Hiking units for a new water plant

 

Our old water plant.  The new one has only started to be built, a few blocks away.

 At your workshop, City Manager and Staff went straight to hiking our already high unit rates to satisfy lenders that we can pay the debt we are about to incur.  But higher unit rates bring lower use, which staff habitually fix by hiking unit and base rates even higher. 

Lenders will be satisfied if you would return our rate system to what worked for 50 years: paying all the overhead, monthly bills that do not rise or fall with production, including debt payments, maintenance and contingency funds, with our monthly base rates, and charging one low unit rate to pay costs that rise and fall with production of cleaned water.

The time to start doing it is tonight, by voting no.

Water is not precious, it is vital. Rationing our water is killing plants, animals and people, with drought, fires and floods. Rationing water by high unit prices has returned our weather to the time before water plants were built, when cities burned and forest fires were huge.

We don’t want our city to burn.  We want it to be clean, green and beautiful, like it was in 1985, when we watered our yards because water was cheap to use.

 

11-5-2025

Published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com and shared on Facebook

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 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener           541-955-9040                rycke@gardener.com

Cities need to stay hydrated

 

            For National Drinking Water Week, our Public Works Director tells us on the City website, “Our bodies are made up of mostly water and we need to stay hydrated to stay healthy and function properly.”   The same can be said for other living things in our cities that thrive on sprinklers, life that is impoverished and dying where properties dry out over the summer, due to high unit rates imposed by our cities on our water use.  

            Water is the wealth of any ecosystem.  Watering stores water in surface soil and plants, to guard against fire.  Our animals, plants, and soils “need to stay hydrated to stay healthy and function properly.”   

            Like money, water must circulate to be abundant.  Drought is a water depression, not enough water in the air to make rain.  Sprinklers are efficient rain makers.  Half of the water they throw evaporates, which condensed into thunderheads in 1985 in Grants Pass and made nice, wet thunderstorms nearly every weekend, the first summer I lived here.  

            In 1986, we were told that we were in drought, and “Don’t water your lawns or wash your cars.”  That summer, we went 103 days without rain.  Rationing water in a drought doesn’t help it; it makes it worse, by cutting a major source of evaporation, watering of lawns and transpiration from watered plants. 

Rationing water by price has made drought chronic, because watering is the biggest and easiest use of water to cut—and the most destructive to residents’ morale and real estate.  Dry lawns die; some trees and shrubs die with no irrigation.  Residents and landlords stop looking at their yards because they are ugly.  They feel bad because they are too poor to water their property.  They feel even worse when their neighborhood burns because of uncut weeds and little or no soil moisture.

Building water plants and watering our cities with cheap, clean water, paying our water system’s monthly bills with only base rates, made our weather increasingly moister and more moderate over fifty-plus years, and kept the price of using water low, so cheap we thought of it as free, so we could use it for any beneficial use.  We need to return to pricing our water to sell it, not to ration it.  

Clean water is not just for drinking and household use.   The first man the Lord God made was a gardener, the first woman, his helper.  Gardening, which includes lawns, is perhaps water’s highest and best use.  It reaches to the heavens and makes rain.

                       

 

Speech to the Grants Pass City Council, 4-20-2022 and the Josephine County Commissioners 4-27-22

 published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com.

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 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener          541-955-9040           rycke@gardener.com

Give us a real break

 

New Water Treatment Plant site, cleaned for construction.

            Council decided to give the New Water Treatment Plant Project three million dollars of our ARPA funding for a down payment on our new water plant.  You also plan to give ratepayers a small break on our rates in return.  

At first, the City and The Daily Courier said that the City would cancel the last two years of base rate raises that are supposed to help pay the loan.  But they also said that the unit rate raises for the new plant would continue, as well as inflation and raising the separate new plant debt payment fee.  Lately, Courier articles and City staff have become less specific about which rates would be curtailed.

If you stop increasing base rates, but keep increasing unit rates, as unit rates rise, ratepayers will collectively cut back further on water use, decreasing revenue.  This will make the City raise unit and base rates to cover the overhead, the monthly cost of having a water plant, clawing back our expected $8 savings on the base rate.  Or the City might dip into the ARPA $3,000,000 to cover it, decreasing our future down payment and increasing our interest.

If you stopped the new plant unit rate raises instead of base rates, we would be paying more from base rates and no more for our use, and our rates might stabilize. 

When you passed the new plant payment fee, we were told that it would not rise by inflation and would go away when the debt was paid.

