SACRAMENTO – Gov. Gavin Newsom said his administration is “moving forward aggressively” to continue laying the groundwork for a major tunnel under the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to overhaul the state's water system.
“We have to go fast. Go fast,” Newsom told regulators during a speech Thursday at a conference held by the Assn. of California Water Agencies. “We should all be held to a higher level of accountability.”
California's 40th governor gave a look back at his water policies since taking office in 2019 and asserted the need to continue his effort to modernize the state's infrastructure to serve the cities and farms of the future.
Newsom framed the tunnel as a “climate change project,” noting that climate change is expected to reduce the amount of water the country can deliver with its current infrastructure.
With his term ending at the end of the year, Newsom has admitted that he will soon “pass the baton” on water policy to the next governor. Democrat or Republican, that person can decide the fate of their signature water project.
“Delta Conveyance, if we had it just last year, would provide enough water, in terms of what we would take with the new system, enough water for the needs of 9.8 million Californians for more than a year,” Newsom said. “We have to do that.”
Water has been a focus of the Newsom administration since his first day in office, when the governor took his cabinet to the Monterey Park Tract, a rural Central Valley community that lacked safe drinking water.
Described by Newsom as a “perennial issue” in California, water policy is also among the most contentious political issues in the state.
The tunnel will create a second route to transport water from new uses on the Sacramento River to the south side of the Delta, where pumps send water to State Water Project canals.
The project is particularly controversial, revealing territorial battles between north and south and intense battles between officials who want to build the tunnel and environmentalists and Delta residents who want to protect the local environment and their way of life.
Newsom and other supporters said the tunnel would protect the state's water system as climate change exacerbates severe droughts and floods. Opponents called the project an expensive boondoggle, saying it was unnecessary and would destroy the Delta.
It has been beset by regulatory hurdles and other challenges for years.
The State Water Resources Control Board is considering an appeal by the Newsom administration to amend the permits to take water from where the tunnel will be built.
There were other problems. An appeals court in December rejected the state's plan to fund the project, and the California Supreme Court in April declined to hear the case. The state Water Department said it still plans to issue bonds to finance the project.
Other court challenges by Delta area counties and environmental groups are also pending.
Whether the project is eventually built may depend on whether major water agencies, including the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, decide to participate and pay for its construction.
State officials said the tunnel, called the Delta Conveyance Project, will ultimately be paid for by participating water agencies.
The state has estimated in 2024 that the tunnel will cost $20.1 billion, while opponents say it could cost three to five times that.
In the past seven years, California has invested $11 billion in water infrastructure, Newsom said.
The Democratic governor has shown other parts of his water policies, saying he has prioritized finding money to provide clean drinking water to the many communities where Californians live with contaminated tap water.
He said that although there is progress in bringing safe drinking water to many communities, there is still a lot of work to be done.
Newsom touted his administration's investment in replenishing groundwater in the Central Valley and its efforts to support plans to build a Site Reservoir near Sacramento.
Newsom said the Sites Reservoir is important to the state's future, and expressed some frustration with the pace at which it is being developed.
“We have to make a foundation in Sites,” he said. “If you won't agree to an investment without broadcasting to this world whiplash whiplash, we are as dumb as we want to be.”
He said his administration has made progress on environmental projects including restoring wetlands around the Salton Sea, removing dams on the Klamath River, and developing a strategy to help salmon, which have suffered major losses in recent years.
Touching on issues that are causing heated debate, Newsom spoke about a controversial plan for new water laws in the Delta that rely on so-called voluntary agreements in which water agencies will contribute funds to wetland restoration projects and other measures.
Newsom described the approach, called the Healthy Rivers and Landscapes program, as a solution to break away from the traditional approach of conflict-ridden management and improve the Delta's ecological health.
“We must remain vigilant in these voluntary agreements. In danger, we return to our old ways,” he said.
Environmentalists argue that the proposed route, which is widely supported by water bodies, would drain more water from the Delta and threaten already depleted native fish stocks.
Newsom said climate change is increasingly causing “weather whiplash” in California and that the state must prepare. He noted that his tenure included the worst drought since 2020-22, followed by extremely wet conditions in 2023, which restored Tulare Lake to thousands of acres of farmland.
He said the state needs to manage water in a different way because the effects of climate change have been visible for the past few years: “The heat is getting hotter, the drought is getting wetter, and the water is getting wetter.”
