For years, the city of Bend staff has garnered accolades for its drinking water quality, its water conservation efforts and ecosystem restoration initiatives. But a much-publicized project to revamp the city’s aging surface water delivery system has put all aspects of the city’s water management strategy under the microscope. Critics are pushing the city to reconsider a recent decision to pursue a $73-million upgrade of its Bridge Creek surface system and say the city has underestimated the costs of continuing to divert millions of gallons per day from Tumalo Creek while ignoring the potential for a large-scale surface water restoration project in the basin by returning some or all of its surface water rights to Tumalo Creek. There, it would benefit fish and wildlife and help boost flows in the middle Deschutes River.
Last month, the state’s foremost water use watchdog group, Portland-based WaterWatch waded into the murky fray when it filed a formal complaint with the state Department of Water Resources, which manages Oregon’s surface and groundwater supply by issuing new permits for wells and surface diversions and policing existing users. According to WaterWatch’s complaint, the city has been pulling more than its fair share of surface water from Bridge Creek then diverting some of that water back to the river system more than 10 miles downstream at Tumalo Creek near the city’s surface water plant. While the city doesn’t contest the underlying facts, the staff has defended its practice as being within the state guidelines for water use and blasted WaterWatch’s complaint as a red herring. In an unusual public rebuttal, city staff wrote:
“The timing of the complaint is concurrent with the efforts of WaterWatch and others to get the Council to rescind approval of the Surface Water Improvement Project. It seems the complaint is intended as a means of ratcheting up the pressure against the City maintaining a surface water system.”
WaterWatch of Oregon attorney Kimberley Priestley said that while WaterWatch is concerned about the city’s surface water decision, the complaint is a response to recent information that it obtained about how much water the city diverts into surface water system and the fact that not all of that water ends up in customers hands. There’s also another problem with the set-up, the returning water, which is sent through a man-made ditch back into Tumalo Creek, often gathers mud and other debris that pollutes Tumalo. One such event occurred this past November, turning Tumalo Creek chocolate brown and prompting the interest of the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, which has the authority to issue fines for such contamination.
WaterWatch isn’t the only group to blast the city’s surface-water plan. The multi-million dollar upgrade has drawn fire from a cross section of critics ranging from environmental groups to community and business leaders, including Old Mill Developer Bill Smith. Two city councilors, Oran Teater and Jim Clinton, an unlikely pair if there ever was one, voted against the plan to move ahead with the surface water re-vamp, saying the city council needed to take more time to study the questions raised by critics, including how several city-commissioned studies have produced vastly different cost estimates. Later this month, the OSU-Cascades campus will host a surface water forum that will further explore the issues surrounding the surface water project. The controversy underscores the friction surrounding all questions of future water use and supply in the basin where municipalities, agricultural interests and conservationists often publicly endorse mutual benefit and compromise, but privately look after their best interests.
In the case of Bend’s surface water project, one of the foremost criticisms leveled is that the city has failed to account for the economic benefit of returning some or all of the Bridge Creek stream flow to the watershed. Depending on the time of year, this could range from about five to 10 million gallons per day. That’s a significant amount of water in a basin where state and federal agencies and conservation groups like the Deschutes Water Conservancy and the Upper Deschutes Watershed Council have spent millions of dollars on stream flow and habitat restoration over the past decade and a half. Just how much the city’s water right is worth and whether anyone would be willing to acquire it for stream flow restoration purposes is an open question.
“It’s a subject of some debate, but it ain’t zero,” said Bill Buchanan, a local attorney with Karnopp Petersen who has emerged as one of the city’s foremost critics on the water plan.
“Whether it’s a million or $30 million, we don’t know. But to say it’s worth zero is to say you haven’t looked at it,” said Buchanan, who entered the surface water controversy out of a personal interest rather than a professional one.
Over the past year and a half, Buchanan has collected hundreds, if not thousands, of pages of documents that he keeps in a stack of folders. He has information on stream flows, city water usage and also reams of calculations that he says contravene many of the city’s key economic assumptions about cost of converting its surface water system to a ground water system. Such a system, said Buchanan, would be cheaper and more ecologically sensible than maintaining a surface water system that requires an extensive upgrade and a new costly treatment system to meet federal drinking water standards.
In November, City Manager Eric King criticized Buchanan’s advocacy after Buchanan and others raised questions about the city’s decision to hire its surface water consultant, which by the city’s own estimate stood to make between $12 and $18 million on the surface water project, to prepare a cost comparison of the long term outlook of surface versus ground water systems. Perhaps not surprisingly, the surface water consultant, HDR engineering, found that surface water was more economically attractive. Buchanan says that HDR made several faulty assumptions that led to that finding, including vastly overestimating the cost of electricity based on future rate increases. HDR also assumed that the wells would be located in southeast Bend where there is no existing water infrastructure rather than at the city’s existing southwest Bend Outback site where there is additional capacity. King pointed out at the time that Buchanan was an attorney not an engineer.
If the city appears to be treating Buchanan more like an adversary than a concerned citizen, it’s understandable. Buchanan has tangled with the city before on a water-related issue and the scrape left a few scars on city hall. Buchanan was the attorney who represented southeast Bend developer Jan Ward in a successful lawsuit against the city after it condemned Ward’s private water system in the Mountain High neighborhood. The ensuing legal battle led to the closure of the Mountain High golf course and a successful judgment against the city of Bend for more than $10 million. Buchanan is quick to point out that the Mountain High condemnation case and the surface water project are two very different animals. However, he sees some similarities in the city’s narrowly focused approach and its unwillingness to listen to outside viewpoints.