We were not told then that the fee would not cover the whole loan.  Twenty-two percent of eighty million dollars is being put on our base and unit rates, increasing by 5.28%, plus inflation, yearly for five years, will never go away, and will rise by inflation, every year until this rationing rate system is reformed.

You, our Council, can set base rates to cover all overhead: debt payments; operations; administration; maintenance; and actual inflation of plant costs.  You can lower all unit rates to one rate, paying for only unit costs, which rise and fall with our water use.  This was the way we paid for our plant and the cost of producing and delivering clean water with it, for over fifty years.  Grants Pass was watered; rates were low and stable.  To return to that rate system would be a real and permanent improvement in our health, wealth, safety, and happiness.     

Speech to the Grants Pass City Council, 12-1-2021, shared with the Josephine County Commissioners, published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com.

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 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener          541-955-9040           rycke@gardener.com

Some People Can’t See the Good

 

         

Dear Editor,

             The Daily Courier published an article 11-17-2021, “IV Water District makes plea for state help," regarding the problems caused by illegal pot growing operations disguised as hemp farms.  One of the complaints in the article is that some of these farms are buying bulk water from Cave Junction's station.  Some people just don't know a good thing when they see it.

            City bulk water is legal to buy for all uses.  Cave Junction’s bulk rates are $30/1000 gallons.  Ratepayers of Cave Junction pay a top-tier rate of $2.05/100 cubic feet, or $2.74/1000g, for water delivered to their taps by pipelines. 

Everyone who buys bulk water at $30/1000g is paying some of the overhead that city ratepayers are not paying as they cut back on irrigation and other water use to pay high unit rates.  Bulk water users keep ratepayers’ unit and base rates from climbing still higher to pay the overhead, the monthly cost of having a water system, as they keep cutting back on use. 

This is what modern city rate systems do, rationing water by price, with a base rate too low to cover the overhead and high unit rates to discourage use.  But the City thereby depends on high unit rates to cover the overhead, which leaves it always chasing the overhead.  

Businesses can’t survive this way.  But water and sewer plants can; they are natural monopolies.  But they don’t have to; the Council could set base rates to cover all overhead and stop rationing water by rates.

 

Sincerely,

 

Rycke Brown

A pond drains my yard; a willow shades it

 

            We moved to Grants Pass in 1999 and bought a house on Bridge Street in October.  The first winter, our backyard flooded with water.  In the lowest point of our backyard, I dug a small pond to capture the water and pump it out to the street.  I eventually lined it with rubber and then rocks and made a watercourse and fall on the mound of dirt from the pond, lined and covered with rock.  I put a pump in the pond and laid irrigation line to send excess water to the street and added a line to the top of the watercourse, so I could flip switches to change it from pumping out, to recirculating, and back.

          The next spring, I stuck a twisty willow twig in the ground on the other side of the mound.  It grew fast and well, to about fifty feet tall and wide in about ten years.  Its girth is now one hundred eleven inches at three feet.  For a twisty willow, it is very strong and has not lost major branches in snowstorms like some have. 

The shade from that tree covers most of our backyard near the house after one o’clock PM and allows my grandkids to play on a little swing set and swim in an above-ground pool on hot days. It is vital to our use of our backyard.

          Two years ago, I wanted to redo the pond liner and we took the rocks and liner out and reshaped it a bit.  Last winter, it refilled and stayed filled, despite the dry spring.  I decided that twenty years of water in it had compacted the soil sufficiently to leave out the liner and just replace the rocks. 

This summer, the ground within six feet of the pond on the opposite side from the willow stayed moist but still firm underfoot, and our roses within that damp zone were happier than they had ever been.  The willow apparently sucked water only from the soil and the pond on its side.  It had no die-back and dropped far fewer twigs and leaves over this summer.

On the other hand, this magnificent tree has become expensive over the years and especially this year as it sucks as much water as it needs, because of the high and rapidly rising price of city water by the unit. 

This is another reason why we should not conserve water by rationing through high unit rates.

 

Speech to the Grants Pass City Council, 11-4-2021, shared with the Josephine County Commissioners,

 published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com.

Like Ratepayers for Fair Water and Sewer Pricing on Facebook

 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener    541-955-9040    rycke@gardener.com

Asking public servants to ignore the law

Yesterday, I got a call from a person who was totally frustrated with the way the City Council doesn’t listen to her and her neighbors when asked to not allow the Sobering Center and now Foundry Village to be built in their neighborhood. She was also upset that the public were told to not speak about the very reason they were at the meeting, not wanting drunks and homeless people in their neighborhood. She was saying that they never listen, so why should she complain about our water and sewer rates?

