They skipped the takeover and called it complexity. I know the sentence. It is what a government says when the law handed it a shovel, the dirt has been failing inspection for years, and the agency holding the shovel explains, in a letter with a seal on it, that the real problem is that the people asking why it never dug simply do not understand dirt.
Here is the record, from the California State Auditor itself. Report 2025-603, part of the auditor’s high-risk program and published Oct. 13, 2026, looked at the dams and the levees, and CalMatters put the levee half in front of the public on Oct. 20 with the wet season coming. The state oversees about 1,600 miles of levees and other flood structures along the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers in what it calls the State Plan of Flood Control. It promised the federal government it would keep them to federal standards, then handed the shovel down to 102 local maintaining agencies: levee and reclamation districts, cities, counties, private landowners. In its fall 2025 inspections the Department of Water Resources rated 32 of those 102 “unacceptable,” and 23 of the 32 have been unacceptable for at least the last five years. The usual culprits are burrowing animals and brush: holes that make a seepage path through an earthen wall, and vegetation so thick the engineers who inspect from the levee crown cannot see the holes. In Madera County the auditor found erosion the state first noted in 2007 and brush noted since 2012, the brush now hiding the erosion. CalMatters counts what sits behind the failing ratings: more than a quarter-million people and 133,000 buildings worth nearly $40 billion. And here is the line that should be read into the record at every budget hearing in Sacramento: state law says that when a local agency does not maintain its project levees to standard, the department must start the process of turning them into a state-managed maintenance area, doing the work itself and billing the landowners who benefit. The auditor’s finding is that Water Resources “has not followed state law” and has not formed one. Not one.
Now the defense. The department told the auditor that maintenance ratings are not the same thing as flood risk, that a takeover can cost tens of millions of dollars up front “that must be weighed against other investments,” and that the audit “portrays a fundamental lack of understanding of the complexities of flood management.” The audit says the department disagreed with many of its recommendations and did not clearly say whether it would carry out any of them. Meanwhile the money is going the other way: the department estimates it and the locals need at least $165 million a year more than they now spend; the Flood Maintenance Assistance Program that helped small districts was eliminated in fiscal 2024–25 after the Legislature cut the allocation; one county’s district had gotten $202,600 from it in 2024. Of 48 critical repair sites the state has catalogued since 2012 — sites that could reasonably fail in a single flood season — 14 were still not repaired as of August 2026. CalMatters notes Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill this fall that would have created an annual repair fund for Delta levees, saying this year’s budget made it redundant. The dam half of the report is no gentler: 57 dams in poor or unsatisfactory condition, no formal punitive enforcement ever taken under authority the Legislature granted in 2017, and one spillway with a large hole in it for more than 30 years.
Buck read the part about ground squirrels and said he has been running an unacceptable levee along the back fence since 2019, and nobody from Sacramento has ever come to take it over either. Deb wants to know if “complexity” goes in the drawer with “as applicable.” It does. I love them. They are seasoning.
“Complexity” is the alibi. The burrow is the story. Sit with the 23 until they confess. Five years of the same failing grade, written down by the same state, filed in the same annual report, and the remedy the Legislature wrote — the state does the work and sends the bill to the landowners who benefit — sitting in the statute book unopened, because opening it would cost something this year and the flood is a problem for some other year. I do not need the auditor to be a hero and I do not need the reclamation districts to be villains; the districts say they cannot afford the work, and the state cut the program that helped pay for it. What I need is for the agency that issues the grades to stop pretending the grade is a weather report. A government that rates a wall unacceptable for five straight years and then explains that ratings are not risk has not discovered complexity. It has discovered a way to inspect forever and own nothing. Both parties are the help. One cuts the line item. One writes the letter about the line item. The water does not read either. The cardigan stays. Fill the notebook. Then ask, out loud, what a law is for when the agency it commands has decided it is optional.
Sources:
- California State Auditor, Report 2025-603, “State High-Risk Program: Poorly Maintained Dams and Levees Continue to Pose a Risk to Public Safety,” Oct. 13, 2026
- CalMatters, Rachel Becker, “Vital Central Valley flood control levees are poorly maintained, state watchdog finds,” Oct. 20, 2026
— Theo Ashford-Lindström
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