Just a day after confidential documents revealed that the state and tunnels proponents have identified 300 parcels in the Delta they intend to take through eminent domain, a panel of experts today at the State Capitol in Sacramento discussed unanswered questions about the massive Delta Tunnels proposal in an effort to determine whether the proposal is good for California.
The experts testified during an informational hearing of the Senate Select Committee on the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, chaired by State Senator Lois Wolk (D-Davis), according to a press release from Wolk's Office:
“After years of analysis, at tremendous expense, there remain unanswered questions about what the Delta Tunnels will cost, whether they will improve water supply reliability in the state, and whether they’ll be good for the Delta ecosystem. There are unanswered questions about whether the tunnels will significantly affect the economy and communities of the Delta, and about alternatives,” said Wolk. “These are some of the basic questions that all Californians should expect to have answered prior to moving forward with a multi-billion dollar infrastructure proposal, the most expensive and controversial water infrastructure proposal in California history.”
Wolks said the the California Water Fix, or the Delta Tunnels proposal, currently envisions drilling two massive tunnels, each 40 feet in diameter, 150 feet under the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in order to divert freshwater directly from the Sacramento River, bypassing the Delta and delivering the water directly to export facilities in the south Delta.
Whether the tunnels will be cost-effective was one of the questions discussed during the hearing. Fielding that question was Jeffrey Michael, Director of the Center for Business and Policy Research, University of the Pacific.
“The tunnels are not economically justified and are financially infeasible without a substantial taxpayer subsidy," testified Michael. "Benefit-cost analysis guidelines require consideration of strong alternatives, and comparison to no-action or the ‘status quo."
"The tunnels plan does not properly consider less costly alternatives, and is economically no-better than the ‘status quo.’ The state’s analysis of the tunnels show water contractors only receive about 30 cents of value for each dollar spent. The economics of the tunnels for water exporters require a large boost to water yield, but the tunnels plan has little to no increase in water exports," said Michael.
Don Nottoli, Sacramento County Supervisor 5th District, discussed whether the Delta Tunnels will significantly impact the economy and communities of the Delta and Northern California. Nottoli testified that there are more reasonable means of providing for the state’s water needs, calling for reduced water reliance on the Delta and advocating for restoration of the Delta.
“We need not sacrifice the Delta region in order to solve our water challenges in California. The tunnels are not good for the Delta, they are not good for California,” testified Nottoli.
Craig Wilson, former Delta Water Master for the State Water Resources Control Board, spoke to alternatives to the proposal.
“As I’ve looked at it, there are viable alternatives that have not been studied, including a western Delta Alternative,” Wilson said. “The change from a fifty-year permit to an annual permit dramatically affects the water supply reliability benefits. We could end up with the worst of all worlds, where you have this isolated facility at great expense and perhaps less water being made available to the environment and the water exporters.”
Christina Swanson, Ph.D Director of the Science Center for the Natural Resources Defense Council, spoke on the question of whether the tunnels and further water diversion will improve ecosystem conditions in the Delta.
“On average, for the last decade and a half more than half of the freshwater that would have flowed into the Delta or through the Delta no longer does. One of the things that has done is through the estuary it has created chronic manmade drought conditions,” said Swanson. “As far as the estuary is concerned, as far as the fish and the ecosystem are concerned, the estuary has been in a drought. In fact, in the last 15 years it’s been in a very, very severe drought. California has been in a drought for the past several years. The Delta’s been in a drought for decades.”
“According to best available science that we have on the system, and it is an extremely well-studied system, the environmental variable that has the strongest relationship to influence environmental conditions and fisheries populations is flow,” Swanson said. “Consensus is very, very strong that the most likely to be effective approach to improve ecosystem conditions and strengthen and begin to recover fish populations is to, compared to existing conditions, enhance freshwater flow. It is by far the strongest variable.”
“If you look at where we’ve been over the past decade or more with two droughts, and very, very large fluctuations in the amount of water exported from the Delta, those fluctuations are not being driven by conveyance,” Swanson added. “They’re not being driven by environmental protections. The largest component of fluctuations in water exported from the Delta are a function of hydrology and the fact that we have wet and dry years. That is the problem we should be looking to solve with a California water fix. We have misidentified the causal factors in the problem we are trying to address.”
The documents released yesterday, obtained through Public Records actions, demonstrate that water exporters and the "Delta Design Construction Enterprise," housed within the California Department of Water Resources (DWR), have already developed plans to “acquire” family farms and "right of way" in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta through eminent domain. For more information, go to: http://www.indybay.org/...
A broad coalition of fishermen, Tribal leaders, family farmers, conservationists and environmental justice advocates opposes the tunnels because they would destroy the Bay Delta Estuary and take large areas of Delta farmland, some of the most fertile land in the country, out of production in order to export water to corporate agribusiness interests, Southern California water agencies and oil companies conducting fracking and steam injection operations in Kern County.
The construction of the tunnels would hasten the extinction of Central Valley steelhead, Sacramento River Chinook salmon, Delta and longfin smelt and other fish species, as well as imperil the salmon and steelhead populations on the Trinity and Klamath rivers.