It’s been more than half a century since Californians started talking seriously about building a new conveyance system – canals or tunnels – to divert water around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Bay Delta to south Delta pumps for export to farms and cities in the south. California’s Department of Water Resources’ California Water Plan suggested a “Trans-Delta System” in 1957 to convey water around the Delta. And in the 1960s the idea of a “peripheral canal” emerged.