Land use hearings always have specific criteria that one can speak to, and outside of that, they cannot rule. They give the rules in the introduction and the applicable criteria in the presentation. That you don’t like the kind of people that use a service in your neighborhood isn’t allowed in the criteria.

Last night, there was a delegation of 8-10 people with a couple of speakers who implored the City and Council to enforce the city code against camping in parks, so regular taxpayers can enjoy them. Several Councilors explained that their hands were tied by state and federal law as well as a court order to allow nightly camping in all parks but the All-Sports Park and are not allowed to evict campers for violations of code or camping rules without 72-hour notice. The city is being sued for criminalizing homelessness with camping bans.

You want the Council to listen to you? Don’t ask them to ignore the law. On the few occasions when they have listened to people who didn’t want certain people in their neighborhood, they have been overruled by the Land Use Board of Appeals (LUBA).

In the case of campers in the parks, if the City ignores the court, it will be found in contempt of court and likely lose their case. We will probably have to put up with campers in our parks until the city builds sufficient shelters to meet their need.

One Councilor keeps pointing out that little houses, small pallet shelter campgrounds and a warming center will not meet the need and not get campers out of our parks. All of them will also have restrictions on who can use such shelter beyond being peaceful and law-abiding, because they are limited and people in the neighborhood don’t want those without shelter lining up early to get in.

What can meet the need is a couple of large hostels, cheap places to shower and sleep for $5-$10 per night, one for families and one for adults only, to keep kids separated from sex offenders. Think of a building like a grocery store with a large open space where there would be hundreds of cots, 6 feet apart, surrounded by: bathrooms; showers; lockers; a dog kennels; a meeting rooms for classes; a reading/dining room; and a parking lot planted with fruits and vegetables in planting strips, all fenced for use only by its customers. No food service, and few rules: be quiet and peaceful; don’t show anyone your guns or drugs; don’t litter or make a mess around one’s bed. Violators could be temporarily or permanently trespassed or made to pick up litter for minor infractions.

When it comes to asking the Council to reform our water rates to pay all the overhead with base rates and only marginal unit costs with unit rates, they have the power to do so. There is nothing in state or federal law that requires water-rationing rates.

You can ask by email, phone calls, writing on the city Facebook page, in person when you meet them, or a 3-minute comment at City Council meetings, first and third Wednesdays at 6:00. Control your anger; don’t attack them; and speak nicely if you want to influence them. They are public servants, but they are not only your servants. Don’t expect instant action; they need a lot of people contacting them frequently to be convinced to change a rate system that has been in place for over 20 years and to buck what has been instituted in cities around the world over the last 35 years.

Join Friends of the Restwell Center to support hostels and fill out your City survey to support use of ARPA funds to build them. It’s due October 22nd. https://www.facebook.com/groups/1681019735495611

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Why Should We Save Water?

 

            I agreed with ninety-five percent of the Mayor’s Proclamation, “Imagine a day without water,” I really liked the word, “vital.”  I agreed right up to the end, where she asked us to please help the city provide clean, pressurized water by conserving it.

          How does buying less of the product the utility is selling help the utility, the ratepayers or anything in any way?  Selling water is now vital to paying its overhead.

Utilities are high-overhead businesses.  From the time our water system was built until the nineties, we paid all the overhead, the monthly expenses of the system, in monthly base rates, and only marginal unit costs in unit rates. 

No matter how much or little we used the service, the overhead was paid every month and base and unit rates stayed low and stable.  If we had a breakdown in the plant that kept it from treating any water for a month or more, the overhead and unit costs would still be paid, and our water utility would not go bankrupt.

Since sometime in the nineties, ratepayers have been charged rationing rates on water, with a lower base rate and higher unit rates.  Unit charges were most of my bill in summer of 2001.  But few people stopped watering until 2006, when rates were restructured to greatly discourage irrigation.  The base rate dropped more, and units were hiked enough to make many people stop watering, the easiest use to cut, as the Great Recession began.  Banks didn’t water their repossessed properties, either.

Two years later, Staff told the Council that the new rates were working too well.  People had conserved so much that the utility was unable to pay its overhead!  Staff asked Council to raise the base rate back to where it had been before, which would stabilize the rates. 

