By Rachel Becker, CalMatters
Amping up their concerns as a deadline looms, key California legislators today escalated their pushback on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s efforts to streamline the Delta water tunnel and other infrastructure projects.
The stalemate could become a critical lever while lawmakers haggle with Newsom over the 2023-2024 budget leading up to his June 27 deadline for approving the spending plan.
A bipartisan group of 10 lawmakers from the Assembly and the Senate signed on to a letter today urging Newsom and legislative leaders to stall Newsom’s package of infrastructure bills “for as long as the Delta Conveyance Project remains a part of the proposal.”
The legislators said Newsom’s proposals — which would overhaul permitting and litigation for expansive projects like the controversial tunnel plan to replumb the Delta and send more water south — could cause environmental harm.
“Rather than taking up a few blocks like a stadium, the tunnel would span multiple counties and impose water and air quality concerns throughout the region. If the project is litigated under (the California Environmental Quality Act), the process should not be rushed,” said the letter, spearheaded by Assemblymember Carlos Villapudua, a Democrat from Stockton and a member of the Delta Caucus.
In mid-May, Newsom unveiled an executive order and package of wide-ranging proposals to streamline state approval of major infrastructure projects, such as bridges, reservoirs, semiconductor plants and the Delta tunnel. Some of his proposals aim to keep transportation, energy and water projects from stalling under legal challenges related to the California Environmental Quality Act and make the state more appealing for federal funding.
The fight pits Newsom against lawmakers who say they feel “jammed” by Newsom’s use of the budget process to fasttrack the bills. Environmental groups and salmon fishermen are squaring off against building and labor groups. And Delta counties are once again waging a decades-long battle against a massive water project that would reshape their region.
The Newsom administration says the changes are urgent because California needs to more rapidly build water and energy projects to prepare for climate change.
“The proposals that the governor brings forward we don’t bring forward lightly into the budget process, but because we have to take action now,” California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot said at a joint hearing of the Assembly Judiciary and Natural Resources committees in early June. “We need to be in a dead sprint implementing what we call our water supply strategy for a hotter, drier future.”
Newsom’s Deputy Communications Director Alex Stack said the package “ensures California would still have the same nation-leading environmental protections while also cutting unnecessary red tape that has stalled key climate projects for years.”
The final budget is not contingent on Newsom’s infrastructure proposals, and they could be enacted after it’s signed. But experts suspect they will be used as a political lever while negotiations hashing out the budget continue through the end of this month.
Introduced as budget trailer bills less than a month before the Legislature’s June 15 budget deadline, Newsom’s proposals bypass the typical legislative policy committee lineup and give lawmakers and the public less opportunity for deliberation or amendments.
“It feels disrespectful to the process, to all the work that we’ve done … to have something come at this late date and want to be rushed through that has had such an impact on my district, and the state and the 4 million people who reside in that area,” Sen. Susan Talamantes Eggman, a Democrat from Stockton, said in a committee hearing this month.
Assembly consultants warned in a report that this approach “significantly limits transparency and public input” and “increases the potential for creating unintended consequences.”
“They (Newsom officials) want to rewrite more than a century of California law in a backroom deal,” Doug Obegi, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told CalMatters.
During informational hearings held in early June, lawmakers noted that this is not the first time that the Newsom administration has brought policy proposals into the budget process. “It is starting to feel like we are being jammed by design,” Sen. Monique Limón, a Democrat from Santa Barbara, said at the Senate Natural Resources and Water hearing.
‘Overly onerous’ regulations or ‘railroading’ projects in?
Water providers, business interests and several labor unions have voiced support for Newsom’s policy package.
“Major infrastructure projects are too often bogged down in overly onerous regulatory processes and a siloed approach to permitting approvals, which increases overall costs and delays critical projects,” the Association of California Water Agencies, Mojave Water Agency, and the Almond Alliance all wrote in individual letters.
Much of the opposition stressed the impact on the tunnel project, including a coalition of the five counties ringing the Delta — Sacramento, Solano, San Joaquin, Contra Costa and Yolo.
“The Legislature is being asked to railroad over the objections of 4 million people and the 25 county supervisors that represent them and are trying to protect their homes and communities,” said Karen Lange on behalf of the Delta Counties Coalition at an informational hearing of the Assembly Committee on Water, Parks, and Wildlife. “In the case of the tunnel, every county and city that is affected by it opposes it.”
Stockton community organizations, salmon fishers and environmental groups said Newsom’s plan would remove guardrails and hamper litigation against the Delta tunnel and other projects.
One Newsom proposal, for instance, would exclude certain internal communications such as emails from the administrative record prepared for litigation if they didn’t ultimately reach the final decision-making body.
Assembly analysts warned that this “allows the agency to pick and choose what documents to include in the record.” Though these records could be available under a separate California Public Records Act request, this too can lead to lawsuits and delays and “could prove very costly to public agencies.”
In today’s letter, legislators criticized parts of the package that would set a time limit for lawsuits challenging the tunnel and other projects and reduce protections against killing certain wildlife species, such as sandhill cranes that winter in the Delta.
Crowfoot told CalMatters that the proposals were not developed specifically to push through the tunnel project.
“I haven’t been part of any internal conversation on fully protected species and our need to modernize it that discuss the Sandhill crane or its relationship to the project,” he said. “The intent is not to short circuit any environmental review or public input, but it is to ultimately get to an answer around whether this project can be supported and move forward.”
Decades in the making yet still decades from completion, the proposed tunnel has been called both a water grab and a critical update to water supplies for 27 million people, mostly in Southern California, and 750,000 acres of farmland. State officials say it would protect a vital water artery from earthquakes, sea level rise and extreme swings from wet to dry, while local communities and environmental groups say it would upend the way of life and sensitive ecosystems of the Delta.
The estimated price tag, last updated in 2020, is around $16 billion, which would eventually be paid back by water agencies receiving its supplies. Last year, a draft state environmental report warned that the tunnel project would harm endangered and threatened species, convert 2,300 acres of farmland, and disrupt cultural and historic sites.
Asked why the administration included such a fiercely contested issue in the infrastructure package as part of the budget process, Crowfoot said in an interview, “We simply can’t kick the can down the road on this question because it generates disagreements and controversy.”
