On October 30, 2026, the State Water Resources Control Board (Board) approved a Bay-Delta Plan for the Sacramento and Bay-Delta watersheds. The Plan incorporates “voluntary agreements” (VAs) by water users to release small additional amounts of water into and through the Bay-Delta estuary. It also promises to spend about $3 billion, mostly of taxpayer money, on water purchases and habitat enhancement projects over the next eight years.
Bluntly, the Plan is a stinker. It promises far too little water to turn around an estuary in crisis.
The 1% Solution
California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot told the Board on October 29 that the Plan was a “paradigm shift” that “protects water security for California communities.”
Actually, the adopted Plan is more accurately characterized is business as usual. The Plan continues to starve San Francisco Bay and the Bay-Delta estuary of freshwater flow. It is the substantive sequel to the 1994 Bay-Delta Accord, an earlier excursion in magical thinking that also sought to substitute physical solutions and money for adequate flow.
Overall, spread across all areas supplied with water from watershed, and across all types of water years, the water cost of the adopted Plan is 1% of existing supply.
Style Replaces Substance
What has changed is the dominant narrative. In 2010, the Board’s Delta Flow Criteria Report mandated by the legislature announced that the Delta is “in crisis.” The 2010 Report stated:
“Recent Delta flows are insufficient to support native Delta fishes for today’s habitats. Flow modification is one of the immediate actions available although the links between flows and fish response are often indirect and are not fully resolved. Flow and physical habitat interact in many ways, but they are not interchangeable. … In order to preserve the attributes of a natural variable system to which native fish species are adapted, many of the criteria developed by the State Water Board are crafted as percentages of natural or unimpaired flows.”
A raft of additional Board documents over the next fifteen years made similar statements.
That narrative is now supplanted by happy talk about “holistic solutions,” collaboration, and “water assets” that the Plan will add to existing flows. It is adorned with a new fusillade of political euphemisms. For instance, Mr. Crowfoot’s “water security for California communities” is a cheery descriptor for the continuing over-allocation of water to irrigated agriculture. The prize of course goes to the “Healthy Rivers and Landscapes” rebrand of “voluntary agreements.”
Limitations of “Engagement”
In an October 28 preamble to the two days of Plan adoption hearings, Board Chair Joaquin Esquivel called out the differences between the snap decision on the Bay-Delta Accord in 1994 and the Board’s three-year engagement with the public on the new Plan with the public and Tribes.
It is true that the Board offered many opportunities for comment and engagement following release of its Draft Staff Report in September 2023. It is also true that much of the 2023 Draft Staff Report itself was already structured around the voluntary agreements. The VAs were largely fleshed out in the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that the water users and state agencies submitted to the Board in March 2022. That MOU was negotiated behind closed doors.
Subsequent comments were not successful in dislodging the VA structure from the drafts of the Plan. By October 2024, comments notwithstanding, the overall recommendations of environmental and fishing organizations, environmental justice advocates and Tribes about the Plan’s basic structure were not in play. The Board had clearly decided to make voluntary agreements the center of the new Plan. The Board considered public comments from these entities largely in two limited ways: first, refining the voluntary agreements, and second, tinkering around the edges of how the Board could apply a percent of unimpaired flow to the outliers or in the event that the voluntary agreements fell apart.
The same polite non-response was not true for the water user community writ large. In the December 2025 Draft Plan, the Board introduced the concept of “water supply adjustments,” or WSAs. WSAs reduced the percent of unimpaired flow bypass requirement for non-VA entities from 55% to 35% in the driest third of water years, and 45% in the middle third of water years. The December Draft also carved out tributary-explicit WSAs that for some tributaries eliminated a Delta inflow requirement altogether. Thus, the Board met water purveyor interests even as it dismissed most others.
From beginning to end, CSPA diligently submitted comments. Many of these were in conjunction with other organizations. Early in the process, CSPA submitted comments largely alone in order to make constructive recommendations aimed at making workable a percent-of-unimpaired-flow requirement for the watershed (the “regulatory path” in the Plan). This effort built on fifteen years of similar efforts CSPA made in FERC relicensing and other venues. In all those years, not one water agency lifted a finger to make workable a percent-of-unimpaired-flow framework. Not one.
The Final Plan now leaves the Board two years to determine how it would implement a percent-of-unimpaired-flow requirement for non-VA parties or as a “backstop” in the event of the collapse of the VA edifice. Sixteen years after the 2010 Delta Flow Criteria Report, the “backstop” is still a plan to make a plan.
More delay is not a surprise. A previous Board passed a percent-of-unimpaired-flow requirement for lower San Joaquin River tributaries in 2018, following which newly elected Governor Newsom declined to reappoint the presiding Board chair. Little practical progress has occurred in developing a plan of implementation for the San Joaquin tributaries, and the requirements remain unimplemented.
Overall, by far the largest net effect of public process from September 2023 through October 2026 was that the Board took three extra years to make a terrible decision.
