In what Gov. Gavin Newsom hailed as a major milestone, his $20 billion Delta tunnel largely cleared another chokepoint last week — but it still faces obstacles of a different magnitude.
For more than half a century, California’s leaders have debated rerouting water around, rather than through, the network of rivers, farmland and marshes of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Newsom’s version would pipe Sacramento River water through a 45-mile bypass to a reservoir on the California Aqueduct, in an effort to shore up state supplies and send more water south.
