Legislators continue talks on state water plan, now $9.99 billion

Published online on Tuesday, Nov. 03, 2009

California legislators took a first step on an ambitious path to overhaul the state's water system Monday night, when the state Senate approved a bill that would change oversight of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.

On a bipartisan 29-5 vote, senators approved a plan that would create a seven-member council to oversee management of the Delta – and possibly approve a long and hotly debated canal through or around the Delta.

The bill was part of a multi-measure package of water-related bills lawmakers were struggling with Monday. Assembly members had yet to consider it late Monday.

Other elements include potential new dams, stricter conservation standards and a $9.99 billion bond act to pay for it all.

The Delta oversight component of the plan would create a council whose members would be appointed by the governor and Legislature. The council would be charged with adopting a long-range management plan for the troubled estuary by 2012. The plan would attempt to balance the reliability of water exports while protecting the fragile Delta ecosystem.

State Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, said that "a long history of benign neglect has not served the Delta or the state well … what should be an east-west estuary is being used as a north-south plumbing system."

Both Simitian and Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, warned that if the council was not created the Schwarzenegger administration would go ahead with plans to build a canal through the Delta. They also said that a canal through the Delta was only one of several options the council could consider.

But Sen. Lois Wolk, D-Davis, who represents much of the Delta area, charged the bill was a thinly disguised attempt to build a Delta canal, which she called "the equivalent of a 100-lane freeway" through the area.

"This makes it clear you intend to take the building of a peripheral canal out of the hands of the public," she said.

Last-minute changes in the water package, designed to placate the various special interests with a stake in it, left its future uncertain, despite fears of supporters that the longer the plan languished the more likely it was to fall apart.

"I'm not going to rush this," insisted Steinberg. "If we don't get it done tonight, we'll come back tomorrow."

Steinberg was echoed by Assemblyman Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, a key player in crafting the plan.

"The only urgency is that we all came here to get something done, so we want to see if we can," Huffman said, "but I don't think anyone wants to do an all-nighter if we don't need to. … We got two houses, two parties, we got a lot of moving parts."

The difficulty of reaching consensus on an issue that fractures along geographic, social and economic axes as well as partisan differences was illustrated by the day's first legislative exercise.

Over objections, majority Democrats in the Senate convened a three-member subcommittee to hear – but not vote on – changes in the bond proposal. It proceeded to hear how what had been a $9.4 billion bond proposal last week had become a $9.99 billion proposal this week.

The additional money was not enough to placate a swarm of opponents to the bond, from public employee unions to environmental groups.

That opposition was joined Monday by the city of Sacramento. In a letter to Steinberg and Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, D-Los Angeles, city water officials said the package of bills did not do enough to protect the city's rights to Sacramento River water.

"The conservation bill would require the fully self-sufficient Sacramento region to implement conservation measures that are not cost-effective, while allowing regions that depend on Delta exports to reduce their current use by only five percent," wrote utilities director Marty Hanneman.