In a mostly published 43-page opinion filed December 31, 2025, the Third District Court of Appeal affirmed the trial court’s judgment in consolidated actions consisting of the Department of Water Resources’ (“DWR”) in rem validation action seeking to validate its authority to issue revenue bonds for the “Delta Program,” and a reverse-validation action brought under CEQA, the Delta Reform Act, and the public trust doctrine by various environmental NGOs, and other governmental agencies and entities, challenging that authority. Department of Water Resources v. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California et al. / Sierra Club et al. v. Department of Water Resources (The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California et al., Real Parties in Interest) (2025) ___Cal.App.5th___. The Court of Appeal held the trial court properly denied validation of DWR’s authority to issue revenue bonds under Water Code § 11260 to finance the planning, acquisition, and construction of the nebulously defined “Delta Program” as a supposed modification of the existing “Feather River Project” component of the State Water Project (“SWP”), which is one of many separate and distinct legislatively-authorized “Units” of the Central Valley Project (“CVP”).
Because the Court of Appeal concluded DWR lacked statutory authority under the Water Code statute it relied on to issue revenue bonds for the Delta Program – which DWR’s Bond Resolutions vaguely and opaquely described as encompassing any facilities DWR might choose “to convey water in, about, and through the Delta” – it noted in the brief unpublished portion of its opinion that it need not reach the merits of the CEQA, Delta Reform Act, or public trust doctrine issues presented by cross-appeals in the case as they were rendered moot. (The trial court had ruled in DWR’s favor on all the CEQA-related issues, which is unsurprising given that the approval of the Bond Resolutions as a financing mechanism did not commit DWR to approve any actual project within the meaning of CEQA.) The Court of Appeal did note, in the text and a footnote in the published part of its opinion, that DWR is currently pursuing an isolated single-tunnel “Delta Conveyance Project” to achieve a number of stated objectives and purposes, including restoring and protecting the reliability of SWP (and potentially CVP) water deliveries south of the Delta, and that DWR’s 2023 FEIR for that project is the subject of separate CEQA litigation.
