Stop the Delta Tunnel

The Department of Water Resources (DWR) proposes to build a massive tunnel under the Delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers. It is bad for fish and wildlife. It is bad for water quality. It is bad for the communities and their economies in and around the Delta.

California Sportfishing Protection Alliance (CSPA) was born in 1983, in the wake of the defeat of the first major effort to bypass water around the Delta. CSPA has opposed such schemes ever since.

Background

In 1982, voters of California voted down a plan to move water from the Sacramento River around the Delta in a “peripheral canal.”

In 2007 the Department of Water Resources (DWR) and state and federal water contractors revived the peripheral canal scheme. This scheme had the same goal of more efficiently feeding Sacramento River water to the canals that lead from the south Delta to the San Joaquin Valley and southern California.

It started as the Bay Delta Conservation Plan” (BDCP), a stakeholder process to develop a “habitat conservation plan” under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Habitat conservation plans provide an exemption from state and federal ESA requirements for fifty years. The idea was that moving water around the Delta would be coupled with environmental improvements that would benefit everyone.

It didn’t happen.

In 2015, DWR abandoned the stakeholder process and proposed to build two huge tunnels under the Delta, rebranded as the “California WaterFix.” The rebranding included messaging that two proposed tunnels under the Delta would benefit fish by reducing the flow of water within the Delta towards DWR and the Bureau of Reclamation’s existing “export” pumps in the south Delta. After water rights hearings that lasted three years, multiple lawsuits, and an adverse outcome before the Delta Stewardship Council, DWR halted its effort late in 2018.

The version started in 2020 is now called the “Delta Conveyance Project,” or, informally, the Delta tunnel. The project has been stripped of its conservation guise. The new Delta tunnel proposal is unabashedly a water supply project. As far as fish are concerned, DWR now argues only that its Delta tunnel would not make conditions worse.

CSPA has opposed BDCP, the WaterFix twin tunnels, and the new Delta Conveyance Project single tunnel every step of the way. Over the years, CSPA has submitted hundreds of pages of comments and testimony to support its opposition. CSPA has also filed many lawsuits to challenge various aspects of the various iterations of the tunnel projects in the courts.

In 2020, CSPA joined many environmental and fishing groups, and several Delta counties, in opposing a “validation” action by DWR to fund the new tunnel project. In January 2024, a superior court judge ruled against DWR. The judge said that DWR could not sell bonds for the new project based on a vague conceptual project description it made decades ago.

On December 8th, 2023 DWR published a Final Environmental Impact Report (EIR) for the Delta tunnel project. On December 21, 2023 DWR approved the Project by filing a Notice of Determination (NOD). On January 19, 2024, CSPA joined a lawsuit challenging the Department of Water Resources’ approval of the Delta Conveyance Project, based on a long list of deficiencies.

Some of CSPA’s greatest particular issues with the Final EIR are that it does not say how the project and upstream reservoirs would operate and does not propose flows for the Delta as required by law.

Key Facts about the Delta Conveyance Project

The Delta Conveyance Project is a proposed 40-foot-diameter tunnel that would extend for approximately 45 miles. The proposed underground tunnel would take water from the Sacramento River before it enters the Delta. The water would then enter the State Water Project’s (SWP’s) 444-mile-long aqueduct to be exported for agricultural and urban use in central and southern California.

DWR’s Final EIR said that since the 1960s, when the State Water Project (SWP) began, “regulatory changes intended to better protect fish and wildlife resources in the Delta have reduced the amount of water that the SWP can export from the Delta to central and southern California.”

Well, those regulatory changes have come about because DWR’s operation of the SWP has been disastrous for fish.

Delta smelt, for example, are an endemic species vital to the Delta’s ecosystem. In the 1980s the Delta smelt population declined by more than 80 percent. In 1993 Delta smelt were listed as threatened under federal and California endangered species acts. In 2007, this designation forced DWR to cease pumping water when hundreds of Delta smelt perished at south Delta pumps.

