Task force requires deadline extension for reservoir report

A task force charged with mapping out the future of the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir needs an extension on the report it had hoped to finish this month.

“They all think we’re about 85 percent through,” Albemarle County Supervisor Sally H. Thomas said Friday. “It just didn’t quite get there.”

Thomas, who chairs the 13-member panel, said that the group wasn’t able to finish its report because it ran out of time trying to perfect the language, not because the members are greatly divided on the general idea of what the report should say.

“I wouldn’t say that anybody was tearing it up,” said Thomas, who wrote the initial draft and has been revising it based on input from other members.

The task force plans to meet again in January, though a date has yet to be determined.

In prior meetings, members debated whether the group should recommend dredging the reservoir to remove sediment, which has lessened the reservoir’s size and water capacity. Thomas said that some members came to the conclusion that the task force should provide to Albemarle County and Charlottesville leaders the benefits of dredging, not an answer to whether dredging should be done.

Ridge Schuyler, the Piedmont director of The Nature Conservancy, said at Thursday’s meeting that he doesn’t think the task force has the right to tell the community how to spend its money. Those are decisions best left to elected officials, he said.

“We were asked why we should dredge,” Schuyler said after the meeting. “Not whether we should dredge.”

Members agreed that dredging enough to allow lanes for rowers would be a key benefit of selective dredging.

A draft report from Thursday morning recommended “dredging sediment from specific, defined, critical areas at the least cost” to accomplish water-storage and recreation objectives.

Some members have said that dredging could provide additional water supply that could be beneficial if the area faces a drought before infrastructure has been built for the long-term water supply plan. However, officials say that it isn’t vital that dredging be done as a way to supplement the water supply plan.

The task force is also hoping to determine how much reservoir capacity would be lost permanently, if any, if dredging isn’t done in the near future.

The area’s long-term water-supply plan would pipe water from the South Fork reservoir to the Ragged Mountain Reservoir after a higher dam has been built at Ragged Mountain. The cost of the project was initially estimated at $142.8 million, but critics say it will be much more.