Does SLO County’s future water supply depend on a very fragile concept?

January 15, 2023

OPINION by DANIEL BLACKBURN

Fifty years ago, my one-of-a-kind job was to promote the construction of a California water project then known as the Peripheral Canal. My efforts were spectacularly unsuccessful, as the object of my labors has yet to materialize.

And therein lies an unpleasant truth.

The idea of a huge public works project that would impact a considerable swath of the state – one that has been mired in a controversial and suspended state of planning for half a century — might fairly be viewed with some skepticism. But like a stubborn blood stain, this is a project that is not going away. As a concept it has morphed and evolved and clung to survival over the years, doggedly remaining at the forefront of California’s long term water resources planning.

There’s a reason for that, too.

Over the decades, what was originally the “canal” became the “twin tunnels,” then the Delta Tunnel, and today, the Delta Conveyance.

While its moniker may have been periodically altered, the proposed project’s purpose has not changed, not one bit: getting water of sufficient quality and quantity to agencies holding contracts for deliveries from the State Water Project. Those entities, most using water for agricultural and domestic purposes, all are located south of the city of Tracy at the edge of a sprawling estuary, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

SLO County’s stake in the plan

San Luis Obispo County Flood Control and Water Conservation District is one of 32 of those contracting agencies, each of which depends to some degree on the promise of current or future water delivery.

In 1970, I was plucked from my news reporting job at the Orange County Register by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD). There I spent part of the next three years exploring the under-construction State Water Project, stretching from Oroville Dam to the outskirts of Los Angeles County. It’s a 450-mile-long transfer facility featuring canals, tunnels, pumping plants, and holding reservoirs.

Without getting too far into the tule patch, the water project would probably work just fine, given adequate water to fill its canals… if not for that darned Delta in the middle of it all. Think about the problem like a tiny electrical short that can darken a small city.

So the plan from the very start was to somehow divert Sacramento River water around the Delta, to skirt the constant threat posed by the Delta’s unpredictable salinity levels due to its tidal nature.

I was picked by my bosses at the MWD to become executive director of a new quasi-public entity called the Association of State Water Project Agencies, answering to a board of directors featuring some of those day’s top water players. Our office was in Sacramento, and because of my singular professional interest, the Peripheral Canal plan, and my occasional chats and contacts with lawmakers, my board decided I needed to register with the state as a lobbyist.

It was a position for which I was sorely unprepared, partly because my reporter’s instincts (such as they were) soon began colliding with the “facts” about the proposed canal I was assigned to peddle.

I went into the job already steeped in the knowledge that officials of the biggest, southernmost contracting agencies knew from the very beginning that the water project would likely never deliver the amount of water promised by those oh-so-many agreements. That made it imperative to politically protect what water was deliverable, at virtually any cost. And that in turn made the proposed canal all the more important.

Delta degradation ‘collateral damage’

Those involved at the time knew that the giant pumps taking water from the Delta were poised to wreak havoc on the estuary. The diversions were often so powerful that the tidal-influenced waters were actually drawn toward the pumps, which also sucked up fish, fish eggs and other aquatic features.

While our group of water diversion advocates argued for the canal’s construction, we also downplayed the destruction of entire fisheries, like the Delta smelt, a primary food for the Delta’s annual migration of anadromous salmon, steelhead, striped bass, shad, and others.

Working with what was then the Department of Fish and Game toward a “solution” to the environmental damage being done, I found myself among lawyers and others who should have known better when they would chuckle and say things like “die, Delta smelt” and “who gives a s**t about that fish?” Fifty friggin’ years ago!

At one point during a meeting, I mentioned to my board of directors that I thought environmental lawyers opposing the canal were becoming more informed and adept, and perhaps we could benefit by opening up dialogue with them.

I was called a “communist” by the director from Kern County Water Agency, the second-largest contractor for the water project, and my suggestion was dismissed.

In June of 1975, I sat amidst hundreds of water industry folks at a conference and listened to plans to gradually erode environmental protections from federal legislation designed to enable the funding of the canal. My job, it seemed apparent, was to lie for the next two years to the public and to my reporter friends and associates.

I resigned my position immediately; the San Francisco Chronicle published my very critical three-part series with an accompanying editorial where my concerns were outlined. Suddenly I was unemployed and the target of a host of impotent threats from some water folks. They’re all dead; I’m not.

Half a century later, it’s all the same… the arguments, the promotion, the regularly disgorged environmental impact studies, and inevitably the myriad complications of hydrology, engineering, public opinion, and politics.

Nothing has changed. And that includes the state’s water exporters’ intent to pursue a canal-like solution to the “Delta problem” at any cost, for however long it may take.

If, that is, there is any water for the State Water Project to send south.

Daniel Blackburn co-founded CalCoastNews after somehow surviving the water wars.

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