California DOF projects 5 Delta Counties Will Account for 84% of California's Population Growth Over The Next 45 Years, While Southern California Population Is Projected To Decline

California DOF's population projections are highly relevant to State planning efforts such as water infrastructure.  The vast majority of the State's future population growth is expected to occur in the 5 Delta Counties.  

Those 5 Delta counties are projected to grow by 1.715 million people which is 84% of the entire State's projected growth of 2.065 million people.  In contrast, the six main Southern California counties that are served by the Metropolitan Water District are expected to decrease in population by 574,000.

The State Department of Water Resources thinks the State's water infrastructure priority is a giant water conveyance tunnel that will degrade water supplies and recreational opportunities in the fastest growing part of the state in hopes of bolstering water supply where population and water demand is already declining and projected to decrease further.  The region with the declining ratepayer base is also expected to pay for this scheme as its ratepayer and taxpayer base declines - increasing the financial riskiness of the project and the burden on individual taxpayers and ratepayers. 

Source: https://dof.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/sites/352/2023/07/P2A_County_Total.xlsx

Personal News - Moved to Montana

I haven't posted on this blog in nearly a year.  That's because I moved to Missoula, Montana for a new job in Fall 2024.  I am now Director of the Bureau of Business and Economic Research (BBER) at the University of Montana. After 16 years at Pacific, my kids in their mid-twenties telling me there was a 0% chance they would come back to California, and a remote working spouse - it was time to think about a career move and this opportunity in Montana fit my interests very well.  The past 10 months have been very busy, and I completely forgot about this blog.

While I won't be maintaining this blog regularly, I am going to keep it published because I can see that people are still reading the old posts.  I am still following things in California, so I will still come over here and post from time to time.  Especially if I have something to say about the Delta or California water issues, as Delta/water posts have consistently gotten more views than posts about other topics since the beginning.  

Getting back on here made me a bit nostalgic, so I was looking at the list of the most read posts of all time and rereading a few.  Some observations in the top 20 posts (out of 629 over 16 years).

The #1 post of all time is actually not about the Delta or Water.  With over 20,000 page views, it is

a 2015 post, "An Encouraging Story for Downtown Stockton."

The top rated Delta/water post is #3 on the all time list.  Over 5,000 views for this 2020 entry on the first cost estimate for Governor Newsom's single-tunnel plan.

New $15.9 bil. Delta tunnel cost estimate: Revisiting DWR's 2018 single-tunnel economic analysis with updated costs shows it is a bad investment for water agencies

#5 on the all-time list is one of my personal favorites - many people told me they learned and enjoyed this one from 2016/2012 with nearly 2,000 views.  Jason Peltier is still making sense on delta tunnel economics: A look back 4 years shows the WaterFix is an even worse financial deal than the BDCP

Interestingly, some of the most recent posts about the Delta tunnel from last summer have cracked the blogs all-time top 25 with over 1200 views and have seen an uptick in traffic with people revisiting them since Governor Newsom introduced his trailer bills to promote the tunnel.  

California's Next Governor Should Make New Technology Their Top Water Policy Priority

There have been some interesting stories in the past year about pilot projects for new desalination technologies.  Here are two in the LA Times that caught my eye.

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2025-03-21/desalination-tech-tested

https://capture6.org/2024/06/24/capture6-featured-in-the-los-angeles-times/

The thing that always strikes me about these articles is that the State of California does not seem to be involved.  In these cases, the start-ups are getting some support from forward looking local water agencies, but the State is largely absent when they should be leading.  Instead of supporting the technologies of the future, Governor Newsom is spending his second term going all out for concrete mega-projects like it is the 1950s.

The next Governor will be in a position to set a new direction. 

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Feeling nostalgic about the blog tonight, so here are snips from old posts making this point when discussing other new technologies that were not being funded by California.  From 12 years ago.

California water policy is driven with built in expectations of sea-level rise, changing precipitation and levee-exploding earthquakes.  We accept those assumptions, but not assumptions about advancing technology.  I am confident that we will have game-changing technological advances concurrent with if not before any of those climate change and natural disaster impacts hit California water in a large way, and I am certain we would if our policies did more to encourage these technological advances... 

... after links to new technology developments at LLNL and Lockheed Martin... 

 If California were to focus more on these types of technological breakthroughs, we would not only be solving our own water problems but helping to solve a critical present and even greater future problem in poor, developing countries.  We could develop technologies and advanced manufacturing here, and sell to a global market.

Instead, California water policy is fixated on a pair of $14+ billion concrete tunnels, where an estimated $3 billion of the total will be spent on foreign tunneling machines and plumbing components.  It seems so last century and unCalifornia to me. 

In 2019, this post about a new federal grant supporting a desalination research hub at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (not funded by California),

It's nice to have the hub of this new federally-funded consortium in California, but there could be much more of this activity in the state.  California could totally dominate R&D, new technology development, and commercialization of alternative water technology with a relatively small amount of investment and policies to push local adoption.  I strongly believe supporting and adopting new technologies should be the focus of the state's future water vision, including any future water bonds. This would create lots of high-paying jobs, as we develop technologies to solve our own problems that have broad applicability and worldwide commercialization potential.