The Northern California Water Association applauds Governor Newsom’s announcement today to accelerate new water supplies throughout California to serve people, farms, recreation and fish and wildlife. The dry years in California have shown that expanding and modernizing our water infrastructure in California is a must-do for California’s future. This modern infrastructure includes maximizing the use of our existing reservoirs, new water storage (such as the Sites offstream reservoir and groundwater storage), access to safe drinking water for all our communities, reactivating our floodplains, healthy farms and soils, and watershed management with forest health. We cannot meet our future water demands without modernizing our infrastructure and stretching our available water supplies. The Governor’s Water Supply Strategy is an important step forward in modernizing our water infrastructure in California and implementing ridgetop to river mouth water management in the Sacramento River Basin.
I noticed in the articles that Newsom’s plan includes $1 billion to remove 500,000 sq feet of turf. That’s roughly 11.5 acres at a cost of roughly 87 million dollars per acre. Someone needs to fact check this information. Otherwise, I’m sure we could easily find 30,000 acres + of farmland that uses exceeding more water to retire.
Glad to hear he’s on board to get something done towards storage, recycling, and desalination. But I’ll believe it when something is done instead of political window dressing preparing for a presidential run.