Built in 1947, Matilija Dam has been obsolete for more than 50 years. Standing 168 feet tall and 620 feet long, it was designed to hold 7,018 acre-feet of water, but decades of sediment buildup, now estimated at 9 million cubic yards, have reduced its usable capacity to less than 500 acre-feet. The dam is a complete barrier to migration, cutting off 17 miles of spawning, rearing, and foraging habitat from Southern California Steelhead, a population so depleted that fewer than 500 adults are estimated to return anywhere in the region each year.

Removing a dam this size isn't a single project, it's a sequence of them. CalTrout works alongside the Matilija Coalition, the Ventura County Watershed Protection District, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, NOAA, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, Surfrider Foundation, the State Coastal Conservancy, and the Resources Legacy Fund to advance the infrastructure upgrades that have to happen before the dam itself can safely come out. The Santa Ana Boulevard Bridge, replaced in 2022 with a $13 million CDFW grant, was the first piece. Construction on the Camino Cielo Bridge is expected to wrap up in 2025, with modifications to the Robles Diversion Facility targeted for 2027 and levee improvements for 2028.

With that groundwork in place, dam removal itself could begin as early as 2030, with the full process expected to take another two to five years once the dam's bore holes are opened and sediment begins moving downstream again. It's slow, sequential work, made harder by a lack of dedicated funding that requires the project to compete for grants at every phase, but each completed piece brings this dam, and the river it has blocked for nearly 80 years, one step closer to coming down for good.