The battle over whether California should build a $20-billion water tunnel in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta is escalating, with Gov. Gavin Newsom pushing to lay the groundwork for the project before his term expires and state water regulators considering whether to grant a key authorization.
The White House on Sunday released an executive order by President Trump that laid out a plan to exert the federal government’s role in California’s complex water management operations and claimed its authority to overrule state officials. The order, dated Friday, comes after Mr. Trump traveled to the state to see the devastation from wildfires that have been raging in Los Angeles for weeks.
It would be impossible to overstate the complexity of water supply management in California. Hundreds of federal, state and local agencies decree who or what is supplied with water, when and how much will be delivered, and the prices recipients must pay.
California’s contentious and long-debated plan to replumb the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and pump more water south finally has a price tag: about $20 billion.
The Delta Tunnel proposal exemplifies California’s political dysfunction. It will probably never get built, but it promises to dominate all discussions of major state and federal spending on water infrastructure for the next decade, preventing any other big ideas from getting the attention they merit.
The controversial Delta Conveyance Project may have bigger problems than legal action over its recently approved environmental impact report. Who’s going to pay the estimated $16 billion price tag?
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.
When do you get labor icon Dolores Huerta attacking a press conference attended by NAACP leaders? When it’s about water — which as we know is for fighting, not drinking. A press conference yesterday at the Capitol, put on by the group Groundswell and attended by state Sen. Steven Bradford and NAACP regional president Rick Callender, is raising environmentalists’ hackles.
The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is the West Coast’s largest estuary, an awe-inspiring area of wetlands with 700 miles of waterways and 1,100 miles of levees nestled between the San Francisco Bay and the Central Valley south of Sacramento. It’s one of the most magnificent places in California—a refuge of orchards, marinas, tin-roofed shacks, plantation homes and tiny historic towns that feels more Deep South than Golden State.
The story of California’s water wars begins, as so many stories do in the Golden State, with gold. The prospectors who raced westward after 1848 scoured fortunes out of mountainsides using water whisked, manically and in giant quantities, out of rivers.
