The California Transportation Commission voted Friday to spend nearly $100 million on the flood-prone North Bay stretch of Highway 37 — money billed as a defense against a road that studies say could be underwater by 2050. Almost none of it goes toward the elevated causeway that engineers agree is the only design that actually lifts the highway above the water.

The near-term package the commission approved funds congestion relief and sturdier bridges, not a road raised above a rising San Pablo Bay. The pile-supported causeway that planners have identified as the corridor's permanent sea-level fix remains unfunded, carries a price tag in the billions, and is decades away. That gap is not new: a longtime North Bay columnist warned years ago that spending heavily on a conventional highway destined to flood within its own service life is "fiscal folly." Friday's vote is the clearest test yet of whether the region will keep choosing the cheaper stopgap.

On Friday, the California Transportation Commission approved close to $100 million for Highway 37 in the North Bay — a package ABC7 reported↗ (external source, opens in a new tab) is meant to keep a major artery toward Napa and Sonoma from slowly going under, as studies warn the road could sit below the tide line by 2050. The station described the allocation as a first step toward a broader $190 million round of work that would repair bridges and, eventually, rebuild the highway's most flood-prone stretch.

Read the fine print and the money targets the corridor's chronic congestion and aging spans — not the raised roadway engineers say is the only durable answer to the bay. Highway 37 runs 21 miles across Marin, Sonoma, Napa and Solano counties, and, as the State Coastal Conservancy notes↗ (external source, opens in a new tab), the route is exposed both to sudden storm flooding and to the slow, permanent rise of the tides, with a badly clogged two-lane segment between Highway 121 and Mare Island. Caltrans, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and four county agencies have split the job into near-term repairs and a separate long-term rebuild.

That long-term rebuild has taken shape as a pile-supported causeway — a roadway lifted on pilings so tidal water can move underneath. The Conservancy says a 2022 engineering assessment found that design carried less environmental harm than the alternatives, and that raising the road would reconnect the San Pablo Baylands, where partners have already sunk more than $600 million into restoring roughly 30,000 acres of marsh. Lifting the highway is the piece meant to survive the rising bay. It is not what Friday's money builds.

So why not build the elevated road now? The bill. The permanent structure is a multibillion-dollar undertaking still decades out, and that cost is the heart of a long-running objection. Back in 2022, Marin Independent Journal columnist Dick Spotswood used an August 2022 column↗ (external source, opens in a new tab), reposted by Rep. Jared Huffman's office, to press against Caltrans' sequencing: pay hundreds of millions for an interim freeway on the sinking segment, then tear it out once the permanent structure arrives. He called that approach "fiscal folly" and urged officials to commit to the lasting fix in one effort. Huffman, part of whose district hugs the corridor, shares that preference for building it right the first time; the same column reports the congressman praising the elevated design and describing it as "environmentally self-mitigating."

None of that makes the near-term spending worthless. Easing a commute that regularly seizes up, replacing failing bridges and restoring wetlands that themselves blunt flooding are real gains, and the marsh work carries climate benefits of its own. But relief and permanence are different line items. The version of Highway 37 that survives 2050 is the one lifted above San Pablo Bay — and that version still has no funding source anyone has named. Friday's vote advanced the stopgap. The road that outlasts the water is still waiting, its price climbing with every year the region takes the cheaper option first.