California Legislature’s final weeks could decide fate of Delta water tunnel

Tanned, rested and presumably ready after a summer vacation break, state legislators will return to the Capitol next week for the final month of their 2025 session.

The session’s final weeks will be dominated by bills aimed at registering blue California’s dislike of and opposition to President Donald Trump. The most prominent will be Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to redraw boundaries of California’s 52 congressional districts, giving Democrats five more seats to counter efforts in Texas to create five more Republican seats.

Despite the Capitol’s fixation on national political maneuvering — tinged by Newsom’s likely bid for the White House — there are pending matters that hit closer to home. None is more important than what’s been kicking around for at least six decades, a project to bolster California’s north-to-south shipments of water by bypassing the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

The project has gone by several names and morphed from a “peripheral canal” carrying water around the Delta to twin tunnels beneath the Delta and, most recently, to a single tunnel called the Delta Conveyance Project.

Newsom’s administration believes it needs just one more thing to get the greenlight, legislation to streamline various aspects of the project, such as water rights, thereby lessening the ability of critics to delay construction.

Newsom had hoped he could get what he wants with a “trailer bill” attached to the state budget approved in June, taking advantage of the bulletproof and expedited budget process.

“For too long, attempts to modernize our critical water infrastructure have stalled in endless red tape, burdened with unnecessary delay,” Newsom said. “We’re done with barriers. Our state needs to complete this project as soon as possible, so that we can better store and manage water to prepare for a hotter, drier future. Let’s get this built.”

Northern California legislators opposed to the tunnel persuaded their leaders to stall on using a trailer bill, but Newsom and tunnel advocates, such as the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, will try again during the session’s final weeks.

Tunnel backers contend that it would make California’s vast water system, which taps Northern California rivers to supply water to relatively arid Southern California via the California Aqueduct, more reliable by bypassing the environmentally fragile Delta.

That’s true as far as it goes. But opponents say the diversions of Sacramento River water into the tunnel would deprive the Delta of the water it needs to be a healthy habitat for fish and other wildlife.

The debate has essentially raged along those lines since the State Water Project was first constructed in the 1960s. During his first governorship a half-century ago, Jerry Brown won legislative approval for what was then a canal, only to have it overturned by voters via a 1982 referendum. Since then versions of the project have proliferated and been debated but none has advanced to the current stage.

Newsom is trying to sweeten the deal by offering the Delta $200 million to offset the project’s impacts. But whether Newsom can get what he wants from the Legislature remains uncertain, because Democratic legislators, who are a supermajority, are divided roughly along geographic lines.

“The Legislature rightly rejected the governor’s ill-conceived plan to fast-track the Delta Tunnel Project in June and should reject it again,” the Legislature’s Delta Caucus declared last week. “Delta communities that will be devastated by this unaffordable and unnecessary project cannot be bought off with $200 million. In fact, no amount of money can compensate for the destruction of thousands of acres of prime farmland and the loss of fisheries and historic tribal resources.”

The division is so sharp that Republicans, although small in number, could be decisive.

An earlier version of this column referred to the seeking exemption from the California Environmental Quality Act. CEQA is not an issue in the proposed legislation.