Flooding, debris, and blocked waterways have turned Lake County's Cole Creek into a death trap for an endangered fish species. Meanwhile, homes and roads remain underwater for months.
We're a community of neighbors in Green Acres, Kelseyville, California. Many of us have lived here for decades, witnessing the situation worsen significantly in recent years. Floodwaters now remain on our properties for more than 6 months each year, damaging homes, roads, and severely impacting daily life and the local ecosystem.
Cole Creek was rerouted and channelized in the late 1950s. Since then, Lake County has performed almost no maintenance, allowing sediment and debris to accumulate. This negligence has turned Cole Creek into a flooded disaster, trapping residents and wildlife alike.
Cole Creek is vital for the survival of the endangered Clear Lake Hitch, yet thousands of fish still die every spring in stagnant floodwaters. Despite recognizing this crisis for years, Lake County authorities delayed crucial action. Through ongoing community collaboration (monthly meetings, detailed documentation, and consistent communication about the issues), the county published a comprehensive planning RFP in September 2025 and is now working to finalize a contract, marking the first concrete step toward long-term restoration.
July 15, 2026
We now have hard numbers on what the creek work did. Since January 2025, sensors on a pasture at Pharo Place have been tracking standing water and groundwater every 15 minutes. The monitoring is run by O'Connor Environmental, working with the State Water Board and Big Valley Rancheria, and Matt O'Connor just shared the first full data set with us.
Read more →May 15, 2026
Lake County selected FlowWest to plan and design the restoration of Cole Creek. This is the $200,000 to $500,000 planning contract we’ve been waiting for (Task C of the September 2025 wildlife RFP). The money funds the engineering and water flow studies to restore a 1.55-mile stretch of the creek. This is a major step toward fixing the bottlenecks that flood our neighborhood and clearing the way for spawning Clear Lake hitch.
Read more →April 7, 2026
The draft Lake County 2050 General Plan is out for public review. This is the county's blueprint for the next 25 years. It decides where funding goes and which projects get built. The drafts name Cole Creek as a "primary source of flooding," but stop there. They don't recognize the Cole Creek Collaborative's work or mandate the fixes we need. We submitted a public comment pushing for concrete changes: priority funding for Green Acres, mandated channel maintenance, evacuation-constrained mapping for our flooded roads, and the Collaborative as the county's template for restoring channelized creeks.
Read more →While long-term planning moves forward, recent cleanup efforts have made a difference. California Conservation Corps crews cleared vegetation from the channel in December 2025, and county workers separately removed vegetation and sediment upstream of Clark Drive Bridge in August 2025. Yet much of the creek remains clogged. Consistent maintenance (cutting vegetation, removing debris, and keeping the channel open) is essential to protect homes, roads, and wildlife while the multi-year restoration project develops.
