“Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated” is a quote made famous by Mark Twain upon hearing rumors that he had died in 1897. This is the same thought that we had in reaction to news that the most important project for securing a long-term water supply for the Central Valley, the construction of Temperance Flat Dam, was not fully funded by the California Water Commission.
The last time California voters passed a statewide ballot measure to provide funding for parks, beaches, wildlife and forests, it was 2006. Arnold Schwarzenegger was in his first term as governor, Twitter was a fledgling app, and the iPhone hadn’t been invented yet. Since then, California’s population has grown from 36 million to 39.5 million — the equivalent of adding a new San Francisco, San Jose and San Diego.
Farmers receiving allocations from the State Water Project can expect a bigger allotment this year than they anticipated as recently as last month, thanks to late-season precipitation. The California Department of Water Resources announced Monday this year’s allocation has been raised to 35 percent of full distribution, or 1.48 million acre-feet of water statewide. (One acre foot is enough to cover one acre of land with a foot of water.)
A new threat to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and the San Francisco Bay is coming not from the governor’s mansion but from the U.S. House of Representatives. Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Corona (Riverside County), inserted language into the Interior and Environment Appropriations bill that would prohibit legal challenges to anything related to California WaterFix — the governor’s name for the twin tunnels project to move water from the delta to Southern California — not just retroactively but in perpetuity.
A congressman set off a legislative bomb in California’s water wars last week. Rep. Ken Calvert (R-Corona) inserted a rider into an Interior Department appropriations bill that would exempt from all judicial review the intensely contested Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta twin tunnels project. Passage of the rider — it’s scheduled for a House committee vote Tuesday — would mean that the water diversion scheme wouldn’t have to follow federal or state law. The project, known formally as California WaterFix, would bury two 35-mile-long, 40-foot-diameter tunnels beneath the delta.
California this year will vote on not one but two water bond measures totaling $13 billion. Given that the state still hasn’t spent all of the $7.5billion from the Proposition 1 water bond passed in 2014, it raises a crucial question: Does California really need another $13 billion in water bonds? As of December 2017, the state had allocated only about $1 billion from Proposition 1. About half of the total money available from the bond is dedicated to new water storage under a complicated new process that funds only the “public benefits” of such projects.
We all can agree every Californian should have access to safe drinking water. But too many – nearly 800,000 people – do not. The unfortunate reality is their local drinking water system serves contaminated water or can’t provide reliable service, and also can’t afford to invest in improvements to make the system safe. There are about 300 of these chronically noncompliant systems, most small and in rural, isolated communities. We can take an important step toward fixing this important health and safety problem by empowering newly created local agencies to supply clean and safe drinking water.
California’s Central Valley is home to 19 percent of food production in the world yet about 100,000 of its residents have lived without clean drinking water for decades. New technologies attempt to overcome political and cost challenges in filtering toxins out of tap water in this rural region. New technologies attempt to overcome political and cost challenges in filtering toxins out of tap water in this rural region.
There’s a bill that’s been resurrected after not going anywhere last year in the state Senate that if approved would impose for the first time in California a tax on public drinking water for both homes and businesses. It was a bad idea the first time around, and its standing has not improved with its reintroduction this session. SB 623, sponsored by Sen. Bill Monning, D-Monterey, would generate $2 billion over 15 years allegedly for a Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Fund, which would provide emergency water and longer-term system fixes for hundreds of communities whose tap water doesn’t meet safe drinking-water standards.
The California Water Commission – the entity responsible for awarding $2.7 billion in Proposition 1 funds to water storage projects in a few months – didn’t quite see eye-to-eye with officials pushing for Sites Reservoir, primarily on the benefits to salmon the project would provide. When final public benefit ratio scores came out earlier this month, the commission said Sites, situation on the Colusa and Glenn counties border, was eligible for $1 billion – about $600 million short of what Sites officials requested.
