October 2014 I wrote a column in F&H promoting the passage of the Proposition 1 water bond on the November ballot chiefly because money in the bond would be dedicated to water storage, something desperately needed as California faced a drought. One of our readers commented under the article that I was naïve to believe that money would ever be spent for water storage, that dams were an anathema to the powers that be in Sacramento. More than three years after voters approved the bond the $2.7 billion set aside for water storage is still unspent.

About 92 percent of California is under some level of drought, according to a report released by the National Drought Migration Center on Thursday. That’s a three-fold increase from conditions just three months ago, when only 26 percent of the state was experiencing drought. The drought conditions are broken down into five categories, ranging from abnormally dry to exceptional drought. Right now, no part of California is being affected by extreme or exceptional drought, according to the report.

With the snowpack in California’s Sierr­a Nevada now at 20 percent of average – lower than at the same time three years ago, the driest year on record – Californians are girding for a repeat of drought conditions. Water scarcity seems likely to be a recurring part of our future. Legislators in Sacramento, therefore, would be remiss to delay the adoption of a group of bills that would place the state on a path to ensuring more sustainable water supplies.