Blocked By Old Contracts And Modern-Day Infighting, California's Big Water Project Staggers To Its Deathbed

October 18, 2017

ARE Professor David Sunding's 2015 cost-benefit analysis of the California Waterfix is highlighted in this Los Angeles Times article on the Westlands Water District's recent withdrawal of support from the $17-billion water project. The author noted that "it’s hard to see how anything on the scale of the California WaterFix can be built without some cross-subsidy," citing Sunding's study which concluded that "the project would pass a cost-benefit test in the aggregate... on the assumption that the federal government would chip in $3.9 billion.