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State lawmakers will return to the Capitol next week for the last month of their 2025 session, rested, tanned, and probably ready after a summer vacation.
Bills intended to document blue California’s distaste and resistance to President Donald Trump will take center stage in the last weeks of the legislature. In order to counter moves in Texas to generate five more Republican seats, the most notable would be Governor Gavin Newsom’s proposal to redesign the boundaries of California’s 52 congressional districts, granting Democrats five additional seats.
There are still issues that affect people closer to home, even when the Capitol is preoccupied with national political scheming that is influenced by Newsom’s probable presidential campaign. The project to strengthen California’s water shipments from north to south by avoiding the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is the most significant of them. It has been in the works for at least 60 years.
Originally a peripheral canal that carried water around the Delta, the project has seen multiple names and transformations, including twin tunnels beneath the Delta and, most recently, a single tunnel known as the Delta Conveyance Project.
The Newsom administration thinks it merely needs legislation to remove the project from the onerous procedure of the California Environmental Quality Act, which would deny opponents the legal means to postpone the project.
Newsom had planned to use the robust and accelerated budget process to get over the CEQA barrier by attaching a trailer bill to the state budget that was adopted in June.
According to Newsom, efforts to update our vital water infrastructure have been bogged down in needless red tape for far too long. Barriers are no longer an issue. In order to properly conserve and manage water in anticipation of a hotter, drier future, our state must finish this project as quickly as feasible. Let’s construct this.
Legislators from Northern California who opposed the tunnel convinced their leaders to postpone using a trailer bill, but Newsom and supporters of the tunnel, including the Southern California Metropolitan Water District, will make another attempt in the last weeks of the session.
Supporters of the tunnel argue that by avoiding the ecologically vulnerable Delta, it will increase the reliability of California’s extensive water system, which uses rivers in Northern California to send water to comparatively drier Southern California via the California Aqueduct.
As far as it goes, that is accurate. Opponents contend that the tunnel’s diversion of Sacramento River water will deny the Delta the water it requires to support fish and other animals.
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Since the State Water Project was initially built in the 1960s, the argument has essentially waged along similar lines. Jerry Brown secured legislative approval for what was then a canal during his first term as governor fifty years ago, but voters overturned it in a ballot in 1982. Since then, there have been numerous iterations of the project that have been discussed, but none have progressed to this point.
By offering the Delta $200 million to mitigate the project’s effects, Newsom is attempting to sweeten the deal. The supermajority of Democratic lawmakers are split approximately along geographic lines, so it’s unclear if Newsom will be able to achieve everything he wants from the Legislature.
The legislature’s Delta Caucus said this week that the legislature should reject the governor’s misguided attempt to expedite the Delta Tunnel Project once more, as it did in June. $200 million cannot buy off the delta towns that will be destroyed by this needless and costly project. In actuality, the loss of fisheries and traditional tribal resources, as well as the ruin of thousands of acres of great farmland, cannot be made up for with money.
Despite their tiny number, Republicans could make the difference because of how sharply divided they are.
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Newsom wanted to fast-track the Delta tunnel project. The Legislature slowed the flow
Key player in California s water wars embraces controversial pact
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