Santa Clara water district rejects twin tunnels

Agency says it would support scaled-down version of Gov. Jerry Brown’s WaterFix plan

Silicon Valley’s water district Wednesday rejected Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan to build twin tunnels beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta but said it would support a smaller, less expensive project. A top state official said the Brown administration could support such an approach.

The Santa Clara Valley Water District’s board voted 7-0 to give the Delta plan “conditional support” but only if it involves one tunnel instead of two. The board’s vote indicated the district would be willing eventually to commit more than $200 million to the project. That’s well below the $600 million or more in support it had been considering.

“It’s clearly going to be a smaller project than what was originally proposed,” said board member Gary Kremen.

Santa Clara’s vote appears to fuel the momentum toward scaling back the project, known officially as California WaterFix. Board chairman John Varela said he was told recently by John Laird, Brown’s Natural Resources secretary, that the administration is “open to the idea of a single tunnel as opposed to twin tunnels.”

Grant Davis, the director of Brown’s Department of Water Resources, told board officials that the administration could support Santa Clara’s approach. “We’d be willing to work with that,” he said shortly before the board voted.

Brown’s administration has begun floating the idea of a scaled-back tunnels project in the past few weeks. The gosmall approach emerged after major agricultural irrigator Westlands Water District, which gets Delta water from the federal Central Valley Project, refused to back the $17.1 billion tunnels project. Not a single CVP customer has endorsed the plan, recoiling from a cost allocation plan imposed on CVP agencies by the federal government, leaving a potential funding gap of about $6 billion.

Santa Clara board member Richard Santos suggested a second tunnel could be built later. “Why don’t we try one? If we show it works, that builds confidence,” he said.

Santa Clara’s vote left the project’s future as muddled as ever. Brown met with some district board members informally last week at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, at a meeting brokered by Silicon Valley’s business community, to urge them to support his project.

His administration was hoping for a “yes” vote from Santa Clara because it’s a major Northern California agency that serves 1.9 million customers in Silicon Valley. Most of the agencies that would pull water from the tunnels are located in the San Joaquin Valley and urban Southern California.

Support from Santa Clara would counter “the notion of a water grab, a Southern California water grab,” said water expert Jeffrey Mount of the Public Policy Institute of California.