Newsom’s suggestion to quickly track Delta tunnel stalls again

From Rachel BeckerCalmness

This story was originally published by CalmattersS Register about their ballots.

In a blow to the ambitioner Gavin News to replay the Delta, California’s legislators again attacked his plan to quickly track a deeply controversial project for a $ 20 billion tunnel to transfer more water south.

Numerous sources in the legislature say a clock Delta tunnel project. The news comes as a legislators and a Newsom competition to reach megadeal, which covers the carbon trade, fire financing, energy transmission and refinery problems. The governor’s service did not respond to the Calmatters investigation.

While supporters admit that a tunnel bill has hit a dead end so far, this is not the first time the Newsom has I tried to follow the project quicklyS And water observers expect it will not be the last.

“Even if the actions are delayed this year, the need for a modern transport delta has never been greater,” said Jennifer Pierre, General Manager of the State Water Performers, a firm supporter of the bill. “The need is urgent, the support is wide and the time to advance is now.”

Legislators representing Delta Communities called the failure to track the account relief. They have long said that the construction of a tunnel for watering water around the delta will devastate communities, fish and local farms.

“This will be incredibly destructive to my communities,” said State Senator Jerry McNenne, a democrat of a hundred, in front of Calmatters. “They made a good battle, but we were just too united to make progress.”

Assembly Member Lori Wilson, Democrat from the city of Suisun, said no compensation for Delta communities would compensate for the lasting damage of the project.

“Once a short -sighted policy, always a short -sighted policy,” she said in a statement. “We will continue to stand strong and fight for the delta and communities that call it at home.”

“Let’s build that”

The proposed tunnel, more formally known as the Delta transportation project, will extend 45 miles from the Sacramento River to a reservoir near Livermore, bypassing the Delta of Sacramento-Son Joaquin, which serves as a critical center for the water supply in California.

This is the latest iteration of decades of the supply of water supplies from northern California around, not through the delta-with the aim to shorten the water supply for 27 million Californians and 750,000 acres of agriculture in a large extent in the central and southern parts of the state.

The planning of the project remains underway, although it is cruel to environmentalists, tribes, Delta cities and cities and the fishing industry.

They are afraid of losing water supply, environmental worsening and the years of construction that they say they will do Some cities uninhabited. Thehe State analysis He warned that the Delta tunnel would put salmon at risk.

NEWSOM introduced the optimizing bill earlier this spring as a budget supplement, a strategy that it had previously used to circumvent a more extensive contribution from lawmakers.

“We have finished the barriers -our country must finish this project as soon as possible so that we can preserve and manage the water better to prepare for a hot, drier future,” ” Newsom said May. “Let’s build that.”

Stopped but not dead

The Tunnel Bill aims to equalize road blocks Related to the acquisition of land, decisions on water rights, financing and litigation. Delta legislators He pushed back, as well as Newsom’s strategy to use the budget process to discuss a shortcut.

“Drying to the north, just to water the south, it doesn’t make it better at all and it doesn’t make it fair,” Stephanie Nguyen, Democrat from Elk Grove, froze for the Assembly, He said in May.

The legislators submitted decisions on the bills to the latest at the session, and the Newsom administration continued to insist on both the tunnel and optimizing efforts.

Pierre, with state -owned water contractors, told Calmatters that the failure to track the project did not reflect the legislative opposition of the tunnel itself.

“We had voices that showed the majority in both houses,” Pierre told Calmatters. “It was not a function of lack of support for the bill.”

But McNenne said he believed that political costs for the administration were getting too high.

“I think the governor realized there were other battles to fight,” McNenne said. “It’s just not worth it to lead this battle to the wall.”

John Rosenfield, a scientific director at San Francisco Baykeeker, said he hoped it was the last effort by the Newsom administration to “cut sliders” for Delta tunnel.

But he added, “This is the zombie offspring of the Zombie Project … You understand, if I don’t necessarily believe this is the end.”

This article was Originally Published on CalMatters and was reissued under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Noderivatives License.