California governor backs new pipeline to vastly increase state water supply

California governor Gavin Newsom reaffirmed his commitment to the Delta Conveyance Project, which would create a new pipeline to the state aqueduct system to draw water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta during rainy periods. If the system had existed during the rainy season of January 2023, the Department of Water Resources estimates it could have supplied an additional 228,000 acre-feet of water, or enough water to supply over 2.3 million Californians with water for one year.

“After the three driest years on record, we didn’t have the infrastructure to fully take advantage of an exceptionally wet year, which will become more and more critical as our weather whiplashes between extremes,” Newsom said in a public statement. “This proposed project is essential to updating our water system for millions of Californians.”

Among the state’s water challenges is a projection that state water supplies will decline by 10% by 2040. Despite the estimated cost of $16 billion, the project is considered by DWR as a way to readily make use of the “state’s most affordable and reliable source of water.”

Planning for the project began in early 2020. With the submission of the project’s final environmental impact report, as required by the California Environmental Quality Act, DWR now must certify the report. Once certified, DWR will circulate Community Benefits Program Implementation Plan and Guidelines Discussion Document, after which the agency will attempt to secure relevant state and federal permits.

California has not built significant new water infrastructure since the 1970s, when CEQA was first adopted. Under CEQA, any stakeholder can use courts to hold up projects nearly indefinitely based on objections to the projects’ environmental impact reports. Due to the deteriorating condition of the state’s basic infrastructure as a result of CEQA, the governor and state legislature worked together to pass SB 179 this year, which allows the governor to require that court rulings on environmental impact reports filed by the government for infrastructure projects certified as priorities by the governor be issued within 270 days.

The governor first used this power to streamline construction of the Sites Reservoir, a 1.5 million acre-feet, $4 billion reservoir funded by voters in 2014 with water infrastructure bond Proposition 1 that can hold enough water to serve three million households for one year. In part due to CEQA, not a single Proposition 1 project has been completed.