WaterFriday, November 6
California's water board approves a permit for Sites Reservoir
The SACtoday team
Decades in the making, Sites Reservoir has its water right. The State Water Resources Control Board voted unanimously Wednesday, Nov. 4, after a nine-hour hearing. The reservoir would sit near Maxwell in Colusa County, about 70 miles northwest of Sacramento, and hold up to 1.5 million acre-feet of Sacramento River water diverted during high flows.
Sites would hold less than Oroville or Shasta, in million acre-feet
Source: Newsweek
View as table
| Value | |
|---|---|
| Lake Shasta | 4.55 MAF |
| Lake Oroville | 3.54 MAF |
| Sites Reservoir | 1.5 MAF |
Gov. Gavin Newsom said the approval shows "California can get big infrastructure projects moving again." Opponents disagree. Keiko Mertz of Friends of the River said the project "makes no sense," and tribal representatives told the board the reservoir would flood sacred land and ancestral burial grounds.
- Cost estimate: $6.8 billion to $9 billion
- Land flooded: about 15,000 acres
- Construction: could start as early as summer 2027
- Timeline: about seven years to build, six more to fill
The permit followed two years of hearings
- 2 years
- of hearings before the board's decision
- 60+
- experts gave testimony
- 1,600+
- pieces of evidence were reviewed
- 9 hours
- for Wednesday's board hearing
Sources: CBS Sacramento, Abridged, KRCR, Newsweek, Sacramento Bee