WaterFix results in $1 billion in harm to winter-run chinook salmon according to California guidelines used for storage projects

Two major water infrastructure policy processes are moving towards critical decision points that will determine their financial viability: a) the WaterFix (Delta Tunnels) led by the Department of Water Resources (DWR) and b) $2.7 billion in Proposition 1 (Water Bond) funding towards public benefits from new storage administered by the California Water Commission.  

One of these processes (Prop 1, California Water Commission or CWC) is treating economics seriously in the planning process, while the other (WaterFix) has not.  Sadly, there is a lot more money and environmental risk associated with the tunnels project that has been ignoring and/or suppressing economic analysis of the project.    

Recently, I was reviewing the California Water Commission's guidelines for valuing ecosystem impacts from new storage projects for the purposes of awarding Proposition 1 funds.  It led me to ponder what would happen if WaterFix followed the California Water Commission's guidelines for benefit-cost, including valuing ecosystem impacts, and had to compete for funding like these storage projects.  

I believe the results would be similarly ugly for WaterFix as the benefit-cost analysis I did in 2016. Using the CWC guidelines, the value of water would be higher than I used (especially after SGMA is implemented), but the yield would remain a meager 225,000 acre feet per year.  However, the increase in benefits from higher value water would be offset by a host of environmental costs that I did not include in the 2016 analysis.

For example, the CWC gives explicit guidance on how to value changes in endangered and threatened salmon populations estimated with a life-cycle model, and the biological assessment for the WaterFix gives clear results of this type of assessment for winter-run chinook salmon.  Applying the values and procedures from the CWC guidelines to the WaterFix results in a $58 million annual loss from the damage of the WaterFix to winter-run chinook salmon.  Extended over 100 year life of the project (beginning 2031) with a 3.5% discount rate, it is a nearly $1 billion social cost from the tunnels.

The $1 billion cost is just for winter-run chinook from operations.  Thus, it does not include costs to winter-run chinook from construction or consider impacts from both operations and construction on spring-run or fall-run salmon, steelhead or delta smelt.  It would take more work (and help from biologists) to estimate values for these, but is not hard to see this adding up to a cost of several billion dollars from the WaterFix tunnels.

The applications for Prop. 1 storage money are due in a few days.  It will be really interesting to see how the different applications apply these guidelines to value the public benefits, as well as the overall feasibility and benefit-cost for the storage projects.  Then it will be really interesting to see how the CWC evaluates these applications.  That will be the real test of the extent to which economics and science or politics is allocating the funds.  

It's inexcusable that the WaterFix tunnels, despite 11 years and hundreds of millions in planning, hasn't produced any feasibility or economic analysis comparable to what these storage projects are required to do.