But use kept dropping, and both base and unit rates kept rising.  Unit rates are too high.  We’ve been chasing the overhead and cheating on maintenance ever since as rates keep rising faster than inflation. It is the easiest overhead item to cut, just like watering is for homeowners and banks.  Now our ninety-year-old water plant is slowly falling apart and we have to build a new one.

I had a live-in boyfriend.  After two years, I knew I couldn’t marry him.  After ten years, I decided to stop making the same mistake every day and gave him thirty-day notice. 

We’ve had over twenty years of water-rationing rates, fifteen years of seriously rationing rates.  When will we stop making the same mistake? 

                             

Three-minute comment to the Josephine County Commissioners and the Grants Pass City Council, 10-20-2021

 published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com

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 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener         541-955-9040                rycke@gardener.com

Water-rationing has Consequences

 

Tubbs fire, Coffey Park, Santa Rosa, before and after

            The eighties were considered a wet decade.  Water was so cheap to use that we thought of it as free.  It was the height of sprinkler irrigation. 1986 was the first year we heard two nonscientific themes all over the media: burning fossil fuels is causing global warming from too much carbon dioxide; and fresh water is a scarce and precious resource that we must conserve. 

          Change began quickly as some cities, like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, grabbed that idea and ran with it, lowering base rates and charging high unit rates for using water.  The area around those cities and to their east got dryer and hotter.

The first sign of trouble was the fires in the Hollywood hills around Christmas, as katabatic Santa Anna winds, caused by high pressure, cold, and dryness, flowed down out of the Sierra Nevada and blew every spark into brushfires with high-speed wind and high heat at lower elevations.  Seems like nobody connected the almost-yearly fires to the change in water pricing.  It being a Southern California problem, people joked about the winter fire season in Southern California.

Meanwhile, water-rationing rates were spreading across the country and around the world.  Grants Pass started them in the nineties in a small way.  But City Manager David Frasher and the City Council got serious and introduced tiered rates in 2006.  Grants Pass started getting fires from dry weeds and brush, and wildfires got closer to the city as lightning storms turned dry.

Jokes about California’s fire season stopped in 2017 when the Carr fire burned much of Redding in August, and the Tubbs fire burned huge, tight subdivisions in Santa Rosa in October.  In November 2018, the Camp fire burned most of Paradise and killed eighty-five people.  These were all katabatic-wind-driven fires.

In 2019, the West got a brief reprieve from big fires after Congress legalized hemp, which had to be watered.  In 2020, we had a rainy May and June and a cloudy July.  But after water masters made farmers stop using unpermitted water in July, temps rose to well over a hundred degrees in August. 

High heat built up a high-pressure bubble that covered the West coast from Mexico to Canada.  September 8th brought us katabatic winds from highlands under that dome, causing the biggest fire disaster of the last fifty years, as fires started in cities and burned them, all over the western half of our west-coast states.

 

Speech to the Josephine County Commissioners and the Grants Pass City Council, 10-6-2021

 published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com

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 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener                  541-955-9040                rycke@gardener.com

Council: Cheap water bought fire safety

 

Honorable Council, Mayor and Manager,

            I was looking over the water section of your website and looked at “The Value of Water” page.  Three brochures were listed and shown: “Clean Clothes;” “Clean Drinking Water;” and “Treated Wastewater.”

            You are missing at least one brochure: “Irrigation and Fire Safety.”  But your pricing of our water does not reflect this.  Your price discrimination between customers and their uses of water has irrigation and fire suppression paying the same top tier price that single-family homeowners pay, which shows that you want to suppress these uses the most.  As Staff pointed out in 2008, irrigation uses the most water and it is most easily cut from household budgets. 

Our city is showing the result in brown, often weedy yards that could burn at a spark.  Last year’s fires have people on edge; they know that Grants Pass could burn in the next katabatic wind event like that of last September. 

Grants Pass did burn, as did many cities, before it had a water treatment plant.  It was rebuilt with brick.  I am sure that they built the water plant to allow our residents to keep their property safe with pressurized water.  They priced water as cheap as possible by the unit and paid for the overhead with base rates.  There was no competition; water service is a natural local monopoly.  The City did it so people could afford to use as much as they needed for every conceivable use.  It resulted in a clean and beautiful city in the 80’s.

Green grass does not burn.  Dry grass and weeds burn hot.   Fresh, cleaned water is not scarce or precious and should not be priced as though it is.  It is abundant and vital to our health, hygiene and fire safety and should be a cheap as possible to use.  Those big storage tanks on our hills give us the pressure to use cleaned water effectively for irrigation and fire suppression, all over the city, making our cleaned river water far superior to water delivered in ditches.

