11/16/2025
Driving East from the Sacramento valley up into the Western Sierras, an inspiring landscape of gnarled trees scattered like monuments along ridge lines and hilltops, and gathering together in deeper woods along stream beds, attracts the eye. The iconic oak, with its gnarled and twisted branches, reaching out from a thick trunk to capture the sun with its leaves, surrounded by savannah grasslands, is the dominant ecosystem of the western Sierra Nevada foothills.
Among these oaks is the distinctive blue oak, with its blue shaded leaves, a species that contains many fine older and even ancient specimens. They thrive on the dryer hillsides and bottom lands of this region, but they do not reproduce rapidly, and human intrusion has interrupted their natural reproduction cycle.
Drive down Scott Road between White Rock Road and Deer Hills Creek and you’ll find yourself winding through varied vistas of rolling hills, with majestic oaks standing tall against the sky and alternating with creek bottoms with their denser stands of oak forest. Blue oak woodlands are home to almost a hundred different species of birds, amphibians, reptiles and mammals in a complex ecosystem which supports these many denizens. All of this will be destroyed if the Coyote Creek solar project is built on Barton Ranch land.
Ironically, SMUD, our local publicly owned power company, signed a contract in 2021 to bulldoze more than 1400 acres of blue oak woodland in a 2700 acre project area in order to replace these natural solar collectors and carbon sequesters with industrial made solar panels. While thousands of acres of already disturbed land remains available to build such a project, this ranch with its heritage oaks many hundred of years old is on the chopping block.
Eight tons of explosives will be used every day for over a month and 1.4 million cubic yards of earth will be removed. The rolling hills, with their rocky outcrops, will be bulldozed and
smoothed so that these industrial solar facilities can be constructed in the eastern part of our county on rangeland which supports wildlife as well as cattle ranching. Another irony of this ill-considered effort is that these lands are eligible for conservation easement payments which would provide more than $27million dollars to the owners of Barton Ranch.
But this only happens if the Sacramento County Supervisors approve a faulty Environmental Impact Report which underplays and understates the impact of this project on the lands and environment.
There is still time to speak up about this project up to Tuesday, November 18th, when a hearing will be held at 2 pm in the afternoon.
If you can't attend the hearing, or don't wish to speak for the limited amount of time they'll give you, you can submit written comments and send an email to your County supervisor.
A coalition of conservation, recreation, and environmental groups has submitted extensive technical comments citing the alternatives and the environmental costs of completing this project. Please see the Sierra Club Mother Lode Chapter website for info on your supervisor’s contact info and how to submit a comment. Mother Lode Chapter | Sierra Club (See Save Coyote Creek section)
Yours in opposition to bad tradeoffs.
Chris Brown
