Sonoma County Water Agency recently released its Environmental Impact Report (EIR) for the Russian River County Sanitation District Irrigation Reliability and Beneficial Reuse Project. ("Irrigation Project".) Comments are due by July 20

District Directors (Supervisors) will hold a meeting on the project on July 10th at 10 AM. For more information call Jeff Church at 547-1949.

In order to serve the Russian River County Sanitation District (RRCSD) which generates an average dry weather flow of about 350,000 gallons a day (50 times less than Santa Rosa) the Agency is proposing construction of 32 miles of pipeline, storage facilities including up to 1,000,000 gallons of operational and capacity storage tanks, pumping facilities, service turnouts, and associated connecting pipelines. This is a boondoggle if ever there was one!

The Executive Summary lists ten issues, but fails to include cost as one of them. In fact, in going through the index, it didn't appear that there are any cost estimates provided. In the "Five Year Capital Improvement Plan", about $6.5 million was estimated, but we doubt that would pay for the entire project. According to cost estimates in the 1998 EIR for a similar irrigation project, the costs were around $15 million, and things were much cheaper then. It is entirely possible that the described project could cost as much as $20 million.

EIRs are required to provide a reasonable range of alternatives. This document give two alternatives that are equally problematic and large scale, and fails to describe a small-scale local project, which is really all we need to meet Regional Board permit requirements. It has been estimated that an approximately 100-acre irrigation project in the Guerneville area could be more than adequate to serve the needs of the system.

Supervisor Mike Reilly admitted privately to a friend that this project is not needed to serve current ratepayers, but rather facilitates expansion of the system to include Occidental and Camp Meeker. In another action, Camp Meeker Recreation and Park District recently released an EIR for the pipeline hookup project to RRCSD. At their last meeting, they expressed great concern about the cost projections for installing a collection system and building a pipeline to the Treatment Plant: about $22 million to serve the 650 connections in both communities. (The Monte Rio project went from about $11 million to about $17 million so far for about 400 hookups.) Is this outrageous?

Occidental and Camp Meeker already have a certified EIR for a local project that would ultimately cost way less than this pipeline project. The Water Agency persuaded Camp Meeker to explore this RRCSD hookup under the guise that it would be much cheaper than the local project. The real truth is that Sonoma County Water Agency (Supervisors) want to regionalize the RRCSD. They don't want to be upfront and reveal all the costs, because then they know that people won't support it. Furthermore, according to environmental law, both of these documents should have been considered as one project. RRCSD is also going to need additional storage and new disinfection facilities, which should also be considered in one review along with the other components.

Russian River Watershed Protection Committee has been closely tracking this issue since the Water Agency took over our system in 1995. Over and over we have seen the Agency selling "Cadillacs" to people who would rather have "compacts". They have very high overhead, about 200 employees, and sometimes we feel that these project proposals aren't really serious, but rather provide busy work for their employees. Also, there are many reasons to be concerned about this project on environmental grounds, but we will discuss those in a later article.

Contact us at rrwpc-1@comcast.net for more information. We will include a target letter on this project in RRWPC's current mailer to help you comment. You can get on our mailing list by emailing a request. It is very important that citizens, and especially rate payers in the affected districts, express opposition and outrage to this SEE "Your Watershed" column on page 30 excessive and unnecessary project.