A controversial city water project west of Bend will result in the immediate eight-month closure of the Tumalo Falls Day Use Are beginning tomorrow, according to a joint news release sent just today from the city of Bend and the Forest Service.
Several popular hiking and biking trails in the area, including the portions of the North Fork and South Fork Tumalo trails, will be closed.
Officials said it was necessary to immediately close the popular recreational corridor to allow the city to begin staging construction equipment for the planned surface water improvement project that is designed to replace roughly 10 miles of aging pipe.
It is not clear how long the city and Forest Service knew they would need to close the highly trafficked area, but Forest Service spokesman Jean Nelson Dean said she had “just found out” about the closure.
“It’s certainly not fun to be closing a popular location like that,” Nelson-Dean said.
Nelson-Dean added that she wasn’t sure how long her staff may have known of the shutdown, but said some of the details around the project were finalized just last week after the agency rejected an appeal from a local land use watchdog, Central Oregon LandWatch.
Nelson-Dean said the deadlines are being driven by the city, which wants to get as much work done as possible while water flows are low in the creek. The city plans to begin work on laying the pipe in early October.
“We obviously like to give people a lot of notification,” she said, of the notoriously analytical federal agency.
“The city does have a need to get out there and take advantage. Once the appeal was basically resolved and they move forward, they wanted to get on it as quickly as possible.”
City spokesman Justin Finestone said he didn’t know how long the city had been aware of the necessity to close Tumalo Falls and referred questions to the city’s engineer Tom Hickman.
Hickman could not be reached for immediate comment.
While the work is expected to stretch into May, Nelson-Dean said they hope to have Tumalo Falls and the other trail section open for next summer.
In the meantime, she said, there is a chance the agency may temporarily open some of the area if weather forces a work stoppage.
Weather may not be the only obstacle, LandWatch may yet seek an injunction against the city to stop construction of the project that it and other opponents have decried as unnecessary and wasteful.
Those critics would prefer that the city move to a groundwater only system using existing and future well capacity, or explore other alternatives to the 10-mile pipe option. Other alternatives, they say, would have both long-term economic and environmental benefits.
This article appears in Sep 27 – Oct 3, 2012.
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This is not a controversial project. 99% of Bend knows it is good. It is the 9 or 10 left wing nut jobs that are against it and are having a temper tantrum.
Actually, there is a broad opposition to the project: more than 1500 petitions against it, community leaders from all over the political spectrum (developers, Tea Partiers, environmentalists, etc), and 7 former Bend Mayors.
Please find out more at http://www.stopthedrain.org.
MissD – While the ‘nutjobs’ at CO Landwatch are spearheading the legal opposition, the most compelling arguments against the SWIP are economic. HDR’s analyses of both the cost of switching to groundwater and the projected revenues from the SWIP have been shown to be incompetent. I inivite you do some actual research before simply declaring the project ‘good’.
The SWIP is quite simply… unecessary. And here’s why: Given falling water demand and the city’s excess well capacity, we could continue using the existing pipes into the forseeable future, meanwhile developing the most cost effective plan: Gradually transitioning to 100% groundwater as demand increases over the next 10-20 years. Sweet! We just saved $70,000,000 while providing ample, clean and affordable water for our city.
SWIP has been a bad plan for a long time. Remember when the city council tried to get all the brewers to sign a document stating how important our surface water is for their business? None of them wanted to endorse the project. Just one other example of the city council trying to ram this project through.
Even The Bulletin covered that story, here is a link to it. http://tinyurl.com/bwgntou
Once again, Jim Clinton was the only guy who thought SWIP was a bad idea.
This is just another example of the city desperately trying ram their pet project rhrough before the voters have a chance to make their opposition known in November’s election. If you look you can see that all of the candidiates are against the present plan (except the incumbent Cathy Eckman – who never says anything, just votes yes for anything the city staff presents).
seriously 1500 hundred signatures, and they have been bugging people to sign for many months. That is only about 2% of bend. I could probably get more signatures of people who want to return to slavery.
That’s an unfortunately bleak outlook on your neighbors, MissD!
The petition has been around for a while now, but keep in mind the group fighting the project has miniscule resources compared to the City, their PR firms, and the engineering giant HDR.