California’s largest new reservoir project in 50 years gains momentum
Colusa County, Calif., is known for sprawling rice farms and almond orchards, wetlands full of migrating ducks and geese, staunch conservative politics, and the 19th-century family cattle ranch where former Gov. Jerry Brown retired five years ago.
But the windswept county in the Sacramento Valley — whose entire population of 22,000 people is just one-third of Palo Alto’s — may soon be known for something else: the largest new reservoir anywhere in California in the past 50 years.
Last weekend, President Biden signed a package of bills that included $205 million in construction funding for Sites Reservoir, a proposed $4.5 billion project planned for the rolling ranchlands west of the town of Maxwell, about 70 miles north of Sacramento.
The funding is the latest boost for the project, which has been discussed on and off since the 1950s. Plans call for Sites to be a vast off-stream reservoir 13 miles long, 4 miles wide, and 260 feet deep that would store water diverted from the Sacramento River in wet years, for use by cities and farms around the state in dry years.
We have a definite tailwind at our back, said Jerry Brown — a civil engineer unrelated to the former governor — who is executive director of the Sites Project Authority. The authority is a group of government agencies in the Sacramento Valley planning the massive reservoir. Brown was also the former general manager of the Contra Costa Water District, where he oversaw the expansion of Los Vaqueros Reservoir 15 years ago.
The funding is a vote of confidence and a sign that the federal government sees a significant benefit to this project and it being a sound investment, he said.
If the project overcomes opposition and a lawsuit by environmental groups, the 1.5 million-acre-foot Sites Reservoir would be California’s eighth largest. It would be four times the size of Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite National Park, which is the main water supply for San Francisco and the Peninsula.
It would provide water to 500,000 acres of Central Valley farmlands and 24 million people, including parts of Silicon Valley, the East Bay, and Los Angeles. Plans call for groundbreaking in 2026, with construction finished by 2032. If completed, Sites would be the largest new reservoir in California since 1979 when the federal government opened New Melones Lake in the Sierra Foothills between Sonora and Angels Camp.
With the newest funding approved by Congress, the project now has more than 90% of its financing lined up, Brown said, a major hurdle that has killed dozens of other large water storage projects around the state in recent decades.
