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Final environmental docs for state water tunnel project released

www.californiawaterfix.com
A video rendering of a WaterFix tunnel.

California Governor Jerry Brown’s administration has released a 97,000-page environmental document on a plan to re-engineer the state’s water delivery system. Brown said it’s essential in maintaining a reliable water supply.

The $15 billion dollar twin tunnel project would carry water from Northern California’s Sacramento River to Central and Southern California. Governor Brown said the WaterFix project has been analyzed for 10 years and undergone more environmental review than any other project in the history of the world.

Ellen Hanak, with the non-partisan Public Policy Institute of California, said building new infrastructure benefits both water supply and the environment. But she said building one tunnel instead of two is a better solution, and the original environmental documents never looked at that option.

“It’s not starting from scratch. That’s one of the beauties of it is that a lot of the work has already been done, including in this new EIR/EIS, so we think the compromise proposal could move through pretty quickly,” Hanak said.

Brown’s administration has argued that costs aren’t greatly reduced with just one tunnel. The final environmental documents contend that the project will have little to no impact on threatened fish species. Opponents, including residents in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, disagree.