Month: February 2013

On September 6, 2011, the Davis City Council pushed through, by a 4-1 vote, water rates that were advertised to be 14% rate hikes.  As it turned out, in order to get to 14% rate hikes, the consumer would have to reduce usage by 20% and thus, by any reasonable means, the actual cost per gallon would go up by a lot more than 14%.

Not only did a large number of people protest these rate hikes through the Prop 218 process, although they fell well short of the number needed to prevent the rate hikes, another group of people emerged with a signature process to put the rate hikes to a vote.

The Woodland-Davis water project was already dealing with one setback as Veolia withdrew from the bidding, and now the city has disclosed that on January 23, 2013 CDM and United Water sent a letter to Jim Yost of the project engineering firm West Yost Associates, informing them that they were withdrawing from the Davis Woodland Water Supply Design-Build-Operate (DBO) Project procurement process.

After considerable discussion with Dennis Diemer, the project’s general manager, six days later they wrote to inform the general manager, “We remain interested in participating in the regional water supply project.”

By Elaine Roberts Musser, Helen Thomson, Jerry Adler, Alf Brandt, Steve Boschken, Jim West and Jane Rundquist

The objective of the Woodland-Davis surface water project is to create a safe, sustainable and reliable source of clean water for our community. Many extremely qualified experts testified before the Water Advisory Committee, a group of knowledgeable citizens tasked to look closely at the water issue in Davis. Every one of those experts who spoke before the WAC agreed Davis needs a conjunctive-use project, using both ground and surface water. Every single WAC member concurred with a conjunctive-use project, in a unanimous vote.

We believe if Davis fails to implement a conjunctive use project, the city would not be acting in a fiscally responsible manner. Here is why:

In an op-ed earlier this week, Frank Loge and Matt Williams, who on volunteer time designed the Consumption Based Fixed Rate (CBFR), punched back at the Davis Enterprise columnist who attacked their rate structure, claiming it violated Prop 218.

By Steve Daubert

Some have said that our city needs to import water from the Sacramento River to supplement our own well water. But the quality of the river water raises questions about that suggestion. Biological and chemical contaminants can occur at high levels in the Sacramento River. It drains 27,000 square miles of land, and the by-products from the cities and industries on all of that land wash down-hill and concentrate in the river.

The river carries municipal sewage out-flows, and run-off from agricultural sites. As a state, California is the biggest user of agricultural chemicals in the U. S. Used organophosphorous and carbamate pesticides (2,3) enter the river in irrigation drainage from farming operations. Fertilizers wash into the river and stimulate algal blooms that increase the suspended organic carbon compounds and disflavor the water.

(Editor’s Note: The Vanguard has received two shorter submissions, one from Elaine Roberts Musser and one from Steve Hayes.  We have put them together in this piece to present two different views of the water project.)

Many reasons to reject West Sac Option