Trump opposes massive Calif. water project

SAN FRANCISCO — A massive California water project has drawn opposition from the Trump administration, the government said Wednesday, the latest and one of the most serious blows to Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan to re-engineer the state’s water system by building two giant tunnels.

“The Trump administration did not fund the project and chose to not move forward with it,” Russell Newell, deputy communications director for the U.S. Interior Department, said in an email.

Asked if that meant the Trump administration did not support California’s tunnels project, Newell said yes. While the plan is a state initiative, it would intersect with existing state and federal water projects and would require approval from the Interior Department to move ahead.

Brown wants California water agencies to pay the $16 billion price tag to build two, 35-mile-long tunnels to divert part of the state’s largest river, the Sacramento, to supply water to the San Francisco Bay Area and central and Southern California.

But the plan has run into its biggest obstacles yet in recent weeks, when two key water districts opted not to help fund it. While the federal government was never supposed to bear the cost of the project, the Obama administration spent millions planning for it.

The Interior Department’s inspector-general last month challenged that financing, saying the U.S. agency under former President Barack Obama had improperly contributed $84 million in taxpayer funds to help pay for planning for the tunnels, which would be California’s most ambitious water project in decades.

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump had called broadly for more projects to bring more water to farmers in California, the country’s leading agricultural state.