Will the Plan Limit New Water Supply Projects? Maybe
There was one partial exception to the general rejection of comments from outside the VA parties. It does not make a terrible Plan good, but it is not trivial either.
How the Board would address new water supply projects remained in play after October 2024. This stemmed in large part from the contradictory structure of the voluntary agreements. The VAs propose to add defined amounts of flow to flows that would otherwise exist under existing flow conditions. Unregulated flow is part of those existing conditions. But water users see unregulated flow as water available for new diversions.
CSPA and many others voted early and often on this structural contradiction. CSPA framed it simply: when you add a new volume to a shrinking initial volume, part of the new volume just makes up for the shrinkage. It’s no addition at all. This is elementary school arithmetic.
Even a Board that was pressured to give the water user community almost everything it asked for could not duck the question: flow additions compared to what?
So, in considering new water supply projects, the Board tried several ideas on for size. In October 2024, it considered, alternatively, a percent of unimpaired flow and a fixed number for Delta outflow (42,800 cubic feet per second), below which new water supply projects could not divert at all. The December 2025 Draft Plan proposed to punt Delta flow criteria for each new water supply project to the water right permit for that project.
In August 2026, the Board landed on a hybrid solution, which it adopted in the Final Plan. New water supply projects in the Bay-Delta watershed are subject to the regulatory path of the Plan, with an initial prohibition on diversion unless Delta outflow is greater than or equal to 55% of the unimpaired Delta inflow. However, that default is subject to modification by the Board in granting or modifying a water right.
Moreover, developers of new water supply projects can request modification of their applicable Delta flow requirements in the Plan’s required annual or tri-annual reviews. They can seek either “water supply adjustments” for their projects or to apply a voluntary agreement.
Under this Plan, there’s always a pathway to diverting more water from a watershed and estuary in crisis. How easy it will be to pursue that pathway is yet to seen.
Theater of the Absurd
The adopted Bay-Delta Plan gives water users just about everything they want. But there’s no pleasing some folks.
The Bureau of Reclamation under the Trump administration has threatened not to join the VAs and not to cooperate. Reclamation has taken the extreme position that the Board cannot dictate storage requirements for Reclamation’s reservoirs. Reclamation has also said that any water deliveries it can create by weakening environmental rules are federal water fair and square, and no one should have to make up the resulting lost Delta inflow or outflow.
If Reclamation bails, it would mean that the VAs would be short about a quarter of their $3 billion price tag. It could also mean that Reclamation could divert from the Delta the water that other entities release as “added” Delta inflow or outflow. Reclamation’s largest contractor, Westlands Water District, which serves a large swath of the western San Joaquin Valley, has joined Reclamation in threatening not to participate.
Others have complained that the Plan requires too much accountability to the Board. The Plan requires defined check-ins with Board staff on various aspects of the VAs, both flow and physical habitat improvements. The VA parties created their own governance structure and review processes. They want this structure and those processes to be the limit of their reporting and decision-making about implementation and modifications.
In further concessions to the VA parties, the Board decided in its adoption hearing to require Board staff to attend the VA governance meetings. It remains to be seen whether those meetings will entirely supplant the Plan’s reporting structures. It also remains to be seen whether the VA parties are satisfied with effective control, or whether they want absolute control.
Finally, many water users, especially VA parties, have publicly decried the “uncertainty” within the Plan and its implementation. And, frankly, there is some. A lot has to do with whether water rights with ongoing (and even legacy) petition processes would be classified, in full or in part, as new supply projects. As new projects, they would be subject to a percent-of-unimpaired-flow bypass requirement. There is also a question whether more complete exercise of previously underused water rights will preclude full VA status.
It will be entertaining to see how water right holders currently or soon to be in process will respond. They may rely on their spokespersons and attorneys to sort out their water right issues as these issues arise. Or, they may follow Reclamation’s approach and adopt a full-throated spitting in the plate of their non-regulatory feast.
Last Minute Concession for the Trinity River
On the final adoption hearing day October 30, the Board made an eleventh hour promise to a series of vocal (mostly Tribal) advocates for the Trinity River. The Board promised a scoping meeting within two years to evaluate necessary changes to Trinity River operations. The commitment has no specific substance and does not define a specific process for addressing Trinity River operations. But it is a testament to the persistence and moral persuasion of Trinity River advocates that the Board felt compelled to make the commitment at all.
Closing Thoughts
Barring self-inflicted implosion of the VAs by water users, the VAs and the generally inadequate flow requirements will be litigated by environmental, fishing, and environmental justice groups, and by Tribes. Some assortment of water users will litigate the Plan’s regulatory pathway, both the percent-of-unimpaired-flow construct and reservoir carryover storage requirements.
Meanwhile, while the voluntary agreements fiddle, the Delta will remain in crisis. A series of bad water years could cause one or more species to follow the Delta smelt’s road to functional extinction. Under this Plan, the only thing that will avoid continued decline of Central Valley and Delta native fishes will be a series of wet water years with copious uncaptured Delta outflow. The adopted Bay-Delta Plan is the water management equivalent of a health plan whose organizing principle is “don’t get sick.”