California Environmentalists Move to Kill Massive Reservoir Project as State Faces Record Drought

Jamie Traynham has spent nearly half a century in and around the lush Northern California valley, about 70 miles north of Sacramento, that is home to her family’s ranch.

As a girl, she and her sister rode their horses through Sites Valley, and helped build the barn stalls where they raised livestock to show in local 4-H competitions. As an adult, Traynham and her husband rent the ranch from her mother and use the land — typically a sea of green in the rainy season — as a key winter-feeding location for their cattle.

“It’s a beautiful, beautiful valley with beautiful scenery and history,” Traynham said.

And she hopes that within the next eight years it will all be under water.

Traynham is no catastrophist counting on California to soon fall into the Pacific Ocean. Rather, the valley where her family’s ranch is located also is the site of the proposed Sites Reservoir, a planned 1.5-million-acre-foot off-stream water storage facility that would be the first reservoir built in the Golden State since the New Melones Dam was completed in 1980 north of Sonora.

The reservoir is designed to provide much-needed water to about two dozen water districts and suppliers up and down the state who’ve invested in the roughly $4 billion project. The state also is a partner in the project, and the federal government intends to invest in it as well, according to project leaders. If all goes according to plan, permitting will be finished in the next two years, and the reservoir will be built by 2030.

There is little doubt that California could use the water. The state is in a severe, three-year drought, with all 58 counties under an emergency proclamation. This past January, February, and March were the driest on record for those three months, according to state data.

Farmers are letting their fields go fallow, with State Water Project allocations slashed from 15 percent to only 5 percent. Last month, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California announced for the first time that it was limiting outdoor water use to one day a week for its six million residents, with threats of massive fines for providers who fail to impose the restrictions. A Los Angeles Times headline in April declared that Southern California “cannot afford green lawns.” The water district’s general manager told the paper, “We’re behind on precipitation. But it’s the changing climate that we cannot rely on anymore.”

The fight over water in California pits two distinct ideological visions against one another.

On one side are progressive environmentalists who view water as an increasingly scarce resource, and who call for reining in modern lifestyles, prioritizing conservation over new water-storage projects, limiting greenhouse gas emissions, and protecting endangered species. A coalition of environmental and tribal groups that subscribe to that view have gathered more than 50,000 signatures on a petition to kill the reservoir project, citing the alleged harm that would be done to certain species of fish in the nearby Sacramento River, among other concerns.

On the other side are water-abundance advocates who believe that even in years of drought California receives more than enough precipitation to support both its farmers and urban residents, if the water is managed well. They champion innovation and an “all of the above” water strategy, including constructing new water-storage facilities and desalination plants, in addition to recharging aquifers, recycling wastewater, and conserving stormwater runoff.

To the water-abundance crowd, California’s drought — or at least the water shortage leading to fallow fields and a war against green lawns — is “man-made,” the result of environmentalist lawsuits, government “green tape,” and weak political leadership.

“It’s a long-term problem caused by long-term inaction,” said Steven Greenhut, a California-based senior fellow at the free-market R Street Institute, and the author of the book Winning the Water Wars.

Rather than focusing on scarcity and limiting peoples’ water use, water-abundance advocates argue that California should model for the world how to increase water supply in an environmentally responsible way.

“California shouldn’t be in this predicament. We should have so much water abundance in this state that everybody’s got water fountains in their front yards,” said state assemblyman Devon Mathis, an inland Republican who has been helping to lead a statewide effort to establish an ongoing funding stream to pay for new water projects.

But California is nowhere near achieving water abundance. For the most part, the environmental groups have been winning. Since California’s last reservoir was built, the state’s population has skyrocketed from about 24 million to nearly 40 million.

“The environmental justice lobbies are extremely powerful in the state of California,” Mathis said. “They are loud. They have a lot of funding. And they are very large in the Democrat-majority cities.”

But for the first time in more than 40 years, the proposed Sites Reservoir offers Californians an opportunity to increase their water-storage capacity, and to provide more flexibility in managing the entire state’s water system.

“This project is probably the largest and most significant opportunity to improve our statewide water management of any opportunities that are out there currently,” said Jerry Brown, executive director of the Sites Project Authority, and of no relation to the state’s former governor of the same name. “I’m 100 percent confident that the Sites Reservoir will be built. It must be built. It is absolutely necessary for our future water management in California.”

