Increases or specific changes to your credit score are not guaranteed. It’s a different story for farmers, who typically pay in the $200 range for an acre-foot.¹Sezzle offers an optional program called Sezzle Up that users may join to enable their repayment information on Sezzle transactions reported to credit reporting agencies. That’s relatively affordable for cities, which can spread the costs over millions of customers. But just a month ago the Sites board accepted a new estimate that pegged the project at around $3.9 billion, reflecting ordinary inflationary pressures and new geotechnical studies showing that it will cost hundreds of millions more than anticipated to build the main dam structures.Īt such a price, the water coming out of Sites will cost its investors plenty - maybe $700 to $800 an acre-foot. The cost is so high that, without more help from the state and federal governments, “Sites is going to hit the wall,” Kightlinger said.Īcknowledging funding problems, the Sites Authority downsized the project last year, bringing the cost from $5.1 billion to just over $3 billion. Kightlinger, the just-retired general manager of Metropolitan, fears that Sites won’t be able to stitch together enough funding to complete the work. The hydroelectric dams aren’t used for storage. At least $250 million in Proposition 1 funding also is being used to tear down some existing dams - namely, a group of small dams on the Klamath River along the Oregon border that are being removed to improve salmon runs.

It generated funds for all manner of water needs: $1.5 billion for protecting lakes and watersheds, $395 million for flood control, $725 million for recycling. Voters agreed, and Proposition 1 became law. Jerry Brown, whose first stint in office coincided with the completion of New Melones, as he signed the bill putting Proposition 1 on the 2014 ballot. “It was an amazing convergence over a big idea, and the big idea is that the future of California needs a lot of water and we’ve got to use it in the best way possible,” said then-Gov. Seventy years after Congress gave New Melones the green light, with the state in the early stages of the last drought, the Legislature placed an initiative on the ballot to borrow billions for new water projects. Most Californians apparently thought otherwise. Environmentalists - who argue that damming rivers is harmful to fish and wildlife - hope it stays that way. It’s the last major reservoir built in California by the federal government following the dam-building boom that began in the Great Depression. Today the reservoir, capable of storing 2.4 million acre-feet of water, stands as something of a relic from another era. In early 1979, as construction was finally winding down, the leader of Sacramento environmental group Friends of the River chained himself to a rock to prevent the Corps of Engineers from filling the reservoir with water. In 1974, while construction was still under way, environmentalists qualified a ballot initiative that would have limited the size of the lake to the capacity needed for flood control. The main impetus was to replace a 1920s-era dam and protect Oakdale, Riverbank and other downstream communities from floods.Ĭonstruction didn’t begin until 1966, and controversy flared as environmentalists protested a project that would flood archaeological sites and a popular whitewater rapids area.

In 1944, Congress authorized construction of New Melones reservoir, on the Stanislaus River about an hour east of Stockton. Much of the funding approved by the Legislature, totaling $2.1 billion, hasn’t been earmarked for any particular projects yet that’s expected to be hashed out later this summer by lawmakers and the governor. The money will also be spent on new septic systems and sewer lines in disadvantaged communities to prevent groundwater from becoming tainted. The new budget also earmarks $1.3 billion for somewhat longer-term projects such as repairing leaky pipes, installing water meters, digging new wells, and cleaning contaminated water systems. The budget commits California to $5.1 billion worth of spending on water over four years, starting with more than $300 million in emergency aid for rural and urban water systems whose wells have already failed - or are at risk of failing - as the drought intensifies and groundwater tables fall. On the other hand, Crowfoot said California is moving quickly to facilitate billions of dollars worth of smaller water projects that lawmakers recently approved in the new state budget.

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