Consultant questions dredging estimate

The estimated cost of reservoir dredging that many view as key to the future of Charlottesville and Albemarle County’s water supply is likely inflated, a consultant said Monday night.
A handful of city and county residents gathered at the city’s Community Design Center to hear a presentation from a dredging consulting firm that has spent the past two days looking at the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir and coming up with cursory conclusions about what it would take to haul the muck out of the silting-up reservoir.
As the community moves forward with a 50-year water supply plan that would build a new dam at Ragged Mountain and a pipeline to fill it, several city residents have brought the cost of dredging to the forefront. They say the $142 million plan should face more scrutiny – especially because they believe that the Rivanna Water & Sewer Authority’s consultant was off the mark when it came to estimating the cost.
RWSA officials have stood behind their consultant’s estimates, which peg the cost at between $159 million and $178 million, with a 25 percent contingency bringing it to $223 million
At Monday’s event, though, there were more questions than answers.
Dredging is a complicated process with many unknowns, consultant Chris Gibson of Gahagan and Bryant Associates told the crowd. Citizens for a Sustainable Water Plan, a group of city residents and environmentalists that has criticized the water supply plan, brought in the consulting group. The consultants will make a similar presentation when the City Council takes up the issue tonight.
The firm has offered to do a “feasibility study” for around $275,000, and much of their presentation Monday was a sales pitch about projects it has already completed, along with what it could do for the South Fork project.
First, firm representatives said, it would need to determine the kind of sediment in the South Fork. Then it would have to determine what could be done with it – the hardest part, the consultants said.
RWSA Executive Director Thomas L. Frederick Jr. has said that it’s not clear whether there would be a market to sell the sediment, part of the reason the authority consultant’s estimate was so high.
Gibson said that is a concern, but he believes it wouldn’t be as difficult or as costly as Rivanna’s experts have suggested.
He may have put to rest one theory: that the sediment could be piped to the Charlottesville-Albemarle Airport, which some have suggested could use the fill for an upcoming runway expansion.
“Realistically … a direct pump to the airport probably is not going to be feasible,” Gibson said.
Residents at the meeting all agreed on one thing: that something needs to be done about the reservoir before a community asset goes to waste.
“Sure, here’s another consultant that wants to make money,” said Jack Brown, who attended the presentation. But he says something should be done about the reservoir.
“We don’t have to either do nothing or restore the reservoir,”
he said. “There’s middle ground there. [Public officials] do have to deal with the health of the South Fork Reservoir. When is somebody going to wake up to that fact?”
Several residents said they’d like to see more specifics on what is actually in the reservoir and what it would take to get it out.
The end of the session Monday turned into a sales pitch from different dredging firms in attendance. Representatives from two firms said they could dredge the reservoir for a fraction of what Rivanna is estimating. One firm, Dock Doctors, based at Smith Mountain Lake, said several years ago it could do the whole project for $21 million. Frederick has said those estimates are not comprehensive, and supporters of the water supply plan say that dredging alone does not provide enough water for the community’s long-term water needs.