Once the numbers from the study became available, King Moon said, contractors were able to commit to paying for a canal if one is built.īut some critics of the canal, including some environmentalists, said that the information should have been shared during planning meetings over the past year. “Our position has been all options should be on the table, not necessarily that we were advocating for it but we were talking about it - as were other people,” King Moon said. The study is a preliminary estimate and does not consider how the canal would be operated or how much water it would deliver. It might protect much of the state’s water supply from the threat of earthquakes and rising sea levels, supporters say.īut such a canal, depending on how it is operated, could deprive the Delta of fresh water, leaving it to fill up with polluted drainage from farms and cities and intruding seawater. MediaNews obtained the study by filing a public records act request with the state Department of Water Resources, which had a copy.Ī canal could improve water quality delivered south and eliminate fish kills at south Delta pumps. The association includes many of the state’s largest water districts, such as the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the Kern County Water Agency and some smaller Bay Area districts. “We did it to get an idea whether the previous concepts of a peripheral canal were still affordable, given we would have to pay for it,” said Laura King Moon, assistant general manager of the State Water Contractors, the nonprofit association that commissioned the study. When the Delta’s fish populations began crashing in 2005, and then Hurricane Katrina later that year demonstrated the vulnerability of levees in New Orleans, many water officials began looking anew at alternate ways to deliver water from north to south.
In many ways, the contractors’ decision to get a cost estimate is unsurprising. The report, obtained under the California Public Records Act, estimates it would cost from $3.3 billion to $3.7 billion in 2006 dollars to build an unlined, 46-mile canal.Ī separate study being done for the Department of Water Resources puts the cost at from $4 billion to $5 billion, but critics say the cost is likely to be much higher and that even if those numbers are accurate, they will be highly inflated before construction begins.
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