Traynham is the authority board’s treasurer and a strong supporter of the reservoir, which she sees as critical for the region’s farmers and for the state as a whole. In addition to running cattle, Traynham and her husband farm rice and walnuts nearby. They’re not planting most of their rice paddies this year to preserve water for their walnut trees, she said.

In her mind, sacrificing her childhood home — where her mom still lives — is necessary to ensure her rural community’s survival. But building the reservoir would still be bittersweet, she said.

“When it starts to flood, the whole valley where I spent basically 45 years riding, driving, walking back and forth, every nook and cranny, bend in the creek, you won’t ever be able to see it again,” she said. “The scenery of your life is gone. It is changed forever.”

Building Support for the Sites Reservoir

The idea of flooding Sites Valley to create a new water storage facility is not new. It’s been studied and considered for over 50 years.

Traynham said earlier efforts by state and federal authorities to build the reservoir went nowhere, because the plans essentially called for shipping almost all the collected water to cities in Southern California. She said the message to the locals was, “We’re going to come, build this reservoir, kick you off your land, and you’re going to get nothing out of it. And we’re going to ship it down to L.A.” That proposal struggled to get broad political support, and “it just kind of sat there,” Traynham said.

The proposed reservoir got a new breath of life starting about 15 years ago, when local water districts, struggling with water shortages even then and looking for new ways to secure water, took control of the project. In 2014, California voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 1, the Water Quality, Supply, and Infrastructure Improvement Act, a $7.1 billion bond that dedicated $2.7 billion for water storage, dam, and reservoir projects. Sites is the largest proposed water storage project eligible for state funding.

Under the current plan, the completed Sites Reservoir would provide an “annualized yield” of about a quarter-million acre feet of water each year to a mix of rural and urban water agencies across the state. That’s down from about a half million acre feet under a previous plan. For perspective, a single acre foot of water is enough to supply about two homes for a year.

The Sites Reservoir wouldn’t solve all of California’s water shortage — there is no silver bullet water project that would — but proponents say it is an important piece of the puzzle.

Every year, Californians use about 40 million acre feet of water, with farmers using about three-quarters of that to irrigate their land. The state actually averages about 200 million acre feet in precipitation every year, but more than half that evaporates, according to a report in the nonprofit CalMatters news site. And the rain doesn’t always fall where the most people and farms are; the less populated northern half of the state tends to receive more rain than more bustling but drier southern half. As a result, California relies on a complex network of dams, reservoirs, canals, and pumping stations to move water where it’s needed.

Sites proponents paint their project as an environmentally friendly opportunity to create a new, reliable, dry-year water supply. It will be an off-stream reservoir, meaning it won’t require damming the nearby Sacramento River. It will instead divert water from the river only during periods of high flow in the winter. Most of the water will come from rain runoff.

“It’s in an ideal location,” Traynham said. “To build this reservoir it only requires one major dam and . . . seven saddle dams, very little dam construction, because it is already a natural bowl.”

The reservoir is expected to help with flood control, and it would likely create a new habitat for local wildlife. Anywhere from 20 percent to 40 percent of the project would be dedicated to ecosystem enhancement and environmental benefits, Brown said. But that doesn’t mean the environmental justice groups are on board.

A coalition of environmental and tribal groups have gathered more than 50,000 signatures in opposition to the reservoir. They claim the Sacramento River is already over-tapped, and that building the reservoir will destroy critical habitat in the Bay-Delta watershed, diminish traditional tribal resources, and undermine California’s efforts to combat climate change.

Doug Obegi, director of the National Resources Defense Council’s California River Restoration and Water Division program, has argued that the project would cause “unreasonable harm” to the salmon and Longfin Smelt populations, the Sacramento River, and the Bay-Delta ecosystem. The water that would come from the reservoir would be expensive, Obegi wrote in a blog post in August, and “large scale water recycling projects are far more cost-effective.” California, he wrote, has an “excessive and unsustainable demand for water.”

“The proponents of Sites are savvy myth-sellers,” he wrote, “but it’s clear that this project harms salmon and the environment, and that it will not meaningfully address future droughts.”

Greenhut agrees that environmental concerns need to be addressed when building new water projects or expanding existing facilities. But the era of reckless building is over in California, and it’s still exceedingly difficult to build even the most sensibly designed projects, even after years, sometimes decades of studying the environmental impacts, he said.

