Dollar flows

The governor has speeded up efforts to secure financing for his $17.1 billion delta tunnel dream. Water agencies should tell the governor they won’t vote to commit their ratepayers to pay for this ill-conceived plan. Here’s why:

The project, known as WaterFix, is environmentally destructive. It would capture water through three enormous intakes at the north end of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, divert it into twin 40-foot-wide tunnels and deliver it 35 miles to the state and federal pumps in the south delta, from which it is distributed statewide.

The governor says the new diversions will keep the pumps from killing off the delta smelt. More significantly, they offer the potential to deliver more water to Southern California cities and farms and deprive the San Francisco Bay of adequate flows to keep it and what lives around it healthy. Sure to suffer — struggling Pacific salmon fisheries.

The water agencies are not yet on board. The governor has demanded that the state and federal water contractors vote in coming weeks on whether they are in or out. WaterFix still lacks a needed permit from the state water board on criteria to protect fish and wildlife, which the water board won’t take up until next summer. As WaterFix is projected to provide no additional water, water agencies will find it hard to justify the added expense.

The project financing is in question. The Department of Water Resources wants to issue $11 billion in bonds to fund the state portion. A Sacramento court must decide by Friday if the authority to issue revenue bonds granted under state water law dating back to the 1950s is valid for this project. If it is, then the Brown administration avoids the need to seek new bonding authority and sidesteps Proposition 13 limits that would have required taxpayers to vote on raising water rates to repay the state for the financing.

Federal auditors dinged the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation for improperly spending $50 million on tunnel planning that federal water contractors should have paid.

Without a formal agreement setting out how much water would cost, what responsible board would vote?