A $25-billion proposal to re-engineer the hub of California's sprawling water system may not yield all the water that San Joaquin Valley farmers and Southland cities want, leaving open the question of whether the massive project will be built.
The delivery estimates are included in draft plans and environmental impact documents released Monday. Totaling more than 30,000 pages, the drafts underscore the many uncertainties about a project that has been in the planning stages for years and is a centerpiece of Gov. Jerry Brown's water policy.
The proposal is a smaller underground version of the peripheral canal that voters killed in 1982 after a bruising statewide battle. It calls for the construction of two massive water tunnels under the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, a new diversion point on the Sacramento River in the north delta and the restoration of more than 100,000 acres of delta fish and wildlife habitat.
The project is designed to ease the endangered species restrictions that have forced water managers to cut delta deliveries to San Joaquin Valley agribusiness and urban Southern California.
But the federal fish and wildlife agencies that ultimately have to grant permits for the tunnel system have been consistently skeptical of the plans.
The draft environmental reviews published online Monday make it clear that the agencies will probably require operating rules that would increase the volume of water flowing through the delta and out to sea, substantially reducing quantities available for agribusiness and Southern California.
"The fish agencies are signaling that they believe that current science supports the need for those higher outflows," said Mark Cowin, director of the state Department of Water Resources. "As the language points out in the draft plan, they are likely to require those flows as part of their findings when the permit is issued."
Reduced deliveries from the delta could undermine support from the project's primary architects, the water agencies that are expected to pick up nearly 70% of the cost and pass it on to their ratepayers.
The project "comes with a large price tag," said Ted Page, president of the Kern County Water Agency, which supplies delta water to irrigation districts in the southern tip of the Central Valley. "The agency and its member units will need to confirm affordability, water yield and related assurances."
The agencies have argued that by restoring wetlands and other habitat, the delta's environmental conditions will improve, and with them populations of the delta's endangered native fish, eliminating the need for more outflows.
"We do have a difference of opinion" with fish agencies, said Roger Patterson, assistant general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which imports delta water to the Southland.
The MWD and other agencies are hoping that restoration efforts made before the tunnels are built will yield enough benefits for the delta smelt and other declining native species so that federal biologists change their minds and allow more water to be sent south.
Patterson called the document release "a huge step forward. It's the first time we have a draft plan out there. We know the range of water supplies and the estimated cost."
Next will come a four-month public comment period, after which the plans will probably be further revised. A final decision on the project is not expected until late 2014 at the earliest.
Water agencies will now have to sort out how the costs will be divvied up and whether the project is worth it. If major participants pull out, the program could collapse.
Even if the proposal's two biggest agricultural backers, the Kern County Water Agency and the Westlands Water District, remain in the project, it's possible that urban ratepayers will wind up subsidizing irrigators to some degree.
That could happen if it's decided that urban customers reap more benefit from the project than irrigation districts because urban water supplies are more valuable.
Federal and state taxpayers, who are expected to pick up about $7.6 billion of the costs — much of it for habitat restoration work — also may be asked to buy water from upstream diverters in the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins to increase delta outflows.
Cowin has said that if the habitat work doesn't boost fish populations, some of the public restoration funding might be shifted to water purchases. "It's still a possibility," he said Monday.
The Brown administration and the state's most powerful water interests support the delta re-plumbing as the best way to stabilize deliveries to the majority of Californians who receive a portion of their supplies from the environmentally troubled delta.
A number of environmental groups and delta-area politicians have condemned the project as a costly boondoggle that will drive up water rates, turn large parts of the rural delta into a construction zone and sooner or later be used to suck more Northern California water south.
The tunnel project "pits region against region and relies upon huge ratepayer increases and taxpayer subsidies," said state Sen. Lois Wolk (D-Davis). "The price of the water delivered to agriculture would make it impossible for farming to continue in the Central Valley. It's time to put more effort into … a more affordable, less divisive and more achievable path forward."
bettina.boxall@latimes.com
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