Contra Costa Times – December 8, 2007
By Mike Taugher, staff writer
Customers of one of the state's largest water delivery systems secretly commissioned a study last year to estimate how much it would cost to build a highly controversial peripheral canal to deliver water around the Delta.
The $50,000 study, completed in August 2006, shows that contractors of the State Water Project were actively considering a new canal similar to the aqueduct voters killed in 1982.
The report, obtained under the California Public Records Act, estimates it would cost from $3.3 billion to $3.7 billion in 2006 dollars to build an unlined, 46-mile canal.
A separate study being done for the Department of Water Resources puts the cost at from $4 billion to $5 billion, but critics say the cost is likely to be much higher and that even if those numbers are accurate, they will be highly inflated before construction begins.
In many ways, the contractors' decision to get a cost estimate is unsurprising.
When the Delta's fish populations began crashing in 2005, and then Hurricane Katrina later that year demonstrated the vulnerability of levees in New Orleans, many water officials began looking anew at alternate ways to deliver water from north to south.
"We did it to get an idea whether the previous concepts of a peripheral canal were still affordable, given we would have to pay for it," said Laura King Moon, assistant general manager of the State Water Contractors, the nonprofit association that commissioned the study.
The association includes many of the state's largest water districts, such as the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the Kern County Water Agency and some smaller Bay Area districts. MediaNews obtained the study by filing a public records act request with the state Department of Water Resources, which had a copy.
A canal could improve water quality delivered south and eliminate fish kills at south Delta pumps. It might protect much of the state's water supply from the threat of earthquakes and rising sea levels, supporters say.
But such a canal, depending on how it is operated, could deprive the Delta of fresh water, leaving it to fill up with polluted drainage from farms and cities and intruding seawater.
The study is a preliminary estimate and does not consider how the canal would be operated or how much water it would deliver.
"Our position has been all options should be on the table, not necessarily that we were advocating for it but we were talking about it -- as were other people," King Moon said.
Once the numbers from the study became available, King Moon said, contractors were able to commit to paying for a canal if one is built.
But some critics of the canal, including some environmentalists, said that the information should have been shared during planning meetings over the past year.
"It is no surprise and it is not necessarily wrong for them to look at that," said Jonas Minton, a water policy adviser to the Planning and Conservation League. "What is disappointing is that they have had this information under wraps and unavailable for over a year."
"Considering those are public agencies, to withhold that information for so long seems ill-advised," Minton said. "We've repeatedly asked for that information."
King Moon said she did not recall being asked for the information and that the report was kept quiet because contractors did not want to feed the perception that they were backing a new canal.
"We didn't want to send out the message that this was a fast-moving train," she said.
The peripheral canal was part of the plan for the State Water Project when it was approved in 1959, but after Gov. Jerry Brown approved it, the canal was defeated in a referendum in 1982.
The plan at the time was for a 22,000 cubic-foot per second unlined ditch -- large enough to carry the entire Sacramento River at times -- that would have trickled water into Delta channels while having the capacity to fully feed state and federal pumps in the south Delta, about 15,000 cubic feet per second.
The 2006 cost study considers a 15,000 cfs aqueduct that would be from 500 feet to more than 700 feet wide.
Because some of the land along the original alignment for the canal has been developed since the early 1980s -- and because other land is developable and therefore more valuable -- the study suggests an alternate route that would bring the canal into the interior of the Delta.
The cost to acquire land along a path that mostly follows the original route was estimated at $200,000 per acre for about half of the land and about $50,000 per acre for the other half. Property acquisition along the alternate route through agricultural areas would cost about $5,000 per acre.
For the past year, water agencies, government officials, environmentalists, farmers, anglers, Delta residents and others have been searching for a solution to the Delta's water supply and ecosystem problems.
One study done during the discussions concluded that a peripheral canal, by itself, would actually reduce the amount of water available to water contractors unless water quality standards in the Delta were softened.
As a result, water agencies and others have been coalescing around a strategy that would build an aqueduct around the Delta but use it in combination with the existing plumbing. The idea is that by doing so, water managers would be able to minimize harm to the Delta environment and maximize water supplies.
There is widespread support for studying that concept but disagreements are sure to emerge before decisions are made on important details, like how large an aqueduct should be and how it would be operated.
"There's a whole lot of strategizing going on, and I think a lot of the stakeholders are keeping their cards close to the vest," said Ann Hayden, a water policy analyst for Environmental Defense and a participant in those talks. #
http://www.contracostatimes.com/search/ci_7670421?IADID=Search-www.contr... [1]
####
Links:
[1] http://www.contracostatimes.com/search/ci_7670421?IADID=Search-www.contracostatimes.com-www.contracostatimes.com