The historic $2.7 billion of voter-approved bond money will go to elevating two Bay Area dams, at Los Vaqueros Reservoir near Livermore and Pacheco Reservoir east of Gilroy, as well as to the development of two much larger dams in the Central Valley.
Collectively, the projects would add about 4.3 million acre feet of water storage across the state, the equivalent of about a dozen of San Francisco’s Hetch Hetchy reservoirs.
Although the larger dams, at the proposed 13-mile-long Sites Reservoir along the Sacramento River and 18-mile-long Temperance Flat Reservoir on the San Joaquin River, are still well short of the money they need to get off the ground, the Bay Area projects are now close to moving forward.
“Getting the money is a greater step toward water reliability for the Bay Area region,” said Oliver Symonds, a spokesman for the Contra Costa Water District, which was allocated $459 million for the proposed $980 million expansion of Los Vaqueros Reservoir.
The reservoir, which holds water piped in from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, would grow by 70 percent, increasing its capacity to 275,000 acre-feet of water, enough to supply more than a half million households for a year.
With $485 million of Prop.
1 money, the Santa Clara Valley Water District plans to construct a new $969 million dam on Pacheco Creek in eastern Santa Clara County, in the footprint of a smaller dam.
The project would store 500,000 acre feet of water piped in from the nearby Sacramento River.
“But it’s a step in the right direction.” Watson said he is pursuing funding from other sources, including the many water agencies that would benefit from Sites, largely districts that provide water for farms.
1 funding for water storage is the most the state has allocated since construction of the State Water Project, which consists of 21 dams and hundreds of miles of canals, built largely in the 1960s.