The decision to reduce the size of the planned Sites Reservoir might appear to be a setback, but it’s really a step forward. It makes it that much more likely the project will happen.
Yes, we’ve been saying that for years. Many people have been saying that, ever since the project was first conceived back in the 1950s.
That was when environmental concerns stopped being afterthoughts, as they had been when the federal Central Valley Project was built. California was well into the planning stages for the State Water Project as well.
It became clear more water would have to be stored, not just for cities and farms, but for salmon, steelhead and the delta ecosystem.
The Sites Valley was well located for the task, close to the Tehama-Colusa and Glenn Colusa canals. They could be used to transport water from the Sacramento River. And their inlets could capture the flow from most of the creeks between Lake Oroville and Shasta Lake when they were running high. That’s 10,000 square miles of watershed that’s not dammed and really can’t be.
But Sites was a dam — well, a series of dams — and the same environmental concerns that gave birth to the idea of it, also gave birth to an opposition to dams in general. Even though Sites would be off-stream it was still a dam. And that was enough to prevent public money from going to the project.
So the water wars intensified, with increased competition for a static water supply as the San Joaquin Valley shifted from row crops to orchards that require water every year, drought or not.
But in 2014, voters passed Proposition 1, a $7.5 billion water bond. Many north staters thought they were voting to build Sites Reservoir, but that’s not what the bond language said. After a long and convoluted process, $816 million was approved for Sites.
That is just for “public benefits,” in this case, primarily for environmental needs. With the new $3 billion price tag for Sites, that gives the state access to more than a quarter of the water the reservoir could deliver for those uses.
Reducing the reservoir from 1.8 million acre-feet to 1.5 million acre-feet will cut the amount of water that could be delivered in an average year to about a quarter-million acre-feet.
That’s still a lot of water, and it’s water we don’t have now.