Return of the soda tax + Water bill takes on Cadiz + Canada-California trade

By Hannah Wiley, Sacramento Bee

THIRD TIME’S A CHARM?:

Sen. Richard Roth, D-Riverside, and Assemblywoman Laura Friedman, D-Glendale, reintroduced a bill on Friday that questions the Cadiz Water Project, which aims to sustainably combat evaporating water in the Mojave Desert.

As outlined on Cadiz’s website, the project complied with a California Environmental Quality Act review process administered by the Santa Margarita Water District. It approved the project to create a new water supply that could service 400,000 people by drawing up to 50,000 acre-feet of water per year from an underground aquifer.

But Roth said that the study clearing the project as environmentally safe is questionable at best and that there’s a great concern about how much water can be pumped sustainably from an aquifer without negatively affecting the wildlife and ecosystems of the Mojave.

“As conversations continue, the indisputable point remains: the scientific review must be completed and the science reconciled,” said Roth. “We can and should do it quickly, but it must be done.”

President Barack Obama halted the project in 2015, but President Donald Trump authorized Cadiz to proceed.

Roth’s Senate Bill 307 is the third legislative attempt to legally scrutinize Cadiz and take a deeper look at some of the stakeholders in the project, including the Trump administration and the Santa Margarita Water District. The senator lost a long battle to get similar legislation passed last year after Friedman’s bill died earlier in the same session.

Roth and Friedman in the past had support from Democratic heavyweights like U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, former Gov. Brown and, when he was lieutenant governor, Gavin Newsom.

However, Cadiz is prepared to fight back, saying that the project has successfully completed robust environmental reviews and will create 5,900 new jobs in building a water transportation system that serves Southern California communities.

“Cadiz is and has always been committed to making reliable, clean drinking water available to Southern California in a safe, sustainable way,” Cadiz released in a statement on Friday in response to SB 307, continuing that it has “followed the law to develop a project that can be part of the solution to California’s long-term water challenges.”

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