The State Water Project’s Dirty Little Secret
This article originally appeared on the Maven’s Notebook website on August 20, 2025
By Brett Baker
Brett Baker is a sixth generation Delta farmer and attorney representing the Central Delta Water Agency and various Delta landowners.
Earlier this month The Governor’s Press office announced a $200 Million Delta Conveyance Project (DCP) accountability plan to use taxpayer dollars to buy off local opposition to his fatally flawed DCP. Just this week the Governor doubled down and released a report claiming the DCP is the single most effective action for our state’s water future. This is simply not true, and is his latest effort in a long line to impregnate our state taxpayers and ratepayers with yet another megaproject. Spoiler alert: This one doesn’t pencil out either, there just isn’t enough water to put in it.
The State and the State Water Project (SWP) contractors continue to foster new permanent demand by way of development in desert areas while shifting Project costs onto State and federal taxpayers for added facilities, repair and replacement of aging aqueducts, dams and other facilities, and mitigation of adverse environmental and regulatory impacts despite knowing the Project cannot meet existing commitments during a multi-year drought. Project operators don’t even bother to measure or account for how much Project water has been put to beneficial use on a given year.
When voters authorized the construction of California’s SWP in 1960 with the passage of The California Water Resources Development Bond Act, the ballot argument in favor of the Project promised that the Project would be completely self-funded, stating: “The program will not be a burden on the taxpayer; no new state taxes are involved; the bonds are repaid from project revenues, through the sale of water and power. In other words, it will pay for itself…This Act will assure construction funds for new water development facilities to meet California’s requirements now and in the future. No area will be deprived of water to meet the needs of another. Nor will any area be asked to pay for water delivered to another.”
Governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown’s press comments at the time also promised, “The plan itself is completely self-supporting. The law provides that the contracts have to provide for the repayment of the cost of the entire Project.”
Ignoring hydrology, the State issued Permits to appropriate water including those for the Central Valley Project and SWP that today greatly exceed project supplies, and lack the firm yield necessary for permanent residential and agricultural demand during a series of dry years like 1929 through 1934-our drought of record. Meeting such needs was the purpose of the California Water Plan.
The SWP and its contractors have abandoned the goal of meeting the permanent demand of its contractors, including development of the planned 5 million acre feet from water projects in the North Coast by the year 2000, and are proceeding to shift billions of dollars of capital cost, facility repair cost, regulatory costs and environmental mitigation costs onto the general State and federal taxpayers. Governor Jerry Brown’s taxpayer funded EcoRestore and California Water Fix replacements for the failed Bay Delta Conservation Plan were basically the same as his father’s failed Peripheral Canal and Governor Newsom’s current DCP proposal. All ladened with political desperation and subsidy.
Governor Newsom is desperately pushing his newest version of the Peripheral Canal, the DCP, a multibillion-dollar mega project, which creates no new supply, and is to be financed by future generations. It is difficult to see how destruction of the commercial and recreational salmon fishing industry, turning the Delta estuary into a toxic soup and exporting water needed for development in the counties and watersheds of origin to further subsidize and encourage desert development with a warming climate is a public benefit.
Currently SWP planning and project operation base project deliveries on only one subsequent dry year. SWP contractors claim the project provides about 30% of the water supply for 27 million Californians and 750,000 acres of farmland. At ½ acre foot per year for a family of four and about 2 acre feet per acre on 30% of the farmland, the water demand would be 3,825,000 acre feet per year. The Department of Water Resources Draft State Water Project Delivery Capability Report 2023 (May of 2024) shows that in a single dry year like 1977, annual Table A water delivery capability would be as low as 186,000 to 233,000 acre feet and in a series of dry years like 1929 through 1934 the average would be 612,000 to 1,038,000 acre feet. The math simply isn’t mathing.
An honest accounting of the appropriated and unappropriated water in State filings and permits including the beneficial use of water in the CVP and SWP is necessary.
For the better part of a century our State leaders have been playing a dangerous game of chicken with Mother Nature. As they have grown comfortable with increasing our level of risk, they have squandered taxpayer dollars and public trust resources for economic and political reward. One day these chickens will come home to roost. It is time to pivot from political pipedreams to protecting our public resources, promoting and incentivizing regional self-sufficiency and locating new development in areas where firm water supply can be more certainly, environmental and economically supplied.