Increasingly, I’m seeing the Sacramento Delta argument turned, from the traditional water conveyance and water users v. fish frame to a focus on levees. Here’s the San Jose Mercury News editorial board:

The primitive conditions of the levees guarding the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta are shocking. The Delta is mostly below sea level. It provides water to 65 percent of Californians, including more than half of Silicon Valley, and those fragile levees are the only thing preventing salt water from San Francisco Bay from spoiling the fresh water flowing from the rivers.

Hundreds of miles of levees were built out of sand and dirt by immigrants, wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow load, in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Saying they’re primitive is kind. They are at extreme risk of collapsing in an earthquake or flood. State Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, calls them “California’s Katrina waiting to happen.”

But neither Brown nor the Legislature has even tried to expedite repairing the levees. Last week, the state ballot proposition for an $11 billion water bond was postponed again, this time until 2014. That’s fine because we can’t imagine that porker passing anyway, but the $1 billion in absolutely necessary repairs to the levees should have been done years ago.

Jeff Michael did a pithy job Thursday of untangling the snag of old fishing line that is “regulatory assurance”, the Endangered Species Act and the proposal to build giant tunnels beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to get water from California’s wet north to its thirsty south with, it is hoped, minimal disruption to the delta through which the water would otherwise travel.

The core of Michael’s argument is that the real value (in dollar terms) for water users is “regulatory assurance” – the knowledge that they’ll get the water they expect without unexpected supply interruptions because of endangered species problems. But why, Michael asks, must that regulatory assurance come from the tunnels, rather than the habitat work that is also part of the project. If they could get that regulatory assurance at lower cost by fixing the delta rather than tunneling beneath it, Michael asks, would that not be a win for all?

I’ve been arguing that water policy planning driven by the ESA is what led the delta to the political and policy mess we’re in. But if Jeff’s line of argument is right, then my argument about the ESA may not be.

It may simply be that the BDCP process got headed down the big conveyance path not because it was constrained by the requirements of the ESA policy process, but rather because that’s the path they wanted to be on. There is some evidence to support that in the November 2007 “Bay Delta Conservation Plan: Points of Agreement” (pdf):

Under a Planning Agreement dated October 6, 2006, the Steering Committee worked over the course of this year on developing an overall approach to the BDCP. We have chosen to concentrate initially on different approaches to conveyance and how they would likely contribute to achieving the planning goals and conservation objectives of the Planning Agreement and affect habitat restoration opportunities across the Delta.

A conveyance is what they seem to have been looking for, and a conveyance is therefore what they found?