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Clifornia’s water managers appear to have violated state law when they hired a consultant to help plan Gov. Jerry Brown’s $16 billion project to build two massive water tunnels, state auditors said Thursday. The audit also faulted the state Department of Water Resources for not finishing a cost-benefit analysis as the price of the tunnels climbs. The audit is the latest blow to Brown’s plan to build twin tunnels east of San Francisco to deliver water from the Sacramento River mostly to farms and cities hundreds of miles away in central and Southern California.

On the eve of key votes in San Jose and Los Angeles, Gov. Jerry Brown’s $17 billion proposal to build two massive tunnels through the Delta to make it easier to move water from north to south was hit with another setback Thursday as a state audit found it was suffering from “significant cost increases and delays.” The 91-page report from California’s state auditor, Elaine Howle, also said the state Department of Water Resources “has not completed either an economic or financial analysis to demonstrate the financial viability” of the project, which the Brown administration calls the California WaterFix.

The board of the Fresno-based Westlands Water District, America’s largest water supplier, voted 7 to 1 on September 19 to pull out their $4.5 billion, 26 percent participation in the $17 billion WaterFix, which planned to build two 40-foot wide tunnels stretching for 35 miles to protect fish and divert water from the Sacramento River to the California aqueducts that service the San Joaquin Valley farmers and Southern California cities.

In February, a huge hole opened in the Lake Oroville main spillway. The cause of the hole is still undetermined. The ensuing closure of the main gates and use of the emergency spillway for the first time ever caused damage to the hillside, erosion toward the spillway structure and thousands of people to evacuate.  The California Department of Water Resources feared catastrophic flooding and chose to once again release water down the main spillway.

Current weather forecasting tools are less than adequate for managing California’s most vital natural resource, state water officials said Tuesday. People at the state Department of Water Resources are now working with researchers at NASA and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography to develop new technology to better forecast moisture-laden atmospheric river storms, like the ones that hammered the Mother Lode and the rest of the Central Sierra in January and February.