Los Banos, CA (November 25, 2025) — California’s political debate over water, climate resilience, and infrastructure delays took a sharp turn this week after Rep. Adam Gray (D-Calif.) pointed to a local Los Banos project as evidence that the state’s bureaucracy is slowing down the very investments communities need to survive.
In a newly published opinion column in The Hill, Gray warns that California’s permitting system has become so slow, repetitive, and expensive that even basic upgrades are now taking longer to approve than to build. The problem, he argues, isn’t opposition from residents or environmental safety- it’s a process so tangled that even widely supported projects spend years in “paperwork purgatory.”
Gray said residents across the Central Valley have told him they no longer believe government can deliver major infrastructure, and in his view, they’re justified. He writes that California faces escalating threats, from drought and groundwater decline to intense storms and rapid snowmelt, yet continues to stall the very projects designed to address those risks.
One of Gray’s most urgent examples sits directly west of Los Banos. The Los Banos Creek Detention Project, a plan to modernize a reservoir built in the 1960s for flood control, is designed to increase water storage, improve groundwater recharge, support wildlife refuges, and strengthen flood protection for farms and small communities. Because the project updates an existing facility rather than constructing a new one, Gray calls it the kind of “non-controversial, multi-benefit project” California should be able to approve quickly.
Instead, he said, it demonstrates the opposite.
Originally proposed around 2012, the project became stuck in more than a decade of layered reviews from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the California Department of Water Resources, the State Water Resources Control Board, and several rounds of environmental, operational, and design assessments. Public hearings stretched on for years, even though the project had support from local water districts and federal partners.
Construction is finally underway, and expected to take roughly six months.
Gray calls that timeline indefensible. “A non-controversial project that will take only six months to build shouldn’t require more than ten years of paperwork and red tape just to get shovels into the ground,” he wrote.
Although the debate starts in Los Banos, Gray argues the implications extend across California. What’s happening in Merced County, he says, is happening everywhere, from housing and eonergy infrastructure to roadway and water-supply improvements.
He notes that the state’s major water systems were once built in record time. The C.W. Bill Jones Pumping Plant and Delta-Mendota Canal, both critical to Central Valley agriculture, were planned and completed within four years starting in 1947. Today, Gray argues, that pace is unthinkable.
California’s permitting system, he says, now makes it easier to stop a project than to build one. As multiple agencies perform nearly identical reviews, opponents can exploit the delays, “litigating the clock” until funding dries up or costs skyrocket. That, he says, creates exactly the kind of instability that hurts rural communities and contributes to rising water rates, supply uncertainty, and stalled climate adaptation.
Gray says the answer is not to weaken environmental protections, but to modernize the system. He is urging Congress and California lawmakers to streamline permitting by establishing a single coordinated review, enforcing clear deadlines, upgrading digital permitting systems, increasing staffing at reviewing agencies, and placing reasonable limits on prolonged legal battles.
He argues that reform is one of the few issues where bipartisan agreement already exists — and one where failure to act will directly impact families, farms, and disadvantaged communities in every region of the state.
For Gray, the Los Banos Creek project is more than an example… it’s a warning. If California cannot quickly approve a straightforward upgrade to an existing reservoir, he argues, the state is unprepared for the climate pressures and water instability that are already shaping its future.
Communities like Los Banos rely on timely investment to secure water supplies, protect agricultural land, and support the region’s economic stability. Delays, he says, only deepen the challenges.
Reforming California’s building process, Gray writes, is essential not just for the Central Valley, but for the entire state.
“By working together to fix our processes,” he said, “we can save taxpayer dollars, strengthen our economy, and once again show that America can build great things for its people.”
This article is based in part on a Nov. 24, 2025 opinion column by Rep. Adam Gray published in The Hill, as well as publicly available records from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, California Department of Water Resources, and State Water Resources Control Board.
