The Trump administration has announced that two key California reservoir projects will receive $315 million in federal funding to help the state store more water in wet years to reduce shortages in dry years.
The administration is investing the money toward the costs of constructing the massive new Sites Reservoir, proposed for Colusa County about 70 miles north of Sacramento, and to raise the height of the dam at San Luis Reservoir, along Highway 152 east of Gilroy, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation said in a news release Tuesday.
But there’s fine print in the deal that the agency didn’t explain. Trump isn’t providing any new federal money for either project.
Instead, it’s money that was already approved by Congress before Trump took office last month, and which had been announced for the projects by the Biden administration over the past few years. After Trump was sworn in on Jan. 20, he blocked the funding as part of a sweeping, government-wide prohibition on spending billions of dollars of federal grants. Critics have called Trump’s move illegal and have sued to overturn it.
The move to release the reservoir funding was described Wednesday as a positive one by California water planners.
“It’s a good sign that President Trump and his administration are committed to the Sites project and are prioritizing it, just like Gov. Newsom and members of Congress from both parties are,” said Jerry Brown, a civil engineer (unrelated to the former governor) who is executive director of the Sites Project Authority.
But the back-and-forth has caused widespread confusion among state, local and federal water planners. And it left unanswered what will happen to other federal money that the two key reservoir projects were already promised during the Biden administration.
“I’ve never heard of anyone freezing money and then unfreezing it and making a splash about it,” said Greg Gartrell, a retired assistant general manager of the Contra Costa Water District in Concord. “I think they were embarrassed they froze it and Republican congresspeople probably raised hell about it, so they unfroze it.”
“This can cause a lot of chaos and anxiety,” he added. “People worry if they are going to get paid or if they are going to be laid off. It doesn’t help the projects get built.”
Sites Reservoir would be the largest new reservoir built in California in 50 years. An off-stream project planned for rural ranchlands near the town of Maxwell in the Sacramento Valley, the $4.5 billion project would create a new lake 13 miles long, 4 miles wide and 260 feet deep that would store water diverted from the Sacramento River for use by cities and farms around the state.
Brown said Wednesday that federal authorities have approved $646 million in various allocations for Sites since 2018. His agency has spent $30 million of it, he said, mostly on planning, design work and other preparations for construction, planned to start next year.
Of the $315 million the Trump administration “unfroze” this week, $226 million was for the Sites project, and all of it came from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a sweeping law signed in November 2021 by President Biden to provide $1.2 trillion for water, roads, bridges and renewable energy projects with the goal of boosting the U.S. economy as it was coming out of the COVID pandemic.
That leaves $89 million in federal funding Trump released this week that had been previously promised to the San Luis project, which is a $1 billion plan to raise the height of the dam at San Luis Reservoir by 10 feet to expand the reservoir by about 130,000 acre feet of water — enough to supply for 650,000 people a year.
Some would go to cities and some would go to farms. The water would be split by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation with the Santa Clara Valley Water District, Westlands Water District in Fresno and other agencies.
On Wednesday, officials who are overseeing the San Luis Reservoir project said they still aren’t clear how much of the $295 million in federal funds that was previously promised to their $1 billion project is frozen or unfrozen.
“Projects of this nature have complex funding structures and we’re working with our partners at Reclamation to understand the particulars of how this recent announcement impacts the affordability of the project for our members,” said J. Scott Peterson, a spokesman for the San Luis Delta Mendota Water Authority, a group of 27 water agencies based in Los Banos overseeing the plan.
One congressman praised Trump’s action.
Rep. Doug LaMalfa, a Yuba City Republican, whose district includes the area where Sites Reservoir would be built, issued a news release that said “Thanks to President Trump, and to (Interior) Secretary Burgum for doing what is needed to fix California’s water problems.”
LaMalfa, however, voted against the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021, which provided the funding in the first place.
Three weeks ago, California Attorney General Rob Bonta and attorneys general from 23 states sued Trump, saying that it is illegal for him to block the distribution of federal funds already approved by Congress. While Trump and many Republicans in Congress have supported the move as a cost-cutting measure, Bonta and other critics say the U.S. Constitution clearly gives Congress the right to pass budgets.
California has been promised $63 billion from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act for a wide variety of programs, including expanding solar farms, building electric vehicle chargers, curbing smog and building water projects. Much of that money now is in question. The case is expected to reach the U.S. Supreme Court.