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Reclamation District No. 1000 was created April 8, 1911 by a Special Act of the Legislature to provide agricultural drainage, flood control and levee maintenance. The District is situated on flat terrain in northwestern Sacramento County and southwestern Sutter County. It includes approximately 55,000 acres of which 38,000 are in Sacramento County and the balance in Sutter County. The District is bounded on the west by the Sacramento River, on the north by the Natomas Cross Canal, on the east by the Pleasant Grove Creek And Natomas East Main Drainage Canals and on the south by the American and Sacramento Rivers. This totals approximately 43 miles of levees of which all are considered “project” levees. In addition the District maintains approximately 10 miles of non-project levees in the Pleasant Grove area.
The District area is known as the Natomas Basin and is
17 miles long in the north-south direction and 5 – 6 miles wide in the east-west direction. The basin is relatively flat with an elevation range of approximately 10 feet – 40 feet National Geodetic Vertical Datum (NGVD) of 1929. More than 90 percent of the land in the basin is between elevations 10 feet and 25 feet.
The interior canal and drainage system as originally designed, conveyed drain water to the pumping plant at Second Bannon (Plant 1A) for discharge into the
Sacramento River. Its purpose was to provide drainage and flood protection to agricultural lands within the District. In 1920 a second plant was added at Pritchard Lake (Plant 2) that served as both an irrigation and drainage facility. A third pumping plant was added on the Sacramento River (Plant 3) in 1939 and the interior drainage system remained in that configuration for many years. As the basin began to develop
in the southeast corner (City of Sacramento) pumping capacity was increased. Eventually five more pumping plants were added at locations to relieve the pressure on the original plants. Over the years the District has had various agreements with the City and County of Sacramento whereby it agreed to handle urban runoff in exchange for one or the other of those entities either paying for the increased capacity, constructing the increased capacity or conditioning improvement plans on compensating the District for adding capacity to handle the increase in runoff resulting from urbanized/developed areas.
The latest agreements involved significant improvements to handle urban runoff from the North Natomas Community Plan area of the city and Metro Air Park located just east of International Airport. |
