Plan dredges up old arguments

By Jeremy Borden

Published: April 27, 2008

John Martin says he’s seen it all before.
As criticism of Charlottesville and Albemarle County’s long-term water supply plan is now seeing once-united environmentalists pitted against one another, Martin says all the new arguments are actually old ones.
Critics, in the form of several notable city residents and environmentalists, say that officials have not fully vetted the community’s long-term water supply plan, a $142 million project that would require the construction of a new dam and a large pipeline from the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir to fill the Ragged Mountain Reservoir. They believe estimates for dredging the South Fork were blown out of proportion and that elected officials didn’t get all the information they needed before adopting the plan.
Before embarking on what they call an expensive, environmentally unsustainable plan that would flood acres of land and take down trees, critics are asking that dredging get another shot.
Martin said he was once a critic of the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority over the same issue.
“I haven’t heard a single argument that is being made right now that wasn’t made back then,” said Martin, who is now a member of the Albemarle County Service Authority’s board of directors, of the plan that was adopted by both the Board of Supervisors and City Council in 2006 after years of discussion.
“They chose to advance their arguments by attacking a good, well thought out water supply plan. And they’ve done so by attacking our institutions … but inferentially, they’re attacking every single citizen who participated in this water supply project in the last 10 years.”
The critics don’t see it that way.
Rich Collins, a University of Virginia professor who served as chairman of the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority’s board of directors from 2001 to 2003, said he was close to having a plan approved that would have added storage capacity to the Ragged Mountain Dam and dredged the South Fork for the community’s long-term water supply needs.
He says the game changed after the Board of Supervisors and City Council declined to reappoint him chairman of the authority board. He says he was pushed aside because of his views on growth — that the benefits are overblown, and that a community must decide at some point when the negative aspects of growth begin to outweigh the positives.
“It’s a highly visible agenda,” Collins said of pro-growthers, adding that the water supply plan provides much more water than the community really needs. “There was a lot of closed door discussion and a 90-degree turn in the plans after I left.”
The plan Collins wanted while chairman of the authority board was rejected because of environmental concerns, said the RWSA’s executive director, Thomas L. Frederick Jr. Frederick said the James spinymussel, an endangered species, would have been put in peril by that plan.
The cost of dredging
The RWSA’s consultant estimates dredging costing between $159 million and $178 million, with a 25 percent contingency bringing it to $223 million, Frederick said. Critics say those estimates are overblown and dredging can really be done at a fraction of the cost.
Frederick says that dredging is impractical as a long-term solution because of all the variables. For example, year after year, land must be found where dredged material can dry and then it must be sold or buried. It isn’t clear, Frederick said, whether there’s a market for dredged material — if in fact it’s even marketable.
“The big unknowns are how you handle material once you get it out,” Frederick said. “Until somebody comes forward with something specific … that remains unknown or at least uncertain. We do know it’s going to be expensive if we have to buy land and bury it.”
Former City Councilor Kevin Lynch, who voted to approve the water supply plan, said he wasn’t given all the information at the time of the vote. Recently, he filed a Freedom of Information request with the RWSA, which supplied him with documents that showed estimates from firms that are much lower than the estimates he was presented with when he was a councilor, he says. If he had known of those estimates, he said he “absolutely” wouldn’t have voted for a more expensive plan.
Frederick says those estimates were not “comprehensive.” While 5.2 million cubic yards of sediment would need to be dredged over 50 years, Frederick said those estimates were based on much less than that.
Charlottesville Mayor Dave Norris said the City Council is not reconsidering the basics of the approved plan when it takes up the matter May 6, but simply looking to get all the information out on the table and see what role, if any, dredging can play.
“None of the numbers I’ve seen convince me that we can do it by dredging alone,” Norris said of the city and county’s long-term water supply needs. Dredging will only be part of the discussion on May 6, with other topics such as how the plan will be paid for on the docket as well.
Replacing infrastructure
He also said that the $142 million plan includes replacing aging infrastructure that will have to be done no matter what.
“There are significant investments we’re going to have to make in our water supply infrastructure,” Norris said. “The $142 million isn’t just to accommodate new demand.”
For the Nature Conservancy’s Ridge Schuyler — who has been called the architect of the water supply plan — everyone has always supported some form of dredging. The bottom line, he says, is that it doesn’t provide for the community’s 50-year water supply needs.
“It’s interesting, but it doesn’t get us around this fundamental physical fact that dredging doesn’t solve the problem,” he said. Of course, critics say the underlying information the RWSA and others are using is misleading. For example, Lynch cites the population numbers officials are using and calls them “overestimated.”
Norris said he’d like for city councilors to come out of the May 6 meeting agreeing on the basics. For example, he says the Ragged Mountain Dam will have to be raised — the question is how much.
“I want to put that to rest,” he said.