(The Center Square) – California governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order giving 270 days for the approval of the environmental impact report holding up construction of the Sites Reservoir. The Sites Reservoir, considered by water experts to be a top priority, is 1.5 million acre-feet, $4 billion reservoir funded by voters in 2014 with water infrastructure bond Proposition 1, which is yet to have brought a single project to completion, that can hold enough water to serve three million households for one year.
SB 149, signed into law by Newsom earlier this year, allows the governor to require that court rulings on environmental impact reports filed by the government for infrastructure projects certified as priorities by the governor be issued within 270 days, instead of being drawn out potentially indefinitely as possible under current California Environmental Quality Act regulations.
“We’re cutting red tape to build more faster. These are projects that will address our state’s biggest challenges faster, and the Sites Reservoir is fully representative of that goal – making sure Californians have access to clean drinking water and making sure we’re more resilient against future droughts,” said Newsom in a statement announcing his certification of the project as eligible for his streamlining initiative. Sites’ EIR was finalized last week.
Sites Reservoir is eligible for $875 million in funding from Proposition 1, a $7.5 billion bond approved by voters in 2014 for the construction of water storage infrastructure. According to an analysis from the Los Angeles Times in early 2023, Proposition 1 is yet to yield a single completed project.
“Governor Newsom is appropriately recognizing that endless litigation and pressure by the environmentalist lobby on legislators and the water agencies has delayed necessary projects like the Sites Reservoir for far too long,” said Edward Ring, water expert and author of The Abundance Choice: Our Fight for More Water in California, to The Center Square.
While California is drought-free for the first time in over three years, Ring says the state still is in drastic need of water storage and infrastructure as water conservation methods reach points of diminishing return.
“We have increased our irrigated farmland but are still using the same amount of water we did 30 years ago. Our urban water consumption in 1985 was 7.5 million acre feet per year and that’s how much we’re using today with 39 million people living in California. We’ve already done the easy work in terms of conserving water,” said Ring.
Ring also noted that certain decisions have been made by leaders of the Sites Reservoir project that make it both more financially difficult on water users, as the vast majority of the project will be paid for by users, not the government.
“The individual running the Sites Reservoir capitulated to the environmentalists and decided to give half the water each year to the ecosystems, which is not revenue generating. You have half the water to sell but you’re amortizing the cost of the whole dam still,” Ring said.
Additionally, Sites leaders also decided to not use the site as a pump-driven energy storage site that allow the reservoir to pump water up into the reservoir with the state’s excess solar energy at peak generation, then let the water through the turbines to release electricity at times of peak demand in the hours before and after the standard work day — which Ring says is a missed opportunity for both revenue and meeting the state’s growing energy needs amid its push for greater electrification.
According to Ring, California’s original water plan in the mid 20th century was to build a system that could deliver 40 MAF per year for agricultural use and another 10 for urban use. Instead of expanding water supply, the state signed new standards into law that limit water consumption to 47 gallons per person per day starting in 2025, and just 42 in 2030. Today, California uses roughly 30 MAF per year for agricultural use and just over seven MAF per year for its cities, which Ring says suggests a moderate expansion of the state’s water supply infrastructure is well within reach.
