Steps Toward Water Abundance
Earlier this month a letter was sent to Governor Newsom from the State Water Contractors, an association of 27 water agencies that together deliver water to nearly 30 million Californians and irrigate nearly one million acres of farmland.
This letter is a document of extraordinary importance to the future of California’s water supply. It summarizes several significant reasons the cost of water is rising at the same time as the supply of water is shrinking, and it suggests specific solutions. Throughout this lengthy letter, the tone is reasonable and professional. But if you read between the lines, this letter is a primal scream, voiced by people who are forced to pay for a State Water Project that delivers less water every year.
Quoting from the letter, “the SWP exemplifies a modern case of ‘death by a thousand cuts,’ gradually undermined by countless seemingly small challenges over time.” This truth is exemplified in the dizzying number of agencies, laws, and regulations, the endless litigation, alongside chronically inadequate funding; all of it constantly changing. It makes it hard to even report on the fight for water abundance, much less fight for anything that is more than an incremental step forward. Every year we spend more and get less.
For those of us not immersed in the endless procession of legislative actions and agency directives that affect water deliveries, the issues brought up by the State Water Contractors in their letter to the governor may appear to be complicated details. But the contents of this six-page letter are a condensed discussion, selecting only the deepest of the thousands of cuts. Here is an attempt to summarize some of the highlights:
1 – Veto AB 1319, which would further empower the California Dept. of Fish and Wildlife to list species as “provisional candidates” under the California Endangered Species Act “with no opportunity for public comment and no requirement that the determination be based on science.”
2 – Clarify the criteria under which State Water Project operations are altered because of species that are listed (or are provisional candidates for listing) as threatened or endangered. Mitigation (i.e., reduced water deliveries) “should be proportional to the magnitude and nature of the effect” that water deliveries have on threatened or endangered species.
3 – To very loosely paraphrase the next section: Quit taking forever to update implementation of the Bay-Delta Plan. The State Water Board began the update process in 2009, sixteen years ago. It’s still not done. Meanwhile, not having clear objectives and operating guidelines has created perpetual uncertainty, preventing valuable projects from getting started.
4 – Fund repairs to the major aqueducts. Proposition 4, passed last November, approved $10 billion for environmental projects, but only $75 million (less than one percent) was allocated to repair and upgrade the entire state’s water conveyance infrastructure. It will take billions, not millions, just to repair the state’s major aqueducts. Get the money out of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
5 – Quit requiring the State Water Project to purchase 100 percent “zero carbon” resources an entire decade before every other institution in the state has to do so. Require SWP electric power procurement to be subject to the same rules governing every other utility in the state, instead of forcing them out onto the bleeding edge ahead of the pack.
These five highlights from the SWC letter don’t begin to cover every significant challenge facing water suppliers in California, but nonetheless encompass policy choices that together spell the difference between scarcity and stagnation versus improving statewide water security. These recommendations would go a long way toward restoring reasonable and balanced water management practices and creating consistent rules to enable investment in new water supply projects. Sadly, the SWC’s top recommendation, a governor’s veto of AB 1319, has already been disregarded. Newsom signed AB 1319 on 10/11, further empowering the activists who control and staff the California Dept. of Fish and Wildlife to arbitrarily interfere with water distribution at a massive scale, anytime, with minimal accountability.
Projects that would deliver water abundance to all Californians are known. Expand the capacity to withdraw water from the Delta during high volume winter flow. Expand the capacity to harvest and store storm runoff above ground and in aquifers, across both agricultural and urban watersheds. Reuse wastewater. Desalinate. Fix the aqueducts and develop even more comprehensive infrastructure to deliver water from remote locations, everywhere, to water consumers, everywhere. Done.
But fewer of these projects would be needed if we restored balance to the rules governing the delta pumps. And if we don’t restore efficiency to our water bureaucracies so permits, funding, and projects can get started in months instead of decades, all the worthy solutions in the world will never see the light of day.
What confronts the State Water Contractors and the customers they serve is a collection of special interests that are unified by one primary theme: scarcity. Builders of anything big in California confront bureaucratic inertia that always favors delays and reviews, anti-project litigation as profit centers, and desperate competition for limited public funds. Behind these pragmatic motivations is always the useful moral justification: scarcity in the name of sustainability. But sustainability does not require scarcity. That is a convenient myth.
Water agencies and water consumers have great ideas. They have sustainable supply solutions that don’t require fallowing farmland and rationing urban water use. They need to unite behind an agenda that fights critical incremental battles but also demands major reforms and big new projects. They need to unite their own communities of water users and then recruit allies elsewhere, perhaps starting with the titans of Silicon Valley. These billionaires are belatedly discovering that although the scarcity agenda never mattered when all it meant was a $1,500 per month residential water bill, suddenly it matters very much if it means they can’t build their data center.
Better, faster, and cheaper is the mantra of the Silicon Valley. Perhaps they’re ready to apply that innate imperative not only to digital innovations, but also to policies and technologies that can deliver millions of acre feet. We may hope the State Water Contractors prevail on Governor Newsom to address the concerns they list in their letter. At the same time, they need to find new allies, with sharp elbows and deep pockets, who never lost a battle they chose to join.
Edward Ring is the Director of Water and Energy Policy at the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013. Ring is the author of Fixing California: Abundance, Pragmatism, Optimism (2021) and The Abundance Choice: Our Fight for More Water in California (2022).