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| Their Voice & Your Voice |
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| Written by PI Web | |
| Friday, 18 April 2008 | |
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'An open letter to supervisors' and 'Supervisors failed people' Their VOICE An open letter to supervisors The West Park proposal for the Crows Landing Air Facility is the wrong project at the wrong time in the wrong place. We say this not only to express our objections to the project’s overall size and the fact that it would pave over almost 4,000 acres of the finest farmland in the world, but more particularly to point out just how inadequate and uninformed the water supply planning is for this project. Water has become a key issue in the viability of any new development in California, a fact now recognized by state law. This could not be truer than for a development on the West Side of Stanislaus County and south of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. After struggling for years to secure a viable water supply for the Diablo Grande project, one would think that the county would have required much greater diligence in this regard at this early stage than what appears in the West Park Water System Master Plan. An assessment of the adequacy and reliability of the project’s water supply would seem to be at least as important to the decision making, if not more so, as an analysis of the feasibility of short-haul rail. Intended to provide “information required for the client and county to better assess the feasibility of the planned development,” the plan identifies the project’s build-out annual water demand at between 8,000 acre-feet and 16,000 acre-feet, along with the two obvious alternative sources of water supply traditionally available to meet this demand — surface water and groundwater. Needless to say, that is a lot of water that needs to be reliably available. What the plan fails to recognize are the very serious, ongoing and undoubtedly long-term water supply constraints faced by the West Side and the state. Local groundwater on the West Side is marginal in both quantity and quality, and extractions sufficient to meet project demands would harm adjacent wells, including those that now supply Patterson and Newman. The water plan acknowledges this, and in addition to recognizing the need for “additional studies to confirm the sustainability of groundwater resources,” it states that that the use of groundwater would likely require the development of groundwater recharge basins using a supply of clean surface water. You should know that most of the surface water available on the West Side in the project area is by way of contracts with the state and federal governments. However, a combination of natural and institutional factors, including a recent court decision requiring new protections for the endangered Delta smelt, have made severe reductions in contract water deliveries the norm and now include the very real possibility of no water deliveries during drought periods. But more than just a lack of supply as a result of local hydrology, quantities are limited by the large water project’s inability to convey available supplies through the environmentally sensitive Delta. The West Park developer has stated that one of the project’s main sources of surface water would be through the purchase of water rights from farmers in the northern part of the state. This course of action would not only increase the loss of prime farm ground in another part of the state, it fails to recognize that the capacity of the project pumps needed to convey such a supply are already committed to meeting existing south-of the-Delta water supply obligations. In other words, buying the water is one issue, but getting it delivered to the project area is quite another. Any possible solution to this set of water supply problems on the West Side is tied to long-term statewide water supply planning and infrastructure financing and is not likely to result in more adequate or reliable water supplies for many years to come, if at all. Other complications associated with the use of surface water conveyed by the state and federal projects include obtaining permits to divert, convey and use water in a different area of the state and addressing the very real possibility of long-term canal outages or other failures of the delivery systems. In short, at this time, there is no real water in the plan, only speculation and calls for further investigations. It is certainly premature, if not in fact ill-advised, for the county to proceed with such a large-scale, water-dependent project as is proposed by West Park in an area of the county that has no water supply that can be delivered to it for the foreseeable future. - West Side farmers Your VOICE Supervisors failed people EDITOR, West Park developer Gerry Kamilos has done his job. The problem is those who were elected to do the will of the people are instead doing the will of the developer. Can’t fault Mr. Kamilos for the Stanislaus County board of supervisors’ shortcomings. Mr. Kamilos has an ambitious vision. Unfortunately, it doesn’t coincide with those who live in the project area or their way of life. The West Side residents and elected officials have been clear about the reuse of the base for more than seven years. Our vision was 1,527 acres. The supervisors chose a plan for 4,800 acres. Clearly, Mr. Kamilos did his job well! The money spent on the county’s Crows Landing Air Facility Steering Committee was a waste of taxpayer dollars, as a path was already chosen before the county put out the Request for Proposal for a master developer. Mr. Kamilos was already fast at work doing his job. Can’t fault a guy for trying, especially when he’s succeeding. But we can fault our elected officials who think it’s all right to ignore — and fail to represent — us in the manner in which we are entitled, which is basically not doing the job as they promised. It was wrong to spend our money on a process that they themselves didn’t take seriously. It was wrong to proceed with a plan that was outside the scope of the RFP and wrong to disregard the will of the people. We deserve our votes to count, not count against us. Annette Smith, Patterson City Councilwoman
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