California Has a Long History of Squandering its Precious Water

Gov. Gavin Newsom is bragging about more than $140 million coming from the Biden-Harris Administration to support “critical water storage projects here in California, including the Sites Reservoir.” This is curious since voters already approved Proposition 1 in 2014 together with $7.12 billion in general obligation bonds for the Sites Reservoir.

“We’ll continue building more, faster to prepare for a hotter, drier future,” Newsom says now, after a record winter snowpack and heavy rain year, resulting in Lake Shasta filled to the brim with water.

But Newsom blames “severe, climate-fueled drought” for water shortages, when it’s our government: California sends the first 50% of its winter runoff out to the ocean for environmental purposes; the second 50% goes to agriculture (40%) and urban use (10%).

One Twitter/X reader responded accordingly:

“It dryer because you never built any water storage. It’s a government made drought.”

“Whatever happened to the reservoirs that the residents of California approved to be built in 2014, over 10 years ago?” a California Globe reader asked. Indeed, and what about the $30 billion in voter approved bonds since year 2000?

The elusive Sites Reservoir

Proposition 1, the Water Quality, Supply, and Infrastructure Improvement Act of 2014, authorized the $7.12 billion in general obligation bonds for state water supply infrastructure projects: public water system improvements, surface and groundwater storage, drinking water protection, water recycling and advanced water treatment technology, water supply management and conveyance, wastewater treatment, drought relief, emergency water supplies, and ecosystem and watershed protection and restoration.

The problem is that of the $7.12 billion, $2.7 billion dollars was specifically designated for new water storage projects, but thus far, hasn’t been used as designated. As the California Department of Water Resources bond oversight shows, no water storage has been added, but ecosystem and watershed protection and restoration projects have been completed.

According to Globe contributor and water expert Don Wright, That’s because “half of the $2.7 billion for storage has a string attached; it has to benefit the ecosystem. No strings about benefiting feeding people by irrigating crops.”

Since year 2000, California voters have approved eight water bonds totaling more than $30 billion, according the the Legislative Analyst’s Office. But the state bureaucrats empowered to get these projects built have to deal with endless litigation and constantly changing permitting requirements from dozens of local, state and federal agencies, I reported in 2021. Instead, the “successful bureaucrats keep their jobs by conditioning people to think it’s supposed to take 30-40 years to build a reservoir, or repair an aqueduct,” one water expert told the Globe. “They’re dead wrong. But they’re in charge.”

There are seven projects designated with Prop. 1 (2014) funding that would provide 2.77 million acre-feet of water storage, along with the $7.5 billion bond which dedicated $2.7 billion for the new water storage projects.

Interest in the reservoir renewed in the 2000s as the frequency and severity of droughts grew under climate change and declines in native fish populations led to tighter restrictions on exporting water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

Since 2017, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California’s board of directors has authorized $5.7 million in investments to access as much as 50,000 acre-feet of annual water yield from the Sites project.

In 2018, the project received $816 million from the Proposition 1 water bond and secured a $449 million loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. As of July 2023, $233 million in federal contributions had been made to the project.

Unserious politicians love the bond money, but not the infrastructure projects (eg: High speed Rail).

Last May 2023, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that he was seeking to fast track water, storage and clean energy projects delayed by environmental lawsuits and the byzantine  permitting process. While this should be a great move, Democrats and Newsom approved and implemented the policies impeding these important projects for decades.

While the White House beckons Newsom as he tries to appear moderate, the more pressing question is Why not remove the environmental impediments to building all water storage, water delivery, and housing projects if it is so important in these cherry-picked projects?

The biggest barrier is the California Environmental Quality Act to building nearly anything on a large scale in California.

And many experts say it is the most destructive impediment into California’s housing crisis and water storage crisis. There is a reason CEQA is called “the tort lawyer full employment act.”

However, when Democrats want a project done, they exempt the state from CEQA. Case-in-point: In 2016 the Legislature approved a CEQA exemption to streamline the $1.3 billion project to restore, renovate or replace the existing State Capitol Building Annex.

“CEQA is truly the third rail of California politics,” the Pacific Research Institute’s Kerry Jackson said. “Lawmakers fear touching it in any meaningful way will kill their careers. But when it suits them, they are perfectly willing to bend the rail.”

Politicians choose to impose or bypass CEQA requirements when it is politically expedient for them. They bend over backwards for politically favored projects. But they have no problem killing important infrastructure projects, housing projects, highway widening projects, while crooning environmental prose.

Newsom’s announcement last year on construction of the Delta water tunnel under the San Joaquin River Delta, and the Sites Reservoir, was couched to make it sound as if he’s Gavin the Benevolent, rather than a manipulative politician.

Newsom has been talking – and only talking – about these two projects since he was elected governor in 2018. In 2022, he announced his Water Supply Strategy in which he endorsed the Sites Project “and even had the temerity to suggest environmentalist obstruction is stopping as many good projects as bad ones,” Ed Ring reported at the Globe.