State begins decisive year for water tunnels

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — State regulators launched Thursday into a year of pivotal decisions on Gov. Jerry Brown’s quest to build two giant tunnels to ferry water from Northern California for Central and Southern California, a $17-billion project that would be one of the largest in decades in the state.

Brown’s administration and the water agencies that are slated — but not yet formally committed — to pay for the two, 35-mile-long tunnels from the delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers are the project’s biggest supporters, and the 2016 calendar is full of federal and state hearings and reviews that are required to start digging.

Brown and big Central and Southern California water agencies are the tunnels’ biggest advocates, while many Northern and Central California cities, towns and counties, and environmental and fishing groups oppose them. Supporters and opponents chiefly disagree over whether the project would further harm Northern California’s winding Delta and the San Francisco Bay, the biggest West Coast estuary in the Americas and home to increasingly endangered native fish.

On Thursday, regulators of the State Water Resources Control Board weighed whether it was appropriate to start its upcoming hearings regarding the tunnels when the backers have yet to fully specify the project’s design or finish legally required studies of whether the tunnels would hurt the Delta’s wildlife, overall habitat and human users.

The regulators said Thursday they would announce a possible decision on the timing issue in the next week or two.

Kenneth Bogdan, attorney for the Department of Water Resources, the main state agency involved in tunnel planning, told regulators that the project’s backers hope to have the needed environmental impact review completed in late June.

The similarly named Water Resources Control Board, which is charged with approving or disapproving changes in water intake and water quality with the project, is scheduled to formally start its hearings at least two months earlier, in April.

Bogdan told regulators that the details released so far on the tunnels’ planned design and operation, and preliminary and past environmental reviews, would be enough for the hearings to start.

“It’s not just a matter of ‘trust us,’” Bogdan told the water regulators. “We feel there is enough information” already.