SJV WATER: Giant SoCal water district approves continued Delta tunnel funding, asks “Where’s Kern County?”

By Lois Henry, SJV Water

California’s largest water contractor agreed Tuesday to spend another $141 million on the latest version of a long proposed tunnel that would bring water under the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to farms and cities in the southern part of the state.

But the directors of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California had lots of questions and caveats along with their approval to fund the planning and preconstruction phases of the so-called Delta Conveyance Project. The project is expected to cost $20 billion at full build out, according to estimates released by the Department of Water Resources earlier this year.

A recurring question the Met board had Tuesday was whether the Kern County Water Agency, the state’s second largest water contractor, was on board to pay its share of costs, $3.3 million, for this phase of the project.

Questions to the agency about its participation level weren’t answered in time for this article. But several local districts were discussing the project this week, according to their meeting agendas.

Consideration of spending another $3.3 million weighs heavily on agricultural users who can’t spread that cost among millions of ratepayers or finance it using guaranteed income from future rates, acknowledged Wade Crowfoot, Secretary of California’s Natural Resources Department who was at Met’s meeting in person to answer questions.

Still, Crowfoot assured Kern would pony up its share, he told Met’s board.

“Karla Nemeth (director of DWR) has been working with the irrigation districts and Kern County Water Agency to ensure they will participate,” he said.

DWR representatives made the rounds in Kern County this summer, attending numerous water district meetings in person to go over the project and its funding.

In recent years, several local districts have opted out of continuing to fund the project. Collectively, Kern districts have paid about $71 million since 2007 on various versions of a tunnel project through the delta, including a twin-tunnel version under then Gov. Jerry Brown. When Gov. Gavin Newsom took office in 2019, he trimmed that plan to a single tunnel, but costs have continued to escalate.

Even for Kern districts that remain committed to funding the project, there are a lot of questions about the state’s cost assumptions and how the project will be operated.

The state hasn’t been able to say how much more reliable the tunnel would make water deliveries, which makes it nearly impossible for districts to conduct a cost-benefit analysis, ag districts have repeatedly noted.

Crowfoot indicated Tuesday, the proposed tunnel would be used mostly to capture excess flows during big water years, such as 2023. It would also, theoretically, ensure a continued water supply if an earthquake destroyed delta levees and flooded the region with salt water, Crowfoot said.

The state has the Delta Conveyance project benefits pegged at a 2.20 cost ratio, meaning for every $1 spent there is $2.20 worth of benefits. But Rosedale Rio-Bravo Water Storage District Resource Manager Trent Tailor said this summer that’s skewed toward urban benefit.

Still Rosedale Rio-Bravo is one of the Kern districts that has committed to continue funding the Delta Conveyance, if only out of FOMO (fear of missing out.)

“The heavy hitters in this thing, they have no problem cutting you out if you are not a participant,” Rosedale Rio-Bravo’s vice president Jason Selvidge said this summer after the DWR presentation.