We used to have only one unit price for those who paid the base rate, and it was low, as it covered only the unit costs, those that change with the amount of water produced.  All of our overhead: plant; pipes; equipment; personnel; debt and maintenance; were paid through base rates, monthly charges for monthly bills.  You could go back to that system well before September.

 

Speech to the Grants Pass City Council, 6-16-2021, published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com

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 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener    541-955-9040    rycke@gardener.com

Council: Act like Regulators

 

Honorable Council, Mayor and Manager,

            At our last meeting, I chided this Council, especially the member who wanted to nearly double our bulk water rates from $6.05/1000 gallons to $12 just to see what happens to demand.  The Council passed the increase unanimously, so you all share in that decision. 

It seems that little will happen to demand for that water, because the actual price of the water is still low compared to the cost of hauling it.  Water is, after all, not a scarce, precious resource; it is abundant and vital to families and farms in our county.  Even hauled water is a monopoly, because the cost of time and fuel exceeds any savings that might be realized by hauling water from Medford at $1.25/1000 gallons.   This explains how Cave Junction can charge $30/1000; they are just as far from us as we are from Medford.

            The Councilor who proposed this rate hike for our rural customers replied that he represents the citizens of this city.  If you truly represent and act as regulators to protect the residents of Grants Pass from the monopoly power of city utilities to run rates up to whatever the market can bear, then you would reform our water and sewer rate systems back to what we had before water rationing rates became a worldwide fad over the last 35 years. 

For over 50 years, we paid for all the overhead of our water plant, the expenses that do not rise and fall with our use of the service, in our monthly base rates.  We paid only marginal unit costs, which rise and fall with use, in our unit rates.  Sewage treatment was all base rates with no unit rates not long ago.  Unit rates for wastewater cleaning are oppressive to larger families who are often low income and multi-generational.  Overpriced water is oppressive, too.

Returning to the old rate system would pay all the expenses of our utilities at the least cost to customers every month and allow us to use all the water we want at a low price, as we did in the ‘80s and before, when our city was clean, green, and safe from fire because we put millions of gallons in the air every day of the growing season with our sprinklers and water vapor spread through the surrounding countryside for miles.

Please put utility rate reform on your agenda so we can all water our city and make it clean, green, beautiful, and safe again.

 Speech to the Grants Pass City Council, 6-2-2021, published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com

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 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener    541-955-9040    rycke@gardener.com

Newport has very interesting rates

             I have a new Facebook friend.  Her profile said that she lives in Newport, Oregon so I looked up your water and sewer rates.  These are unique in my experience in that you charge people outside the city the same as inside the city.  You have only about 10,680 people in the city, so you apparently are trying for as many customers as you can get to share the overhead.  I heard you have about 15,000 customers.  You could probably attract more if you make your minimum charges cover your overhead, lower unit rates to actual unit costs, and drop the low-income discounts.

            If Newport uses its minimum charges to cover all overhead plus unit costs within the minimums, low-income households won’t need discounts.  It isn’t base rates or monthly minimum charges that kill budgets; it’s high unit rates.  Low-income people who live many to a house can’t stay within the minimum charge or even close to it when unit rates are high.

This goes double for sewer rates, units for which are generally calculated from winter water use, which is presumed to all go down the sewer.  Three of the thirteen cities on our rate comparison chart still charge no unit rates on sewer: Portland, Oregon; Medford, Oregon; and Redding, California. 

Unit charges on sewage is a relatively new way to ration water and is particularly unfair to low-income people who live many to a house.  Your customers can’t cut the amount of waste they put down the drain, but they can cut their use of the water needed to carry their waste to the wastewater plant.  Get rid of unit rates on sewer and make water units cheap again.  The poor and middle class will be able to afford them again, and sewer pumps and pipes will be less likely to clog.  

Newport has only three water unit rates: Residential, including Single Family and Multi-Family; Commercial, which includes governments; and Single Family low income qualified, which has a 30% discount.  You have no such discount on water for Multi-Family, likely because apartment landlords pay city utilities for their residents.  Few unit rates are a good thing.  A single unit rate would be better.

Newport's unit rates are otherwise flat (no tiers) and pretty high: $4.24/1000 gallons for Residential; 4.77/1000 for Commercial; and $2.96/1000 for Single Family low income.  These are water-rationing rates, but I have yet to find a city without them.  They are remarkable in that residents have lower rates than non-residential users.

