State lawmakers opposed to Gov. Jerry Brown’s Delta tunnel plan are stepping up calls for greater transparency into the project’s finances, as the proposed water delivery system suffered a series of setbacks this fall. At a Thursday town hall in the Delta town of Walnut Grove, lawmakers representing the region called on the Brown administration to drop the tunnel plan in the absence of greater cost certainty.
The last few months have seen a growing number of climate concerns – from historically devastating floods to record forest fires – with many regions still assessing the damage. Beyond recovery, planning and paying for more resilient infrastructure also remains an enormous challenge, and no quick and easy solutions seem to be on the way from Washington or elsewhere.
At Big Break Regional Shoreline, nestled in Northern California’s San Joaquin-Sacramento Delta, Michael Moran, supervising naturalist for East Bay Regional Park District, leads about 30 people out along a path into the park. The group consists of various stakeholders from the Metropolitan Water District (met), a regional wholesaler that supplies water to 19 million people across 26 public agencies in Southern California, hundreds of miles away. Big Break is one stop on a tour of the Delta, an educational trip for those involved with the met.
A throng of people, nearly 200 strong, came to this delta town Thursday, many of them wearing work boots and ball caps, blue jeans and plaid, and all of them hoping to learn something good about Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan to solve California’s water delivery problems. The folks from the river towns and rural communities along the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta didn’t like what they heard about the plan that is being called California WaterFix.
The state Department of Water Resources on Wednesday announced an initial water allocation of 15 percent for most of its State Water Project contractors for 2018. The low percentage is a conservative figure, which is typical of the department’s early season forecast. But already, things are looking up. Shasta Dam is holding more water in Lake Shasta than historical averages, officials said.
A long-awaited study on the costs and benefits of Gov. Jerry Brown’s Delta tunnels should be finished by next spring, a state official said Thursday after an independent audit concluded such a study should have already been done. The tunnels have been in the planning stage for 11 years, but state officials have never completed a comprehensive analysis of whether the project pencils out financially. Such a study could answer basic questions like whether the tunnels will benefit the state as a whole and whether they should be built at all.
Thanks to a wet winter, California’s water supply is being replenished. One of the state’s crucial outlets is groundwater. The Kern Water Bank’s uses ponds to soak water into the ground, adding to the supply of groundwater. However, these ponds have been dry for the past six years because of the drought. This year, the two-feet-deep ponds are full again and the groundwater supply is being restored. With the full ponds comes wildlife that utilizes the wetlands. More than 200 species of birds can be found at the water bank.
High rates of water conservation helped California manage limited supplies during the 2012–16 drought. But conservation can have a downside. New research shows that indoor water conservation can reduce the quality and quantity of wastewater, making it harder for local agencies to use treated wastewater to augment their water supply. We talked to two members of the research team about their findings: David Jassby, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at UCLA; and Kurt Schwabe, professor of environmental economics and policy at UC Riverside and an adjunct fellow at the PPIC Water Policy Center.
California’s wettest months of the year are still to come, but the state’s largest water reservoirs already appear to be in decent shape. As of Nov. 27, most of California’s major reservoirs were above their historical averages for this time of year, according to the Department of Water Resources. The reservoirs received a significant boost during the 2017 water year, one of the wettest on record following a five-year dry spell. Several major reservoirs, such as Northern California’s Shasta, Folsom and Trinity, were above 60 percent of their total capacity.
In a highly anticipated report, a panel chartered by Congress to advise public agencies on effective governance recommends that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency revise how it appraises financial burdens when communities are required to upgrade water and sewer systems. Observers say that the revisions, if the EPA accepts them, could change the agency’s permitting and enforcement of municipalities under the Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act, the bedrock federal environmental laws that occasionally result in multibillion-dollar modifications of water treatment facilities. That means communities could have more time to complete required projects.
