On August 20, 2025, the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors will hear a proposal to develop even more of the North Natomas basin, the Airport South Industrial Project. As the map indicates, other proposals are still pending, too, and all are bad ideas.
North Natomas is directly north and west of Sacramento’s downtown, and has already been developed east of Interstate 5. It remains a floodplain surrounded by levees that were originally so weak that a grant to expand regional sewer contained a $6 million penalty if that capacity were used to serve North Natomas.
The land speculators controlling North Natomas were unfazed by the penalty and went all the way to then-vice-president G.H.W. Bush, who made it pay-as-you-develop installments rather than the prohibitive up-front charge. They also got $43 million in levee improvement grants to bring levees up to pre-Katrina standards…