The city eventually offered an olive branch to Buchanan and other critics by asking its newly convened infrastructure advisory committee to review the city council’s decision to proceed with the surface water upgrade. The meeting that resulted from that decision, however, was less than productive, said Buchanan. The city hired a mediator to run the session, which Buchanan said consisted of a long lecture from the city’s handpicked advisory committee with little opportunity for dialogue. City communication director Justin Finestone said the city opted to bring in the mediator to keep the meeting organized.
“From our point of view, we just wanted to make sure that it ran on time and ran smoothly,” Finestone said.
For Buchanan, the meeting confirmed that city staff and council have no interest in reconsidering their decision to invest in the surface water upgrade, a project that will bump the city of Bend water customers’ bills by as much as 45 percent in the next five years.
The unfortunate result, Buchanan said, is a missed opportunity to move to a more stable and cost-efficient groundwater-based system while undertaking a historic river flow restoration that would benefit generations to come. Buchanan points out that councilor Mark Capell keeps likening the Bridge Creek project to Drake Park, in so far as it is an investment that will benefit the community for years to come. That’s ironic, Buchanan said, because the city does have a chance to create a legacy, but it’s not in the form of water treatment plant or a new pipeline. It’s in a restored river that will run through an actual park, namely Shevlin, he said. As fate would have it, that water would eventually run around Awbrey Butte, spilling into the Deschutes River right in the area where the Bend parks district recently spent almost $3 million to acquire another new property for a regional park along the river.
“I’m anticipating that sometime in my life we’ll see Shevlin connected to Sawyer Park through a series of trails that run through an urban growth boundary… in a way that enhances Bend and having restored stream flows adds some panache to Bend that is comparable to the dedication of Drake Park,” Buchanan said.
But don’t count on the city to take the plunge.
This article appears in Jan 6-12, 2011.
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Is this the bull headed lets keep throwing good money after bad just like BAT busses?; Juniper ridge? Is there a pattern here?
Well written article Eric. A few other interesting points:
1. Of the 3 largest cities in central Oregon, the City of Bend makes the least efficient use of water at almost double the per household use of Prineville. Yay Prineville!
2. Doesn’t Avion Water service 1/3 of Bend’s households as well as other outlying areas with groundwater? Why are they able to move forward with groundwater while the City of Bend is not. Are they better businessmen? By the way, Avion water tastes much better… Yay Avion!
3. What about climate change and future reductions in snowpack. Wouldn’t groudwater be more secure in the long-run?
City of Bend is the bull in the china shop. Rather than seriously consider other alternatives, they prefer to diminish the economic benefits of healthy habitats, streamflows and recreation to the rest of central Oregon.
Unfortunately, secretive & misleading behavior appears to be par for the course these days, as city staff remain stubbornly determined to ram through pet projects on the backs of taxpaying residents and at the expense of Tumalo Creek. Regarding the assumptions used to justify the project, why even argue the details when they’ve been formulated under such an obvious conflict of interest w/HDR? The most important point is that a hydropower plant will create irresistable financial incentives to maximize their take from Bridge Creek. And this at a time when the city could be the hero for trading their Bridge Creek rights for groundwater well rights? I don’t get it.
Bend does need water to support future growth, but groundwater remains a viable option; and one that Redmond, Sisters & Avion Water Co. seem perfectly happy with. I wonder… why are city staff so single-mindedly focused on realizing their preferred outcome rather than genuinely engaging in an analysis of the alternatives? Seems like they made their choice a long time ago and are manipulating the public process to make it so.
If you ask any Engineer or water expert they will tell you that having a dual water source (surface water and ground water) makes us the envy of nearly every other water provider out there. If Avion, Redmond or Sisters had a surface water source option they would use it! Bend would become a laughing stock in utility communities if it gave up a source of water. Just ask any one the numerous Cities in California who are all groundwater and get contaminated. Their whole system shuts down!
Switching to all groundwater would actually increase our City’s environmental impacts by using a tremendous amount of power to operate the many wells that it would take to replace the surface water, which flows “free” with the wonderful use of gravity. Teh greener option is to use surface water.
The City has conducted numerous studies, with numerous consultants, dating back to 1980. The City has openly shared these reports and every one of these professional organizations has come to the same conclusion. The best option for the City is to reinvest in our existing system.
Shouldn’t we believe the professional opinion of those who do this for a living? If not, next time you get sick – go gets your mechanics opinion instead of your doctors.
@Informed Citizen: I am not an engineer, but I know that groundwater contamination in CA is due to (1) Raw sewage dumps from Sacramento; (2) Agri-chemical application in the Central Valley; and (3) un-regulated pumping. These are not issues faced here, where we have a plentiful, pure and highly regulated groundwater source.
At Monday’s forum, it was made clear that the city could garner mitigation credits by leasing its Bridge Creek rights instream, while maintaining the option to switch back if there ever was a contamination issue in the aquifer. Best of both worlds.
Regarding the city’s (apparently incompetent) studies justifying the current project – I noticed they were withheld from the public until after city council voted to approve the project. So claiming an open public process doesn’t hold water. It is time to reconsider this poorly executed coup on this City Council’s financial & environmental legacy to its citizens.