Our thanks to the readers who waded through all this information and distilled it for us and to the Insider Hydrology Institute, which vetted the piece.
CLAREMONT LOGIC
As we noted last week, the Claremont City Council Tuesday night voted 5-0 to dedicate $25,000 to a League of Women Voters (LWV) project dedicated to buying the area around Thompson Creek Dam and turning it into a park with cienegas (or marshlands or fens or bogs or fever swamps), a wooded area, and about 50-60 acres of endangered Riversidean Alluvial Fan Sage Scrub (RAFSS).
The LWV has applied for a $7.6 million grant through the San Gabriel and Lower Los Angeles Rivers and Mountains Conservancy, a state agency that takes state bond money and distributes it to local projects throughout land drained by the San Gabriel River - a very wide area that runs from the mountains to the sea and which encompasses large sections of Los Angeles and Orange Counties.
Our previous post on the subject included the observation that the there was some hypocrisy implicit in the LWV grant application. For instance, the argument that the project is needed because it saves 50-60 acres of endangered RAFSS is specious given the fact that the city of Claremont is also applying for another grant of $1.5 million through the same Conservancy for the Padua Sports Park. That project will destroy 10 acres of the same, precious RAFSS habitat.
So, if the habitat is so rare that we should spend $7.6 million to save it, why are we also asking for $1.5 million to bulldoze it? And why are we asking a land conservancy for that money? The answer is that it depends on a good deal of Claremont logic: The habitat is good when we want it to be and bad when we don't want it.
The irony is you have the same hypocrites on the City Council, on city commissions, and in the LWV pushing both projects. Leave it to City Councilmember Sam Pedroza (AKA, WJM's Ted Baxter) to sum it up perfectly as he did in his rush to show his support for the LWV project: "This is a no-brainer."
We couldn't agree more.
(To be fair, the city's evidence for removing the stuff on the sports park site was equally stupid: They hired a so-called "biostitute" with a Internet-ordered Ph.D in theology to write the biology report that supported their park project.)
THE BASELINE BARRIER WELLS WILL SAVE US!
It's truly remarkable how poorly conceived the LWV project is. One the other concerns we raised previously was the question of where does all the water they intend to spread around the site go? The area sits above the Canyon Water Basin, an underground aquifer that will take the water and carry it to lower, downslope areas. Add water and away it goes. So, how do you keep the water in the project area without having to constantly add more. How do you do that in dry season when the creeks dry up?
Also, what do you do about the water that seeps away? Cienegas are wet places where the area's geology is such that water pools underground and comes to the Earth's surface, sometimes via artesian wells. One such place called the Martin Cienega existed around 6th and Harrison in the Claremont Village near Pilgrim Place until pumping of the groundwater lowered the water table so much that the cienega ceased to exist.
Presumably, the geology remains in place, so if groundwater were to rise high enough, water would once again spout forth in the Claremont Village and in a number of other areas of town. Claremont's Human Services Department would no doubt put a happy spin on them and call them "Water Play Features."
In any case, in order to quell any questions about downslope artesian wells, the LWV grant application refers to a 2006 study by a consulting company called CDM Engineering. The study was commissioned by Three Valleys Municipal Water District and is titled "Mitigation Alternatives to Rising Groundwater Study." It turns out that Three Valleys needed the study because they want to increase the amount of water spread on the San Antonio Spreading Grounds below the San Antonio Dam.
Of course, the LWV grant writers likely did not bother to read the study all that carefully and certainly didn't cite any portions of it in their application. Nor did they attach it to the grant application. For the sake of their project, it's a good thing they didn't. What the CDM study found was that water springing up in Pilgrim Place need not be a concern, provided we're willing to spend $24.4 million to build the "Base Line Barrier Wells" protection system.
That's right - $24.4 million.
The barriers wells are just what the name implies: a network of six wells drilled along Base Line Rd. and connected by many thousands of feet of underground pipes that would act as a sort of wall to block groundwater from turning 6th and Harrison back into a swampy bog.
And there's more! Three more wells in Mallows, Larkin, and Memorial Parks to protect Pilgrim Place.
And how will we pay for this all? To begin with, the study says, $12 million in bonded indebtedness. And then another $12 million and change in - you guessed it - more grants! Federal and regional grants that flow as easily as aquifer water into Marilee Scaff's Pilgrim Place home.
MOVE OVER FLORIDA
We couldn't help but think about an article we read recently in the New York Times. The article discussed the state of Florida's buyout of United States Sugar and Florida's takeover of 187,000 acres of land south of Lake Okeechobee in the Everglades Agricultural Area.The purchase will allow Florida to restore a large swath of Everglades land without having to install much of the huge network of pumps and piping that a year 2000 plan to maintain water flow had called for. Instead, the state will be able to rely on the natural water flow, the Times article said:
The impact on the Everglades could be substantial. The natural flow of water would be restored, and the expanse of about 292 square miles would add about a million acre-feet of water storage. That amount of water — enough to fill about 500,000 Olympic size swimming pools — could soak the southern Everglades during the dry season, protecting wildlife, preventing fires, and allowing for a redrawing of the $8 billion Everglades restoration plan approved in 2000.
It would essentially remove some of the proposed plumbing. Many of the complicated wells and pumps the plan relied on might never have to be built, water officials said, because the water could move naturally down the gradually sloping land.
Kenneth G. Ammon, deputy executive director of the South Florida Water Management District, which would assume control of the land, said it would be a “managed” flow-way, with reservoirs and other engineered mechanisms to control water flow. David G. Guest, a lawyer for Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund, joked that he might have to go to blows to keep the area all natural.
Whereas Florida is able to utilize nature to its advantage in moving and storing water and restoring wetlands, the city of Claremont and its agents, Marilee Scaff and the League of Women Voters, want to spend fistsful of money to create a cienega where none existed historically. As a result, all the water they pour into the ground will seep downslope to the heart of the Claremont Village, requiring the construction of a system of wells and pipes to catch that water before it can burst up out of the ground.
Instead of using the natural water flow and recreating a cienega somewhere they occurred in the past (College Park or one of the parks near 6th & Harrison), they want to spend a total of $32 million (before financing is figured in) to do what the state of Florida is taking pains to try to avoid: the creation of a costly, convoluted, over-engineered, Rube Goldberg system of wells, pumps, and pipes to mitigate a self-created problem. And the LWV can't even be honest with us about the true cost of the project!
Who dreams these things up, the witless LWV or the construction companies and consultants who'll be on the receiving end of all those millions?
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