Governor Newsom and DWR assert that the Delta Conveyance Project will improve the SWP’s ability to export water to southern parts of the state in the face of climate change, droughts, potential earthquakes, and levee failures. They frame it as “modernizing” infrastructure. Delta defenders respond that the concept is 40-plus years old and uses modernist branding to justify the obsolete strategy of diverting still more water from an overtapped ecosystem.

Other Bay-Delta Campaigns

Recent News

Stop the Delta Tunnel Campaign

CSPA Protests Water Right Petition for Proposed Delta Tunnel

CSPA, AquAlliance, and the San Joaquin Audubon Society filed a protest on May 13, 2024 opposing the Department of Water Resources’ (DWR’s) petition to change its water rights.  The change in water rights would allow DWR to construct and operate a proposed tunnel under the eastern side of the Sacramento – San Joaquin Delta estuary. […]

Department of Water Resources Gets a Free Pass: CSPA Asks State Water Resources Control Board to Follow its Own Rules

On March 15, 2024, California Sportfishing Protection Alliance (CSPA) and allies submitted a letter to the State Water Resources Control Board (State Board) requesting that it resolve the protests of CSPA and others of a petition for extension of time submitted by the Department of Water Resources (DWR) in 2009.  CSPA submitted this letter because […]

Show Time: DWR Files Petition to Change Water Rights for Delta Tunnel Despite Pending Lawsuit and Widespread Opposition

On February 22, 2024, the Department of Water Resources (DWR) submitted a water rights petition for change in point of diversion to the State Water Resources Control Board (State Board) for the Delta Conveyance Project also known as the Delta tunnel. DWR submitted this petition despite broad opposition to the project from environmental advocacy groups, […]

The Delta Conveyance Project: Either We Survive Together or Perish Together

On December 8th, 2023, the Department of Water Resources (DWR) issued the Final Environmental Impact Report (Final EIR) for its proposed Delta Conveyance Project, informally called the Delta tunnel. During the required comment period following DWR’s release of its Draft Environmental Impact Report (Draft EIR), the public, native tribes, and non-governmental organizations submitted 700 letters […]

CSPA Strong after 40 Years: We Will Not Surrender this Delta!

The California Sportfishing Protection Alliance celebrated its fortieth birthday in 2023.  CSPA’s year of birth, 1983, was one year after California voters voted down the “peripheral canal” to divert water around the Delta. CSPA’s mission to protect fisheries, habitat, and water quality is a good idea that lives on. Unfortunately, the Department of Water Resources’ […]

More Delta Flow or Delta Tunnel? One Good Decision Will Stop the Next Bad Decision

On December 8, 2023, the Department of Water Resources (DWR) issued its Final Environmental Impact Report (FEIR) for its Proposed “Delta Conveyance Project” (aka tunnel under the Delta).  In thousands of pages of responses to comments, DWR affirms that its Draft EIR was right on just about everything. One thing DWR says it was right […]

CSPA Comments on Deficient Environmental Impact Report for Proposed Delta Tunnel

CSPA submitted Comments on December 14, 2022 on the Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) for a proposed new tunnel to divert massive amounts of water under the Sacramento – San Joaquin Delta.  The proposed tunnel is the latest scheme by the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) to more reliably ship more northern California water […]

CSPA Scopes Out Delta Tunnel Do-Over

CSPA has identified 69 issues that the Department of Water Resources (DWR) must confront in its forthcoming Environmental Impact Report (EIR) for the new incarnation of its “Delta Conveyance” project.  Delta Conveyance means a proposed tunnel under the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta that would move water from northern California south.  CSPA expects to oppose the […]

Oops, DWR Did It Again

WaterFix version 1 is hung out to dry.  There have been welcome announcements by the Newsom administration of a clean start on California water policy.  But on June 10, 2019, the Department of Water Resources posted “Why Delta Conveyance” to one of its many webpages, linked in DWR’s email listserve DWR Water News.  It appears […]

WaterFix: Down One Tunnel, in Holding Pattern. What’s Next??

In his State of the State address on February 12, 2019, newly elected Governor Gavin Newsom announced he didn’t support the “California WaterFix” as a two-tunnel project, and that he favored downsizing it to just one tunnel.  What does this news mean?     Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta Photo: CA Dept. of Water Resources     […]