Ha! Good luck with building any kind of water storage project in California. By the time all the Environmental Impact Studies are reviewed, the whole state will have dried up and blown away. The best you can hope for is mandatory water rationing.
You are right on the money, rather than building new storage, the Enviro nutts want to remove existing storage such as the Hetch Hetchy in Yosemite, and the crazy thing about it is there is considerable support for it.