Groundbreaking on one of California’s newest reservoirs could begin by the end of next year, officials announced Friday.
Work on the Sites Reservoir, west of Maxwell in Colusa County, starts when crews begin testing soils and rocks in and around the 14,000 acre site of the proposed lake, said Fritz Durst, chairman of the Sites Project Authority Board of Directors.
The 14,000-acre Sites Reservoir will be located in the Antelope Valley west of Maxwell in Colusa County.
Officials expect to complete construction of a dam, roads and other structures around the reservoir within six years. The project is expected to cost about $6.8 billion, according to preliminary estimates, Durst said.
The Sites Authority also recently received a favorable opinion from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Agency on the reservoir’s environmental impact.
“It says that any environmental harm that we will cause, we have proper mitigation measures in place,” Durst said.
The project also recently received approval to do stream work on the site from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, according to Ali Forsythe, the authority’s environmental planning and permitting manager.
There are still members of the Sites family living in the valley where the Sites Reservoir is planned.
Sites is designed to be an “off-stream” reservoir. During wet years, when water flows in the Sacramento River run high, water is pumped to the lake in the Antelope Valley west of Maxwell.
Sites officials said that because of the higher-than-normal rainfall that fell over the North State from November 2024 to early April 2025, about 550,000 acre-feet of water could have been shipped to the reservoir.
Water in Sites is designed to be used for irrigation, drinking and wildlife, officials said.
Participation in Sites Reservoir includes the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the state of California, public irrigation districts in the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valleys, as well as urban areas in Southern California and the Bay Area.
The lake could hold up to 1.5 million acre feet of water, which is about one-third the size of Lake Shasta.
The agencies that own a portion of the water can decide how much and when they want to use their share of water in the lake. The cost of building the reservoir is paid back over time by the agencies that receive water from the lake, Durst said.
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This article originally appeared on Redding Record Searchlight: Sites Reservoir, California’s newest lake, could break ground in 2026