Water plan takes heat

Some Charlottesville city councilors on Tuesday signaled a willingness to reconsider dredging the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir after hearing complaints about the area’s $142 million long-term water supply plan.
“This whole process has pointed out that we can’t just sit here and not talk about what’s going to happen with South Fork,” Councilor David Brown said at a work session Tuesday. “I don’t see that in the context of the water supply plan, I see it in the context of maintaining the health of the reservoir.”
Councilor Holly Edwards, a nurse, said she looks at it through that lens.
“As a cancer patient, you want to know what all the options are,” Edwards said. “And that’s what we need to do here.”
The plan, as it was adopted in 2006, would build a new dam at Ragged Mountain and a new pipeline from the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir to fill the expanded capacity. The plan has come under attack as being too expensive and as having inadequately considered the potential effects of dredging South Fork, which has not been maintained in the 40 years since it was built.
Albemarle County Supervisor Sally H. Thomas, who said she was involved in water issues long before she became a politician, said she has undergone a role reversal. Years ago, she criticized water officials for the same issue: not looking at dredging as a feasible option. Dredging, supporters argue, would mean that the expensive new pipeline would not have to be built and that there would be no need for the extensive loss of trees and land.
The supporters of the approved plan haven’t objected to the possibility of dredging. They said the community should look at dredging South Fork, but that dredging alone will not solve the long-term water shortage. The dam at Ragged Mountain is more than 100 years old and needs to be replaced by 2011, supporters say. The pipeline that fills it – Sugar Hollow – is more than 80 years old. The new infrastructure, supporters say, would be needed regardless of the solution.
Ridge Schuyler, the director of the Nature Conservancy’s Piedmont Program, said the approved plan solves all the hurdles that environmentalists have agreed were paramount: keeping the local water system within the watershed; having a plan that supplies adequate water for a growing community; and restoring area rivers, including the dying Moormans River.
Schuyler said that he and critics have more in common than not, and said the local water supply plan came about because of a diverse community effort.
“We also suffer the consequences of having a smart and dedicated community,” he said of the differing opinions. “At some point …you have to act.”
The Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce also praised the plan Tuesday in a statement, though recently the Sierra Club environmental group withdrew its support and said dredging should get another look.
“We, like a lot of people, started looking at dredging the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir,” Schuyler said. “We looked at dredging and determined that it didn’t meet the need. The first requirement of a water supply plan is to meet the need.”
It depends, though, how one defines “need.” Kevin Lynch, a former city councilor who voted for the plan in 2006 but has said officials are now moving ahead without appropriately considering dredging South Fork, said Rivanna Water & Sewer Authority officials have over-estimated demand, population projections and how much the community can conserve in times of drought. He, along with Citizens for a Sustainable Water Plan, a group of city residents that has criticized officials and the current plan, have said that dredging may be a way to at least build a somewhat smaller dam at Ragged Mountain.
Some of Tuesday’s meeting considered the logistics of dredging, as councilors asked specific questions about what it would take and what officials would do with the sediment once it was dredged up. Chris Gibson of the Gahagan & Bryant consulting firm hoped to persuade officials to pay for a feasibility study, which he said Monday would cost $275,000.
There are hurdles, the consultant agreed, including what to do with sediment that some have said would fill the University of Virginia’s Scott Stadium to 26 feet every year for 50 years.
Aaron Keno, of Gannett Fleming consultants, which did the original study on dredging, said dredging should be studied for maintenance of the reservoir, not for the community’s water supply solution.