“You’re always going to find some impact of any construction project,” Greenhut said. “But at a certain point you weigh the costs and the benefits. And I think as we’re facing a harsh drought that the benefits of storing more water should be on everyone’s mind.”

Water Scarcity or Water Abundance?

Despite environmentalist pushback and the power of the eco-justice lobby in California, recent polling has found that increasing the water supply and drought relief are popular among voters.

A statewide survey last fall conducted by the group More Water Now found that 82 percent of respondents believe that California’s water supply and drought relief are either absolutely or very important, in line with concerns about jobs and the economy, the cost of living, and homelessness. The survey found little partisan divide on the issue.

Edward Ring, co-founder of the conservative California Policy Center and a leader with More Water Now, a coalition that supports investing in modern water infrastructure, said opponents of a water-abundance strategy feel a “moral imperative” to lower the middle-class lifestyle.

“The ideological battle is between people who want scarcity and the people that believe that there is such a thing as sustainable abundance, that a middle-class lifestyle can be sustainable,” Ring said. “And in a society as wealthy and innovative as California, we ought to be setting an example to the world of how to build and maintain a sustainable abundance, not how to cram our lives down with rationing and scarcity.”

An “all of the above” water strategy would include building more reservoirs like Sites, but also would include conservation and recycling efforts generally favored by environmental groups. Orange County, for example, already has an innovative wastewater recycling facility, and expects to be recycling 100 percent of the community’s wastewater by early next year.

“You can drink it. I drink it. When we have tours we drink the water,” said Steve Sheldon, president of the Orange County Water District. He said they built the recycling plant because of “entrepreneurship and ingenuity,” and to make the district less reliant on imported water. He said recycled wastewater should be a bigger part of the state’s water mix, but it’s not enough.

“You can’t get out of a drought doing that,” he said. “That is just having a water-scarcity perspective, which actually is control. It’s not about water, it’s about control.”

Ring also is a proponent of capturing and conserving stormwater, but he’s skeptical of recent claims by the Pacific Institute that the state could collect and sequester up to 3 million acre-feet of urban storm water in a wet year.

Water abundance advocates also are proponents of building more plants to desalinate ocean water, like the massive Poseidon Water plant that’s been operating in Carlsbad since 2015, producing 50 million gallons of drinking water daily and meeting 10 percent of San Diego County’s water demand. Although desal represents a small percentage of the state’s water mix, Ring said it’s important because it offers a dependable and perpetual source of supply. The vice president of Poseidon Water has called the Pacific Ocean “the largest reservoir in the world.”

But environmental groups oppose desalination plants, too, arguing that they are too expensive to operate, consume too much energy, can suck in sea life through their water intake pipes, and discharge salty brine back into the ocean. Proponents of the plants say those concerns are overblown; the energy required for the plant is a fraction of California’s overall energy use, and the threats to the ocean and ocean life at the discharge sites are minimal. And desalination plants can be approved and built much faster than a large reservoir, like Sites.

A new Poseidon desalination plant proposed for Huntington Beach is backed by Governor Gavin Newsom. But last month the environmental staff of the California Coastal Commission recommended denying approval for the plant, which would produce enough water for 16 percent of the homes in the Orange County Water District. They deemed the project susceptible to sea-level rise, and harmful to fish and bird habitats. The Coastal Commission officially rejected the plan on Thursday, possibly ending Poseidon’s efforts there.

While radical environmentalists deserve much of the blame for California’s water shortage, Ring said he’s learned through his More Water Now advocacy that the coalition opposed to a water abundance strategy is broader than that. He said it also includes: hedge funds that hold water rights that increase in value when water is scarce, large agrobusinesses that can absorb high water costs to drive out smaller competitors, water-enforcement professionals, and even manufacturers that profit by selling low-flow appliances to consumers.

“We knew there were other sources of opposition, but we didn’t realize how powerful they were,” Ring said. “There’s a lot of bureaucratic momentum, there’s a lot of corporate momentum, there’s a lot of financialization, people that want to trade water futures. None of these people want water abundance.”

More Water Now was trying to get a citizens’ initiative on the ballot this year that would dedicate 2 percent of the state’s general fund — or about $3.5 billion per year — to projects to increase California’s water supply. The group has since shifted its campaign to 2024. Supporters of the initiative say the key is going around the Democratic legislature.

“The polling data is there,” Mathis said. “If we can get this on the ballot, it will pass.”