Does Trump plan to send Columbia River water to California? It’s unclear

The Trump campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment by The Columbian.

What Trump said

Trump made the comments at a September speech outside Los Angeles. A reporter asked him what he would do to help Californians whose homes have been damaged by wildfires, as well as others around the country whose property is threatened by natural disasters.

In response, Trump talked about a trip around Northern California he made four years ago with former Republican U.S. Rep. Devin Nunes. Specifically, Trump detailed an interaction where he asked why an agricultural field was fallow, and if the area was in a drought.

Trump continued, saying he was told there was no drought and instead the fields were not irrigated because “the water is cut off upstate up in the north … in order to protect a certain little tiny fish called the smelt, they send millions and millions of gallons of water out to the Pacific Ocean way up north, never even gets close to here.”

It is unclear from his September remarks who said that to him.

Trump continued, saying Newsom is “the reason you have no water” and that, as president, he had completed a plan to get the region water.

Trump then said the water comes “pouring down from the north, with the snow caps and Canada” and then goes “aimlessly into the Pacific.” But, he said that through the use of “a giant faucet,” it could instead be sent to Los Angeles, given to irrigators for farming and used to dampen forest floors to slow wildfires — an expensive and scientifically unpopular idea.

The speech also contained rants against Newsom, and a threat to cut off wildfire fighting funding for California if Newsom didn’t approve a Trump proposal, along with inflammatory statements pushing the long-debunked idea that immigrants are dangerous.

It could be the Columbia

So, why did the media report Trump was talking about the Columbia River? First, Trump said the water comes from Canada and flows into the Pacific. The Columbia River is the only river that’s fed by Canadian snowmelt that flows into the U.S. and empties directly into the Pacific Ocean.

Secondly, the idea of diverting the Columbia to solve California’s water crisis is nothing new.

In 1947, Congress’ “United Western Investigation” began looking into the idea of sending water from northern California’s Klamath River around the West.

The project also looked at whether other rivers could fulfill this role. Congressman Richard Welch, a California Republican who sponsored the resolution, singled out the Columbia.

“Other river basins are blessed with abundant water supplies,” Welch said in 1947, “supplies so abundant that, each year, thousands of acre-feet of good water are wasted into the ocean. In this connection, I think particularly of the Columbia River.”

Diverting Columbia River water was considered officially again in 1964 as part of a failed $1 trillion (in today’s dollars) megaproject that would have sent water from the Pacific Northwest, Canada and Alaska to seven Canadian provinces, 33 U.S. states and three northern states in Mexico.

After the next serious effort was killed only a year later by powerful Washington Sen. Henry M. Jackson, the following decades were marked by an official moratorium on even studying importing water from one basin to another.

But the idea rose again when California hit a drought in the late 1980s and early 1990s. During those years, longtime Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn made it his personal project, and the idea was proposed repeatedly — each time dying at the hands of Pacific Northwest politicians’ uncompromising opposition.

While the idea continues to haunt California op-ed pages, the last serious consideration the proposal appears to have received was from a 2012 Bureau of Reclamation study that also considered using tugboats to take icebergs wrapped in “large water bags” from the “Alaska Region” to a port along the coast of Southern California.

According to Jon Yoder, director of the State of Washington Water Research Center, the lack of serious proposals to divert the Columbia in recent decades is attributable to economic commonsense.

“There’s a reason why large-scale water storage and transportation projects are less and less often invested in today, and that is because those projects that have really sound and strong economic foundations have generally been pursued,” he said.

“And, in fact, a lot of water storage and transportation infrastructure projects that didn’t have sound economic foundations have been pursued and completed, and there just isn’t much left as options for cost-effective water storage and transportation infrastructure,” Yoder said.

… Or California rivers

While the idea of redirecting the Columbia to alleviate California’s water struggles is old, the idea of using Northern California’s water for the rest of the state is even older — and has real-life precedent.

Southern California has relied on water piped from the Sierra Nevada mountains since the 1913 completion of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. The region’s thirst only grew when the Colorado River Aqueduct was finished in 1939. Momentum increased in the following decades.

Another reason Trump’s comments may not be about the Columbia River: What he said aligns more closely with actions he took on the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers when he was president.

His comments last month began by describing a trip “up north in California” with Nunes that happened “four years ago.”

Trump made four visits to California in 2020, daily records of his presidency show: One in February to Beverly Hills; another days later where he visited Palm Springs and Bakersfield; one in September to the Sacramento area; and a final trip to Orange County in October.

Only reporting on the February trip to Bakersfield mentions Trump traveled with Nunes. Bakersfield is in the southern San Joaquin Valley.

Another indication the former president may have been talking about California’s two most important rivers in his comments last month? He cited smelt as the reason the unnamed river(s) was being protected from his plan.

During Trump’s 2020 trip to Bakersfield, he touted his administration’s new environmental rules that rolled back regulations that had protected salmon and smelt living in the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, as reported by Politico, The San Francisco Chronicle and others.

The Trump administration sought to send more water to irrigators, but its Record of Decision was quickly followed by a lawsuit from Newsom and Attorney General Xavier Becerra. That also aligns with what Trump said last month.

While the bulk of the reporting on Trump’s comments last month connected them to the Columbia River, Politico’s E&E News reported the comments were about the California rivers. Ultimately, it is unclear which rivers he was talking about.

A diversion project on the Columbia River would also have to contend with factors including irrigators’ and cities’ long-standing water rights, protections the Endangered Species Act ensures salmon receive, minimum water levels for ship passage and the growing need for Columbia River hydropower as Washington attempts to meet its 2045 fossil-fuel free grid mandate.