Santa Clara Valley Water Districts votes to support Delta tunnel project
The Santa Clara Valley Water District met Tuesday to consider whether to continue supporting Governor Gavin Newsom's controversial Delta water tunnel project.
The plan is to take water from the Sacramento River, above the Delta, and pipe it underground to pumps near Tracy, bound eventually for Central Valley farms and Southern California water consumers. Over the years, it's had its starts and stops but now looks to be moving ahead again with a fairly costly planning process.
"So far, 12 agencies have voted to support those planning funds, and Valley Water is the 13th to consider it," Carrie Buckman, with the CA Dept of Water Resources, told board members.
Valley Water would be one of the recipients of the water which would be pumped in and stored at the San Luis Reservoir. To remain being part of the project, they were considering whether to pay $9.6 million for the next two years to continue the planning and permitting process.
The agency is estimating their portion of the construction cost would be at least $650 million. But the overall price of the project is continuing to climb, growing from $15 billion to $20 billion in the last four years. And the state is admitting it will only get more expensive.
"The costs are going to continue to escalate, no doubt about that," said DWR's Graham Bradner. "This won't be the last estimate we prepare. This was really intended to support the benefit/cost analysis for the project."
"It's going to be a lot of money," said Karen Mann. "If they think it's only going to be $20 billion, I'll bet you it's going to be $40-50 billion."
Mann lives in Discovery Bay and is president of the Save the California Delta Alliance. She won't be sharing in the cost or the water, but she and her neighbors are concerned about what will happen if the state tries to sink a tunnel under the Delta, 45 miles to the pumping station.
"We're talking about the gamble of digging a 37-foot-wide circle, tunnel, underneath peat moss, under unstable land. I don't see any problems with that, do you?" she said, sarcastically.
But there are also environmental and water quality concerns for the Delta. And residents object to the idea of their water being siphoned off before it even gets to the Delta to supply farmers and people in Los Angeles.
"The lack of reservoirs in Southern California doesn't give Northern California and Delta residents very much encouragement," said Mann. "Hey, they got to be helping us out. They're not conserving water nearly as much as we have over the last 15-20 years. We'd like to see some buy-in on this. Not just give them the water."
Valley Water is already getting water from the Delta. This plan would make it more secure in case of a seismic failure of the levees, and because of larger pump capacity, would allow for more water to be captured and stored when Delta flows are high, as they were during last winter's heavy rainfall.
"So, we expect to see more precipitation falling as rain instead of snow. We expect to see more extreme drought and flood cycles. And we've seen that even within the last three or four years," said DWR's Buckman.
The original project was proposed by Governor Jerry Brown in 1982 as a "peripheral canal." He brought it back decades later as a twin-tunnel project. Since then, the project has changed to a single tunnel that will take a different route, traveling south alongside the I-5 freeway.
Valley Water sees it as an insurance policy, albeit an expensive one, and by a vote of 6-1 they approved spending the money to stay in the game. But they know there are no guarantees. The project has been stalled before when the economic winds shifted in the ever-changing climate of politics.
