California’s vital canals are crumbling. A plan to fix them just died in the Legislature

The major arteries of California’s water-delivery system are crumbling, but a proposal in the state Legislature to spend $785 million fixing them is dead for the year.

The legislation, SB 559 was pulled off the table this week by its chief author, state Sen. Melissa Hurtado (D-Sanger), after an Assembly committee stripped the funding and made other changes to the legislation. Hurtado’s decision turns SB 559 into a two-year bill that could be revived next year.

The failure of SB 559 infuriated farm groups and rural advocates in the San Joaquin Valley, who argue that fixing the canals would help shore up California’s water supply at a time of staggering drought that’s already dramatically reduced water deliveries to most farmers.

“What we’re trying to do is reach a sustainable water supply where we no longer over-use groundwater,” said Jason Phillips, chief executive of the Friant Water Authority. His agency operates one of the troubled waterways, the Friant-Kern Canal, which delivers water to the city of Fresno, a collection of smaller communities and about 17,000 farmers along a 152-mile stretch of the eastern San Joaquin Valley.

The bill would have covered about one-third of the cost of fixing the Friant-Kern and Delta-Mendota canals, both of which are owned by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Funding was also to be appropriated for portions of the state-run California Aqueduct that run through the Valley.

Hurtado’s legislation became something of a rallying cry for Valley resiliency.

“Our community is made up primarily of farm labor,” said Frank Galaviz of the Teviston Community Services District, which supplies water in rural Tulare County. “If it helps the farmers, it helps us.” Galaviz attended a demonstration on the north steps of the Capitol last month in support of the bill.

Despite the bill’s failure, some of the repairs will get started. Phillips said a first phase of repairs will begin in December on the Friant-Kern, funded by the federal government and area groundwater-management agencies.

Opposition from the Sierra Club

The canals have all fallen victim to subsidence — the sinking of the Valley floor caused by years of relentless groundwater pumping by farmers. One segment of the Friant-Kern, in Tulare County, has fallen more than a dozen feet in recent years, creating a kind of choke point that hinders the canal’s ability to deliver water to farmers and others at the southern end of the Valley.

Hurtado’s bill ran into opposition. The Sierra Club said “those entities who receive water from these canals should share the cost of repair; not state taxpayers,” according to a legislative analysis. The club’s California director, Brandon Dawson, couldn’t be reached for comment.

Still, Hurtado’s bill appeared to have momentum until it reached the Assembly Appropriations Committee last week. The committee passed the bill by an 11-5 vote, but not before it removed the funding. The committee’s chairwoman, Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego, declined comment through a spokesman.

“We won’t comment on anyone else’s bill,” said her spokesman Mike Blount.

The Legislature did appropriate $100 million for canal repairs in the budget signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom this year. Hurtado’s bill, coupled with federal funding and dollars contributed by groundwater agencies, was designed to make sure all the repairs got done.

Farmers acknowledge that they’ve pumped a lot of groundwater in recent years, leading to subsidence — but only because of severe shortages of water deliveries from the State Water Project and the federal Central Valley Project.

Hurtado said in an interview that the bill fell victim to “a false narrative, a lack of understanding when it comes to subsidence. I see this as a climate change issue. ... Repairing critical water infrastructure is part of the solution to adapting to climate change.”

This story was originally published September 9, 2021 at 11:56 AM with the headline "California’s vital canals are crumbling. A plan to fix them just died in the Legislature."