California To Dole Out $2.7 Billion For Water Storage

A California agency approved $2.7 billion for water storage projects across the state this week.

“In a historic vote, the administration of Gov. Jerry Brown on Tuesday approved spending $2.5 billion to help fund construction of four new dams and four underground storage projects — including two in the Bay Area,” The San Jose Mercury News reported.

“The California Water Commission action was part of a complicated new process designed to depoliticize awards of state water bond funding by judging projects according to stringent guidelines that some of the biggest projects had trouble meeting,” The Los Angeles Times reported.

“Voters passed the bond in 2014 during the state’s historic drought,” The Sacramento Bee reported.

A couple small projects pioneered by water districts made out well.

“The Santa Clara Valley Water District was awarded half of what it needs to expand a small reservoir on Pacheco Creek. The Contra Costa Water District also won half of the cost of raising a dam and expanding Los Vaqueros Reservoir in Contra Costa County,” The Times reported.

The proposal to build Sites Reservoir an hour north of Sacramento received the largest chunk of change. The project was awarded $816 million.

Still, that was “less than a fifth of what they will need to construct an off-stream reservoir that would store water piped from the Sacramento River,” The Times noted.

Officials have been discussing the Sites proposal for decades.

“The project would flood a 14-mile long valley west of Williams along the Glenn-Colusa county line with water piped 14 miles from the Sacramento River. The artificial lake would have nearly twice the storage capacity of Folsom Lake, making it the state’s seventh largest reservoir,” The Bee reported.

California has not untaken a water project of this size since the 1970s, when it completed the New Melones Dam on the Stanislaus River, the report stated.