New Bay-Delta rules highlight
state’s slow water progress
by Steven Greenhut | November 6, 2026
If you turn a map of California on its side with the Nevada border to the north, you’ll notice a low-lying area where nearly half of the water from the Sierra Nevada Mountains drains before it heads to the San Francisco Bay and then to the Pacific Ocean. That is the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. It’s the West Coast’s largest estuary, an enchanting ecosystem of rivers, historic small towns and orchards.
Per state estimates, the area’s overall watershed “drinking and municipal water to nearly 30 million people irrigation water” and “for 4 million acres of farmland.” It’s also Ground Zero for California’s long-running water wars given its significance in divvying up the state’s scarcest resource. The mighty Sacramento River runs south into the Delta, then gets tangled in a maze of wetlands, tributaries and sloughs before its water is pumped to farms in the San Joaquin Valley.
The latest political tussle involves overhauling the water-management rules in the area, via something known as the Bay-Delta plan. It was last updated 31 years ago. The California Water Resources Control Board last week voted 4-1 to approve a new plan which, per Politico, “will trade billions of dollars in habitat restoration for greater water flexibility for farms and cities in the sensitive Bay-Delta region.” As economist Thomas Sowell once quipped, “There are no solutions. There are only tradeoffs.” This plan seems to recognize that reality.
In the 19th century, the Delta was home to peat bogs, sprawling marshes, herds of elk and even grizzly bear. After the Gold Rush brought droves of newcomers to Northern California, federal and state laws authorized the sale of these swamplands. Developers — first using Chinese labor and then steam-powered dredges — built earthen levees to hold back the waters and precipitate the transformation of the region into an agricultural hub. Even today, the main roads through the Delta are built on top of these 150-year-old levees.
Agriculture remains the key industry, but the California Delta faces serious ecological problems including subsidence (the land is sinking) and salt-water intrusion from the Pacific. That’s the necessary backdrop to understand the latest feuds over the region. It also explains the rationale for the proposed Delta tunnel, which would — if it ever gets built — send water unimpeded from the north end of the Delta to the south while restoring adjacent habitats. One fear: A large earthquake could destabilize the levees and flood the below sea-level farmland.
Previously, water deliveries in the Delta were determined through a regulatory process whereby the state water board dictates water flows and curtailments within the context of our complex system of water rights. In other words, the state dictated the rules based on water availability. Now water users can choose to follow that hard-and-fast regulatory system or enter into voluntary agreements where they agree to divert more water to habitat-improvement projects in exchange for a more streamlined approval process.
The concept aligns with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s approach. As he explained in May in a speech to the Association of California Water Agencies: “California has embraced a more balanced and forward-looking approach to water policy — rejecting the false choice between protecting our water future and building the infrastructure we need. We’re taking an all-of-the-above approach by expanding water projects, restoring habitats, and improving water quality, because real progress comes from partnership, not polarization.” That’s a perfectly reasonable template, but where’s all the actual progress?
As always, the devil is in the details. So, not surprisingly, many stakeholders aren’t happy with the latest Bay-Delta plan update. For starters, original signatories to the deal are no longer behind it. “Water users, including Westlands Water District, a power player in the state’s $60 billion agricultural economy, say the current plan is not what they signed up for,” reports CalMatters. These water-rights holders see the new voluntary agreement plan as encompassing too much state meddling.
And the publication points to these disputes that are based on polar-opposite goals: “The Trump administration has threatened to withdraw support and several hundred million dollars in funding. And environmental advocates, tribes, and fishing groups warn that the deal and its regulatory backup gut protections for an ecosystem already in crisis.” The former believes the plan won’t send enough water to farmers and the latter believes it will send too much.
Welcome to the world of California water. For those of us who are immersed in it, this latest fracas showcases how difficult it is to implement even the most modest upgrades to our water systems. This process of adding an approval process that is slightly less heavy-handed began four years ago, and the state has been operating under rules that have been in place since 1995.
When Newsom took office in 2019, he downsized the Delta tunnels to a single tunnel, but even that smaller project still faces the usual array of hurdles. Meanwhile, the State Auditor recently reported on the troubling state of many of our existing dams.
The plan to build Sites Reservoir, an off-stream water-storage project north of Sacramento received funding in 2014 from the Proposition 1 water bond, but construction has yet to begin. Newsom announced in September that the project is “moving closer to construction.” Its final major approval is scheduled for a water-board vote this week, so optimism is in order — but the project was first proposed during the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration.
So, yes, the new Bay-Delta plan likely marks some modest improvement over the old plan. We’re seeing some progress on building a major new reservoir and the tunnel plan is at least still alive. But the longer the state dilly dallies in upgrading its water systems, the longer its residents will be at the mercy of Mother Nature and fears of another drought.
Steven Greenhut is director of the Pacific Research Institute’s Free Cities Center.
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