WEST SACRAMENTO (AP) – The price tag for addressing the declining health of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, while providing a reliable water supply to California cities and farmers, keeps getting higher.

Officials met last week to discuss one of the state’s most contentious proposals—piping fresh water around the delta and into the canals that carry it south and into the San Francisco Bay area. The various options are projected to cost between $4 billion and $17 billion.

The estimates were provided to a panel created by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to come up with solutions to preserve the delta. The estimates are far higher than the $1.3 billion cost in 1982, when California voters rejected the so-called Peripheral Canal.

“All the cost estimates for all water projects get higher the more you study them,” said Phil Isenberg, a former state assemblyman who is chairman of the Delta Vision Blue Ribbon Task Force. “There has not been a serious, detailed study for more than a decade.”

Funneling water around the delta is being considered as a way to restore the delta’s ecosystem, in particular its population of the threatened Delta smelt and other fish. Their numbers have declined so precipitously that a judge last December ordered the state to reduce water pumping by a third.

Farmers and cities this year will receive just 35 percent of their contracted water from the state.

Scientists, environmentalists and sport fishing groups believe the massive pumps that suck water from the delta into the California Aqueduct also kill large numbers of fish and are a chief reason for their decline.

Eliminating the need to pump water from the delta, as state and federal agencies do now, also would safeguard supplies for Southern California and the San Francisco Bay area.

Nevertheless, building a canal or piping system remains controversial.

Northern Californians fear such a system would divert more water south. Farmers who draw directly from the delta worry their water supply would grow saltier if too much river water was diverted.

Engineers at the state Department of Water Resources presented the task force with four options to move water from the Sacramento River around the delta and into the California Aqueduct:
— A $4.2 billion canal in the eastern delta that runs parallel to the Deep Water Shipping Channel, which stretches from the upper reaches of the delta to West Sacramento. The canal later would cross beneath the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers by tunnel.
— An eastern canal coupled with a second system that funnels water through the Middle River, west of Stockton, at a cost of between $5.4 billion and $14 billion.
— A $7.4 billion canal in the western delta that diverts Sacramento River water near Hood, similar to the path selected for the Peripheral Canal before the 1982 vote spiked the idea.
— A western canal coupled with the Middle River system, costing between $8.6 billion and $17.2 billion.

Paul Marshall, an engineer in the Department of Water Resources’ Bay-Delta office, attributed the higher price to rising construction and labor costs. He said the costs were only preliminary estimates.

The state is in the midst of a 30-month review of the environmental effects of piping water around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The Delta Vision task force is scheduled to issue its final recommendations to Schwarzenegger in October.

“In the past, the ecosystem has been dealt with as a risk to be mitigated,” said Raymond Seed, a task force member and engineering professor at the University of California, Davis. “That’s no longer how we’re viewing it.”