Silicon Valley’s largest water agency will vote Tuesday on whether to support Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to spend $20 billion to build a massive, 45-mile long tunnel under the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to make it easier to move water from Northern California to Southern California.
The powerful board of Southern California’s largest urban water supplier will soon vote on whether to continue funding a large share of preliminary planning work for the state’s proposed water tunnel in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.
The 38-member board of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is set to consider approving $141.6 million for planning and preconstruction costs at its Dec. 10 meeting.
California’s history is defined by building great and innovative infrastructure projects that improve our quality of life and set our state up for continued economic prosperity. From the Golden Gate Bridge to interstates 5 and 80, these projects are symbols of how major infrastructure investments can drive incredible economic growth. Though the creation of these projects was seemingly impossible to many at their inception, they quickly became an essential part of our critical infrastructure fabric that sustains our economy and way of life.
We are at a similar crossroads in building reliable water infrastructure to deliver water to two-thirds of Californians through the Delta Conveyance Project. This proposed project has been studied, refined, redesigned and rerouted due to extensive public input and thoughtful improvements by Gov. Newsom’s administration.
It’s been almost a half-century since I first heard the term “peripheral canal” uttered by William Gianelli, who was then-Gov. Ronald Reagan’s top water official. The project, in one form or another, had already been kicking around for decades.
The controversial Delta Conveyance Project took a major financial hit this week, after a Sacramento County judge ruled California can’t issue bonds to fund the project.
The three top Democrats seeking to replace the late Dianne Feinstein in the United States Senate managed to clearly answer every question California’s McClatchy opinion team recently managed to pose. Except for one.
In the face of heavy opposition from environmental groups, Gov. Gavin Newsom and his administration are pushing forward with a controversial plan to build a 45-mile water tunnel beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta — a project the governor says is vital to modernizing the state’s aging water system.
Lobbing another hurdle at California’s $16 billion plan to tunnel underneath the West Coast’s largest estuary, environmentalists on Thursday sued to freeze public funding for the megaproject championed by Governor Gavin Newsom.
When Gov. Gavin Newsom downsized the Delta tunnels water project last year, the idea was to save money and try to appease at least some of the project’s critics. Yet the project remains controversial — and still figures to be costly. After months of relative quiet, Newsom’s administration released a preliminary cost estimate for the scaled-back project Friday: $15.9 billion for a single tunnel running beneath the estuary just south of Sacramento.
As California confronts increasing water challenges, the most equitable statewide solution from a social justice perspective is the single-tunnel project proposed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, known as the Delta Conveyance Project.
More than 27 million Californians rely on imported drinking water conveyed through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. This imported water also serves millions of acres of local agricultural lands and vital wildlife refuges.
