The State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) voted this week to approve the controversial Delta Tunnel project, which will bring water from the Sacramento River south via an underground pipeline to avoid the San Francisco-San Joaquin River Delta.
The Sacramento Bee reported:
California’s leading water agency approved a controversial water infrastructure project to build a tunnel underneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta Thursday, marking a significant step in a decades-long effort to advance it.
Governor Gavin Newsom has long advocated for the tunnel, called Delta Conveyance, as a key way to protect water supply from climate change.
The Department of Water Resources’ decision is expected to usher in extensive legal challenges. Despite consistent opposition to the tunnel from the state’s leading environmentalists, state officials celebrated the approval of the multi-billion dollar project as a step toward modern and affordable water management.
Breitbart News described the Delta Tunnel project in 2018:
California Governor Jerry Brown has proposed a massive infrastructure proposal called WaterFix (once known as the Twin Tunnels Project). The project — which, at a preliminary cost of $11 billion, would be one of the largest infrastructure projects ever undertaken in the United States — would build two tunnels to carry water from the Sacramento River on the north side of the Delta directly to the pumping stations on the south side, a supposedly environmentally-friendly upgrade.
The WaterFix is highly controversial — not least among the people who live in the Delta. Some locals suspect that the true motive behind the revisions to the Bay-Delta plan is not to save the fish populations, but rather to provide the Delta with more fresh water to be pumped southwards without making the waters even more saline than it already is — one of the many conditions that is said to threaten the smelt and other fragile native species.
Though the project is now only supposed to involve one tunnel, the cost has ballooned to $16 billion — before the lawsuits.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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