Located just over an hour north of Sacramento in Glenn and Colusa counties lies 14,000 acres of grassland, streams and the main canal of the two counties’ shared irrigation district.

It’s the site of the planned Sites Reservoir, which has long been eyed as a possible place to store excess surface water from across California. The project was first proposed in the 1950s, but failed — and was re-proposed several times since then. Now, after roughly 70 years and several iterations, the off-river storage basin west of the Sacramento Valley is being streamlined and moving forward.