As California grapples with worsening cycles of drought, a proposal to create a new water district in Butte County has sparked fears of a profit-driven water grab by large-scale farmers and outside interests.
In recent decades, as water has grown increasingly precious, Californians have tried countless ways to find more of it and make it last longer, including covering agricultural canals with solar panels to prevent evaporation, building costly desalination plants and pulling out tracts of water-hungry grass.
The 10-year proposal aims to shield communities from a neurotoxin that can cause permanent damage to the brain and nervous system, especially in children.
California will escape much of the rainfall from an incoming atmospheric river, but the storm will still benefit some of the state’s reservoirs.
An important milestone was reached Friday for the construction of another reservoir in California. The Final Environmental Impact Report (EIR) for Sites Reservoir was certified and the Sites Reservoir Project was approved by the Sites Project Authority, the lead agency under the California Environmental Quality Act.
Next up for the Sites Project Authority is to move the project through the final planning stages. After getting through the final stages, crews will begin building the reservoir.
In 2014, California voters passed a proposition using $7.5 billion dollars in state funds to expand water storage capacity. Nearly 10 years later, people say not much has come from the vote. The main focus on their minds is the failure to expand Shasta Dam.
Kern County Congressman David Valadao (R-CA) has authored legislation that makes it easier for Shasta to receive federal funding.
In modern American politics, voters at the local and state level are asked to weigh in all the time on ballot measures involving public policy. What’s strikingly consistent across the nation is just how contrary voters are and how ready they are to object to anything. In San Diego, for a local example, an utterly mundane 2016 measure to change the City Charter’s language on municipal bonds so that it conformed with the state Constitution and changes in state law drew the objections of 21 percent of voters. Very lopsided results are extremely rare.
California’s state government began drawing up plans for Sites Reservoir in the Sacramento Valley 70 years ago. And it still only exists on paper.
So, kudos to Gov. Gavin Newsom for deciding that it’s finally time to put this tardy project on the fast track.
Fast track means there’ll be limited time for any opponent to contest the project in court on environmental grounds.
Craig Elmore’s family history is the stuff of Westerns. His grandfather, John Elmore, a poor son of a Missouri preacher, arrived in California’s Imperial Valley in 1908 and dug ditches to deliver water to homesteaders.
California is drought-free for the first time in more than three years because of a remarkably wet, snowy winter and a rare tropical storm over the summer. The last remaining traces of drought disappeared in October, as autumn rainstorms grazed the northwestern corner of the state.
