In an era of dam removal, California is building more

This story is republished from High Country News. Read the original article.

When the largest dam removal in U.S. history began on the Klamath River this year, it seemed as if the era of dam building was over in the West. Just a month later, however, the federal government finalized $216 million dollars in funding for a controversial dam project south of the Klamath, adding to the $1 billion in direct grants already pledged to the project known as Sites Reservoir. Rights for the water are being distributed this summer. 

This would be California’s first major new reservoir in half a century. The project will require building two main dams on a pair of streams that typically only run during big winter rains. Most of the water would come from much farther away, however: Filling the reservoir means piping water from the Sacramento River uphill, away from the Central Valley. If it’s built, the reservoir will inundate Antelope Valley, 14,000 acres of hilly grassland in the California Coast Range, northwest of Sacramento. 

Project boosters claim these will be the most environmentally focused dams in California’s history, with water earmarked for environmental purposes (a first, according to the Sites Authority) as well as minimum flow requirements for the Sacramento River. They also argue that the reservoir will actually work better with climate change, which is turning the snow that historically served as a natural reservoir into rainfall. The dams will be able to store the water from those winter rains so that it becomes available during drier spells — which, according to climate projections, will be longer and more frequent.

But environmentalists and leaders of some tribal nations oppose the project, citing its potential impacts on the river’s watershed, especially its salmon runs, which have already been devastated by dam-building and agricultural diversions. Ecologists and environmental advocates worry that additional water diversions during winter will take away the flows and habitat necessary for the migration of sturgeon and chinook salmon.  

The Sites Project Authority plans to divert water only during high flows, when the river is rushing and full of water from its many tributaries. But that water has a critical function of its own. As it meanders through the river’s floodplain, it feeds the unique ecosystem along the Sacramento River, now home to farms that host some endangered species. For example, rice farms flooded during winter storms have recently become habitat for chinook salmon.

“These winter flows are the only thing that's keeping these really at-risk species alive and these ecosystems functioning,” said Ann Willis, the California director of American Rivers. Dams can’t fix what they broke in the first place, she added. “There’s dams of all different sizes, all different objectives, all different locations. They’ve had opportunity to show their ability to support the environment. The data just doesn't support the claim.”

Just under a fifth of the reservoir’s capacity will be reserved to manage flows and temperature for ecological conditions in the Sacramento River and Bay Delta, or else pumped to distant wildlife sanctuaries across the state through sprawling canals that carry water south from northern watersheds. 

“These winter flows are the only thing that's keeping these really at-risk species alive and these ecosystems functioning.”

The vast majority of Sites Reservoir’s water, however, will be marketed and controlled by those able to pay for it: export-oriented agribusiness, urban water utilities in wealthy cities, and high-value industrial areas.

“There is a lot of water brokering and deals going on with Sites (Reservoir),” said Regina Chichizola from the tribal-led organization Save the California Salmon. “It’s essentially a private reservoir paid for with public money.”

The project’s backers see it as a critical piece of water resilience for the state, a wise investment in a time of climate insecurity. “I view Sites as an opportunity to add another asset into the water system to help its performance,” said Ali Forsyth, environmental planning and permitting manager at Sites Project Authority, the agency in charge of the reservoir. “The more tools we have, the better off we are, just like your retirement account. Every asset performs different.”

Sites Reservoir is structured “exactly like real estate,” said Forsyth. Project “partners” — agriculture districts and cities, mainly — will buy shares of the future water-filled valley, much the way investors buy condominiums or houses. When the reservoir fills up, they can use the water in their share of the reservoir however they wish, including trading it on California’s water market.

To Ron Stork, a veteran of Sacramento River advocacy and policy director at Friends of the River, those decisions come down to revenue and profit. “They are hoping to skim off Sacramento water and deliver it when the price is high,” he said. “With climate change, the Sites Authority believes that water is going to be more dear and that people are going to be willing to pay more for it in the future.” The problem is that the high-priced water will only go to those who can afford to pay for it, leaving poorer areas unable to compete.

“Western water policy treats rivers as a sum of parts and not a living entity of interconnected processes.”

In spite of critics’ objections, the governor has fast-tracked the project to “cut red tape.” This month, the State’s Water Board is in proceedings to offer water rights. 

It’s unusual, Willis said, to see the rush to build water storage project as large as this, considering that there are already hundreds of thousands of dams across the country. In the U.S., there’s not that many places left to build new ones. 

Willis sees the decision to proceed as a continuation of the longtime gap between how US legislators view river ecosystems. “Western water policy treats rivers as a sum of parts and not a living entity of interconnected processes,” she said. Sites is another in a long line of attempts to fragment and control California’s watersheds, she said. It’s also a fundamental misreading of how a river functions: “Temperature, flow, nutrient cycles — all are connected,” she explained. “It’s like a body. Nobody in their right mind would say, ‘Well, I'll just assemble these bones over here, cover it with muscles and skin, warm it up and call it alive.’”

The Sacramento River is already struggling, Willis said. Trying to rearrange a system this complicated risks creating a kind of Frankenstein’s monster out of the entire watershed.