Letter from Sacramento: California’s Muddy Water Policy: Part 2

This is the second in a two-part series around California water. Last month I wrote about the mechanisms by which the Newsom Administration is trying to divert more water from the San Francisco Bay-Delta: negotiated backroom deals known as “voluntary agreements.” This month, I’ll discuss why the state is doing this: securing water for two bad water projects. I’ll also highlight how you can get involved in pushing back on these harmful projects.

As the climate crisis continues to impact Californians, the state’s drought conditions are felt more and more.

The Newsom administration acknowledges that the climate crisis will worsen drought conditions and make the state’s hydrology more uncertain. However, the state’s solution for the issue isn’t to require more water conservation from all citizens, or even promote water conservation and recycling initiatives and programs regionally.

Instead, the state simply wants to build its way out of the crisis. And when I say build, I mean it literally. Two projects, in particular.

There will always be folks who believe that building more dams and reservoirs will cure California’s water supply problems and prevent the worst impacts of drought. They say this even though California has constructed nearly 1,400 dams and reservoirs and yet we continue to be in a drought.

The most recent iteration of this comes with Sites Reservoir, which the Newsom administration has championed on multiple occasions. Sites Reservoir would divert water from the already overdrafted Sacramento River and flood a 13,200 acre area which contains valuable wetlands, oak woodland habitat, and 24 endangered species in the Antelope Valley of Glenn and Colusa counties. The project’s proponents have claimed that Sites would provide huge benefits during the drought, but that’s highly unlikely due to costs.

The proponents now estimate that Sites Reservoir will cost $3.9 billion to construct, a 30% increase from prior estimates. As a result, water from Sites is likely to cost more than $900-1400 per acre foot on average. But as we know, in an era of climate change, the state’s hydrology becomes more and more uncertain. As such, Sites will likely never be completely full and will eventually become a stranded asset.

The second project the Newsom Administration is championing is the Delta Conveyance Project. In his first State of the State address in 2019, Governor Newsom embraced the notion of building a giant tunnel to drain and divert water from the rivers that flow into the San Francisco Bay-Delta before that water reaches the delta. It’s the latest in a many-decades-long push by big water users, including giant, wealthy agricultural corporations, to get more water out of the Northern California water system than is environmentally sustainable.

The Bay-Delta spans about 1,100 square miles where the Sacramento and San Joaquin river systems meet the San Francisco Bay complex. It’s the largest estuary on the west coast of North America and boasts about 750 different wildlife and plant species, including salmon. A tunnel will certainly destroy the already struggling Bay-Delta ecosystem.

Sierra Club California opposes Newsom’s tunnel idea and actions Newsom has taken to try to accelerate the tunnel’s planning process. Those actions include slowing down the critical rulemaking about water flows in the rivers that feed the Delta by promoting the voluntary agreements (which I wrote about last month), slow-walking opposition to former President Trump’s science-defying determination that a tunnel wouldn’t hurt the Delta ecosystem, and asking the courts to allow the state to float bonds to pick up a huge portion of the tab for the tunnel.

The single tunnel project is a high-risk, expensive project built on a dream developed more than half a century ago, before we understood environmental impacts and the effects of climate change. It makes no logical sense to entertain the antiquated notion of a tunnel today. Instead, we encourage the administration to consider actions that discourage large storage and conveyance projects and foster local and regional self-sufficiency.

Sincerely,