Drone Testing in Yolo County Part of Big Plans to Expand Delivery Service

Here are the morning’s top stories on Thursday, June 4, 2026

• San Francisco drone delivery company Zipline hopes to one day fly your burrito — and other consumer goods — right to your front porch. It’s already doing so in Dallas and elsewhere across the country. But before it can expand, Zipline’s drones are flying thousands of test missions above a serene Yolo County cattle ranch near Esparto. 
• San Diego is exploring selling its Colorado River water to other states that need it. Desalinated seawater is making it possible. 
• Voters in Shasta County appear to be rejecting a controversial county clerk who’s been trying to implement major reforms to the elections system there.

Delivering the future: Zipline tests drones high above historic Yolo County ranch

Bay Area drone delivery company Zipline hopes to one day fly your burrito — and all kinds of consumer goods — right to your front porch. It’s already doing so in Dallas and elsewhere across the country. But before it can expand, Zipline’s aircraft are flying thousands of test missions above a vast Yolo County ranch near Esparto, where the Stone family has run cattle for half a century and the drones aren’t the only innovation.

On a recent tour of the Yolo Land & Cattle Company, co-owner Casey Stone stops to gaze at Zipline’s test site. He calls it “the space center,” a hub of activity almost hidden by the ranch’s fog-cloaked foothills about 40 miles west of Sacramento. Dozens of white drones with flashing green and red lights take to the sky. They’re hovering over the middle of his 7,500-acre property. Two-story tall drone docking towers wait for their return. Zipline engineers monitor their flight from the ground below.

Stone describes the scene this way: “My analogy is when you see ‘Close Encounters [of the Third Kind]’, where they’re climbing around the mountain and they see the extraterrestrial space station there — that’s kind of what it is.”  They might look surreal, but Zipline’s drones aren’t something out of a movie. Instead, they’re on the cutting-edge of consumer goods transportation. The company, based in South San Francisco, is in competition with tech behemoths like Amazon and Google to dominate the future of air deliveries.

In Yolo County, Zipline’s drones operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, flying hundreds of feet above the Stone family’s green pastures and rolling hills east of Lake Berryessa. Zipline’s Mike Rigby is in charge of the drone testing. His company believes its technology will be a game changer — one that takes millions of delivery cars and trucks off the road and replaces them with faster, cleaner electric-powered aircraft. “As our CEO famously likes to say, ‘You don’t need a 4,000 pound vehicle to chauffeur your burrito to yah,’” Rigby says. “We can do that a lot more economically and efficiently through this aircraft.”

Zipline drones carry up to eight pounds of goods. The company can fit everything from medicine to groceries to gardening supplies inside the six-foot-long aircraft. But rather than touching down outside your home or office, the drones themselves stay high above. Rigby, as if he’s reading from a sci-fi script, explains what happens next: “And then the zip has a small little droid unit that comes out of the belly of the aircraft on a tether. It has its own propulsion system, as well. So, it’s kind of a sub-aircraft.”

While Zipline perfects its deliveries across the country, the Stone ranch will be home to even more aircraft. The Yolo County planning commission last fall gave the green light for expanded testing on the property.

Why one of the cities most dependent on the Colorado River now has water for sale

Even as California is offering to take less water from the drought-shrunken Colorado River, one of the state’s biggest cities that’s long been the most dependent on it curiously now has excess water to sell.

In a good year, San Diego gets barely 8 inches of rain. And not too long ago, the picturesque coastal city was staring down major water supply shortages. It’s notoriously at the end of the line of the Colorado River “straw,” a good three-hour drive from the shrinking river itself. But today, thanks in part to aggressive water recycling and urban and agricultural conservation programs and a big bet made on salt water, San Diego has a surplus and other thirsty nearby cities and states are eager to tap it. “I don’t think we can save the Colorado River, but what we’re looking to do is show that there is an opportunity to manage the system in a new way,” says Meena Westford, director of imported water at the San Diego County Water Authority.

At Carlsbad State Beach north of the city, roughly 100 million gallons of seawater gets pumped through gravel and sand and treated via reverse osmosis at the Claude “Bud” Lewis Carlsbad Desalination Plant. About 50 million gallons a day turns into potable water. Since it came online at the site of a former coal-fired power plant in late 2015, the facility produces about 7-10% of the region’s water. Right now anyway, despite the western megadrought, they don’t need it locally. “We’re the only agency that is bringing new water into the system. This is not horse trading Colorado River water. This is really introducing and augmenting the system with new water,” Westford says.

No one is talking about building a pipeline from here to Arizona or trucking the extra desalinated water to Las Vegas. Westford says to think of it more like a transfer on paper. If approved by the Department of the Interior, the authority would exchange its existing Colorado River supplies stored in Lake Mead for desalinated water.

But desalinated water is energy intensive and extremely expensive to make. Water from the San Diego plant is estimated to cost upwards of five to 10 times more than river water. And environmentalists like Patrick McDonough warn that building more desal plants up and down the California coast isn’t the panacea for the Colorado River crisis. “The water produced by this massive, biggest in the Western Hemisphere desalination plant is a drop in the swimming pool compared to the entire Colorado River basin supplies issue,” says McDonough, a senior attorney with San Diego Coastkeeper.

But people are willing to pay for it no matter the price. It’s so scary dry in the Southwest right now. It’s also been years since anyone developed new supplies. Southern Nevada Water Authority general manager John Entsminger says Las Vegas doesn’t need the water this year. “But that does not mean I’m not willing to invest in a project and a process that leaves water in Lake Mead for the greater benefit of the entire system,” Entsminger told NPR. Lake Mead and Lake Powell, reservoirs on the Colorado that are the nation’s two largest, are so low they may no longer be able to produce hydropower. Federal forecasts predict the water could get so low at the Hoover Dam that the turbines would shut down, the dreaded deadpool. The Rocky Mountains are coming off their hottest and driest winter on record.

Controversial Shasta County clerk trailing in re-election bid

Joanna Francescut is leading the race for Shasta County Clerk, according to preliminary results Wednesday morning. The closely watched race has become a referendum on how elections should be run in Shasta County. Francescut and incumbent Clint Curtis have offered sharply different visions for the office.