Trump jump-starts repairs for sinking California canal. But who will pay?

The Trump administration is jump-starting a plan to repair a badly sinking canal in the San Joaquin Valley, a year after California voters rejected a bond measure that would have had them pay for the project.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation said Tuesday it will begin studying the environmental impact of fixing a 33-mile stretch of the Friant-Kern Canal — a critical water artery on the Valley’s east side. The federal agency said the repairs are needed to boost water deliveries to 1 million acres of farmland that have been dramatically reduced because of the sagging canal.

Yet despite the support from the federal government to fix the Friant-Kern Canal, a key question remains: Who’s going to step up and pay? Federal officials acknowledged Tuesday they still don’t have the answer for that, even as they announced they were seeking public comment on their repair proposal.

Completed in 1951, the gravity-fed concrete canal runs 152 miles through the Valley, providing water stored in Millerton Lake behind Friant Dam to Fresno, several small towns and 17,000 farmers.

The canal has been crippled by decades of groundwater pumping by farmers, particularly during drought years. The overpumping has caused the earth to sink so much — a process known as subsidence — that the canal is literally dropping.

Sinking canal means less water

It’s gotten so bad that at a choke point in Tulare County, the canal’s conveyance capacity has fallen by about 60 percent, making it difficult to deliver water the last 50 miles.

A failing canal creates a sort of feedback loop when it comes to the region’s profound subsidence problem. If the canal doesn’t supply water, area farmers pump more groundwater during dry years, experts say.

In 2014 then Gov. Jerry Brown signed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which requires farmers to rein in their pumping, but the restrictions don’t fully kick in until 2040.

Farm associations argue that fixing the Friant-Kern Canal would help restore their badly depleted underground aquifers, because water from the rebuilt canal would be used to offset their groundwater pumping and to recharge the underground supply.

The long-standing problems are widely acknowledged, but finding money to pay for the project has been difficult.

Critics argue the farmers who overpumped and who caused the land to sink in the first place should be the ones who ultimately have to pay for the problems they caused.

But those who rely on the canal counter that farmers outside of Friant-Kern’s service area are the ones largely responsible for the subsidence problems. Arguing the chronically impoverished San Joaquin Valley can’t afford to make the repairs on its own, they’ve turned to taxpayers for a bailout.

It’s not been an easy sell.

Will state or feds pay?

In 2018, California voters defeated Proposition 3, which would have raised $350 million for repairs. It was the first time a water bond failed in California in almost 30 years.

After the failure, state Sen. Melissa Hurtado, D-Sanger, introduced Senate Bill 559, a bill that would have allocated $400 million in funds from California taxpayers to pay for it, but with tepid support from her fellow lawmakers, the bill failed to advance this year, though it could come back again for a vote in 2020.

The project’s next best hope is federal taxpayers.

Under a law passed by Congress a decade ago, the Bureau of Reclamation has $25 million to conduct feasibility, design and environmental compliance work, a process that is underway. Once that work is done, then it remains to be seen how the construction will be funded.

“At that point we decide to ask Congress for more money. They’ll either fund it or they won’t,” said Adam Nickels, a project manager with Reclamation.

Congressional Republicans, at least, say they’re in favor of the plan. “Repairing subsidence on the Friant-Kern Canal is one of my top priorities,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield said in a statement emailed to The Sacramento Bee.

Most big water projects typically require that state or local entities contribute a significant share of the funding. Nickels said it remains to be seen how much of the funding would come from Washington.

The CEO of Friant Water Authority, which maintains and operates the canal, said Tuesday it’s imperative to get it restored to its full capacity, and the water district is working with a bipartisan group of state and federal lawmakers to secure the needed funds.

“The Friant-Kern Canal is a critical facility in the statewide water delivery system so we will continue to press policymakers to step up to help us restore its water carrying capacity,” Friant CEO Jason Phillips said in an emailed statement. “We expect to begin construction on the project by the end of 2020, so time is of the essence.”