12/31/09 - The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) public relations machine is hard at work extolling mythical progress. Reality - These folks are more than half way through the planned time to fix up the system and have very little to show for it. Maybe 10% of the real fix-up completed.

The volume of PR in both the SF Chronicle and SF Examiner by the SFPUC reached a crescendo this week. I fired off a quick letter to the editor. Not much one can say in 250 words. Something should be said to ensure some sense of reality.
http://www.sfexaminer.com/opinion/Letters-from-our-readers-Dam-rebuild-will-cost-consumers-in-the-end-80321562.html

Look for my article on Committee Nullification. Upcoming shortly. Voters don't pass legislation and expect it to morph into exactly the opposite to intended. More!!!!

News or PR by the San Francisco Examiner

Re-Entitled – Dam rebuild will restore capacity

On 12/28/09 the SF Examiner published an article: "Dam rebuild will boost capacity" Should be re-entitled "Dam rebuild will restore capacity." Calaveras Dam has historically held 97,000 acre ft. of water. It must now be relocated and completely rebuilt. Why now? Why not in 2002 when we voted on this upgrade? The problems with Calaveras have been well known for years.

The SFPUC estimates this rebuild will take from March 2011 to July 2014. Given the current slippage in SFPUC's implementation of its current capital improvement program AKA as the water supply improvement program (WSIP) a realistic completion date for rebuilding Calaveras is probably 2018. This will mean approximately 50 percent of local Hetch Hetchy storage capacity will unavailable during the interim.

The implications are very serious in that the SFPUC will not be able to meet state legislative mandates of a 2015 finish for WSIP, which is also enshrined in the July, 2009 Agreement between the peninsula customers and City.

In this Agreement, the City assured peninsula customers a 10 percent increase of their historical Hetch Hetchy deliveries. SF planers make this possible by arbitrarily cutting SF from its historical Hetch Hetchy deliveries by 10 percent. According to SFPUC plans, SF will replace this pristine Hetch Hetchy water with augmented supplies, which will be five to six times more costly than current Hetch Hetchy water, and qualitatively inferior. The blending alone will hike SF water costs by 33 percent. The SFPUC based the new Agreement on a statistical anomaly as to average Hetch Hetchy system deliveries, not the real long-term actual average deliveries. SF consumes approximately 100 gallons per day (GPD) per person while the average peninsula county consumes 140 gpd per person. Perplexing?

Two final points - with Calaveras out of commission there will be an increasing demand for Tuolumne River water. This is a very hard working river that marginally has little if any excess supplies. The 1913 Raker Act forbids SF from selling water or power generated from its grantee on the Tuolumne River to private utilities. Without Calaveras reservoir capacity it is difficult to see how investor owned utilities, currently receiving local supplies from the SFPUC, will be supplied with water during this outage period with local reservoir capacity approximately halved.

Brian Browne
415-956-4628
RBOC member