American Canyon will continue looking to the proposed, massive Sites reservoir in Colusa County to someday help slake its thirst.

The city of about 20,000 residents is the only Napa County city without a local reservoir. It depends on the state’s North Bay Aqueduct that pumps water out of Barker Slough, a dead-end slough in the Solano County portion of Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

Supply reliability is tied to the Sierra snowpack that melts and sends water into the state’s Lake Oroville reservoir that feeds into the Delta. From year to year, it’s wait-and-see how much of the American Canyon allocation will actually arrive.“During the drought, we were acutely aware we needed to find something,” City Councilmember David Oro said at the Feb. 5 City Council meeting.

The City Council unanimously approved spending $240,000 this year to continue participating in the Sites project. Among the few dozen other participants are Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Bernardino, Antelope Valley and Santa Clara.

Sites reservoir could be built by 2030 and would hold 1.8 million acre-feet of water, slightly more than Napa County’s Lake Berryessa (1 acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons of water). No river would be dammed. Instead, water would be pumped in during high winter flows from the Sacramento River and its tributaries, a city report said.

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