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Westlands Water District underscored a basic truth in rejecting a decade-long effort to construct a $17.1 billion twin tunnel project to transfer water from the Delta to farms and cities to the south and west: Without clear financing, the project will collapse. But the vote by seven Westlands board members, representing 600 San Joaquin Valley farm owners, doesn’t end California’s water struggles. Gov. Jerry Brown, the project’s main proponent, could be forgiven if he walks away from the Delta. He shouldn’t. Whoever replaces Brown as governor after the 2018 election will be less knowledgeable on this slow-motion mess.

The pressure on California’s water supply during the recent drought was further complicated by outdated policy and antiquated infrastructure. There are multiple projects and policies in the process of getting funded or being approved that will address some of the water needs of the state. Executive Director for the California Water Alliance Aubrey Bettencourt explained that “we have this undersized, outdated water infrastructure system that hasn’t quite been updated since the ‘60s and ‘70s and it’s not able to keep up with our modern priorities, our modern requirements of it.”

A coalition of California environmental groups is calling on the California Department of Water Resources to build a complete, functional emergency spillway at Oroville Dam as part of a sweeping program to improve dam safety and flood control practices across the state and beyond. The conservation coalition — including Friends of the River, the California Sports Fishing Alliance, the South Yuba River Citizens League and American Whitewater — released a 53-page report seeking to apply lessons learned from February’s Oroville spillway crisis.