Mercury News: California shouldn’t miss chance to boost water storage

This editorial is from the San Jose Mercury News:

When Californians overwhelmingly approved Proposition 1 in 2014, voters made clear their desire for additional water storage in anticipation of future droughts. Opportunities to build significant storage occur only once or twice in a century. The state must not let this one slip away.

The California Water Commission has an obligation to fulfill the state's commitment to voters when it announces in July which projects, if any, will receive the $2.7 billion authorized in the $7.5 billion bond measure.

But the commission announced Thursday that nearly half of the 11 project requests have no public benefits that meet the ballot measure's rules for getting money. The rest, it said, fall far short of providing the benefits necessary to justify the cost.

Details were absent from the report. Agencies will receive the in-depth analysis Feb. 2 and will have three weeks to provide more scientific evidence of the benefits before a final decision in July.

If no storage projects meet the commission's standards, then the rules need another look. The public clearly wanted more water storage. At stake is not only our water supply but voters' already frayed trust in government.

Some of the proposed projects really are worthless. The $2.66 billion Temperance Flat Reservoir Project, for example, would build the state's second-tallest dam in the Sierra foothills in Fresno County, destroying the beauty of the San Joaquin River Gorge and providing relatively little water despite massive costs.

But there are legitimate concerns about the low scoring of others, including the Contra Costa Water District's application for $434 million for about half the cost of expanding Los Vaqueros Reservoir.

Unlike Temperance Flats, raising Los Vaqueros' earthen dam by 55 feet has drawn widespread support from both environmentalists and water agencies, including the Santa Clara Valley Water District and East Bay Municipal Utility District. It would provide storage for 275,000 acre feet of water, enough to meet the needs of an additional 575,000 people.

Silicon Valley has a lot to gain because the project includes an 8-mile pipeline from Los Vaqueros Reservoir to the South Bay Aqueduct, which feeds San Jose.

The scoring also calls into question the Santa Clara Valley Water District's request for $484 million for a reservoir near Pacheco Pass that would hold 25 times the water of the existing reservoir, which has a capacity of 6,000 acre-feet.

We recommended approval of Proposition 1 because of its stringent call for “prioritizing storage projects and investing first in the ones offering the greatest benefits.” But adding to storage to build supply in rainy years was the main selling point for voters in the midst of a drought. It never occurred to us that none of the money would be spent on storage.

We don't want tax dollars going into boondoggles like Temperance Flat. But if the rules don't allow for any projects, then we've got a trust issue. We hope the detailed report due next week provides a way forward.