Newport doesn’t have base rates, but rather minimum charges according to service size, which are obviously not designed to cover all the overhead, at $19.61 for Single Family Residential 5/8”-3/4” and $13.73 for Single Family 5/8”-3/4” low income, which buys 4,625 gallons and 4,623 gallons respectively.  Multi-Family minimum charge starts at $37.42, which is likely what your minimum charge for 5/8”-3/4” would be if your minimums covered the overhead, as the city wants to get that covered whether an apartment is rented or not. 

            Your wastewater unit rates are also high.  They run $6.62 for Single Family and duplexes, with a minimum charge of 25.81, and $4.63/1000 for Single Family and duplexes low income, minimum $18.07.  Multi-family is $9.82/1000, minimum $29.76.  This is the same as paid by Commercial, which also has extra charges for Extra Strength waste that needs more biochemical oxygen. 

The biggest problem with water-rationing rates is that they cause rates to rise far faster than inflation.  High unit rates are designed to cut use, but low minimums or base rates depend on use to pay part of the overhead.  When they work as designed and people cut back on use to save money, rates must be raised to cover the overhead.  Raising unit rates causes lower use, so they have to be raised again, which further lowers use and rates are raised again.

This vicious pricing spiral continues until people can’t cut back any further.  Seattle may have gotten to that point with water at $15.78/1000g on their highest tier inside the city and over $18 outside it.  Everybody ends up paying more and more to use less and less water with water-rationing rates.

            In any case, high unit rates are not justified by the need to pay for water and sewer plants; they make it harder, not easier.  Their impact on household and business budgets hurts lower and middle-class households who use city water and sewer plants and every sector of our economy except water and sewer rate consultants.  They also reduce hygiene, fire safety, and the beauty and livability of our cities.

Newport may regret these rates if Oregon has another katabatic wind event like September 8, 2020 that blows wildfire right through your town.  Keeping property watered stores moisture in plants and soil and keeps deciduous trees too wet to burn.  You should be encouraging irrigation, not discouraging it.

            Coastal cities have problems with seawater infiltrating their fresh ground water.  More irrigation can fill aquifers and keep the seawater out.  Florida is probably having this problem because they are also rationing water by price and discouraging irrigation.

            I believe that Grants Pass also had minimum charges instead of base rates when I lived here for two years in the ‘80s, because I recall my utility bills being flat except in summer, when unit charges added only pennies to my bill.

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 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener        541-955-9040        rycke@gardener.com

We may not need a new water plant

 

Honorable Council, Mayor and Manager,

            I was wrong.  I apologize to the ratepayers, Copeland, and all other businesses on their property.  I was wrong to support taking any part of their property to build a new water plant before all options for fixing the old plant are exhausted.

            I was taken in for years, until last week, by Staff’s assertion that the old plant cannot be fixed because the only clear well is falling apart and we can’t fix it in the time it would take for us to run out of clean water.  But how big is a clear well?  Can we not build a new one outside the present footprint of the building and use it while we fix the old one?  Then we can have two and be able to maintain each as needed.  We can proceed to fix the rest of the failing masonry while doing seismic retrofitting and then keep it maintained.  We can certainly do it for less than $81 million. 

            At Monday’s workshop, Staff went over the history of the planning for a new water plant.  A second clear well at the old plant apparently has never been considered. 

Staff did say that they considered taking several properties next to the plant to rebuild parts of the old plant while operating it, but that it would be too complicated to have to negotiate with several landowners.  As though negotiating with the Auslands, helping them and their multiple dependent businesses relocate, and paying for all that is simple or cheap?  We have been negotiating for well over a year, and now we will have to go to trial of the need to build a new plant, with full discovery, to justify taking their property.

Staff also said that they were looking at the possibility of eventually expanding the new plant to use all of our 45-million-gallon-a-day water right.  That can also be done by expansion of the old site and plant as needed.

Staff said that, of the three water-cleaning technology options for a new plant, the conventional system that we already use is the most expensive to build but is cheapest to operate.  We already have it; we don’t need to build much more of it right now. 

Operations go on forever.  Ratepayers would thank you to keep the technology that will cost us less in the long run, in that historic building that only needs to be expanded, fixed, seismically retrofitted, and maintained to last into the next century and beyond.

 Speech to the Grants Pass City Council, 1-6-2021

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 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener      541-955-9040         rycke@gardener.com