Best known for feeding "Blue Hole" and the Sugar Hollow Reservoir, the Moormans is a mountain river whose compact, bowl-shaped watershed in the Shenandoah Park makes it prone to drought and deluge.
September 25, 2010: While Sugar Hollow residents were getting the "water cannon" they wanted, both forks of the Moormans, including the north shown here, were bone dry.
photo by Kevin Lynch
Just when you thought it was safe to save the reservoir, the war against dredging it has reached flood stage. Waterworks director Tom Frederick– perhaps rattled by a yank of his permit to build a new reservoir, and a growing desire, amid upcoming City Council elections, to muster political support– has been spinning the latest data.
What can't be spun is that rates have essentially tripled since 1999. And yet a small cadre of environmentalists– most enmeshed in government, each with links to the other, and one actually leading a Frederick-friendly news agency– persists in pushing reservoir replacement even though it would benefit a bottled-water company at the expense of local households, destroy 180 acres of mature hardwood forest, and require an electricity-dependent pipeline moving more water than all but two local rivers.
How did such a crucial community decision fall into the hands of special interests? The old saying "Follow the money" is apt, because if there's one thing the Rivanna Water & Sewer Authority has, it's money. Money for consultants. Money for activists. Money to spend designing things that don't get built.
What the Authority also has is debt, $54 million today. And it's embarking on a five-year, $173-million capital improvement plan that doesn't even account for the pipeline, the most expensive piece of the plan.
Money to burn
The controversy began about four years ago when the Authority allowed a multi-national engineering firm, Gannett Fleming, hired to oversee dredging, to insist that a dam would be superior– and then to bid for the $3 million contract to engineer it.
"Is Gannett Fleming precluded from proposing on the engineering?" asked a competing dam bidder back in 2007. "If not, how does one deal with a potential conflict of interest?"
The questioner was Pittsburgh-based engineer Paul Rizzo, who, along with the Charlottesville office of Schnabel Engineering, lost out on that deal. But like Schnabel, Rizzo's day would come.
A year later, with its vision for a concrete dam blowing the $143 million budget, Gannett Fleming was out, and Rizzo and Schnabel were back. Schnabel got over a million dollars to design an earthen dam, and although his correspondence (which a reporter uncovered with a Freedom of Information request) indicates that Rizzo never received an answer to his conflict question, he got something better: an open-ended contract of his own.
Rizzo was part of a three-man panel invited for occasional Charlottesville visits to render opinions on competing plans, and, at the expense of Charlottesville water users, enjoy expensive meals at the Ivy Inn and Hamiltons' restaurants. Not counting the meals, he has earned over $40,000.
When the Authority allows 45 years to pass without dredging its main reservoir, engineers aren't the only ones who profit. Two attorneys– Bill Ellis, who runs his own firm in Richmond, and Kurt Krueger of McGuire Woods– earn the bulk of the legal fees with the latter earning a fee of over $500 per hour. In just the most recent month, the RWSA paid $13,600 in legal bills. (And for the record, Frederick says there was never a hiring conflict because Krueger says so.)
Despite all the spending, the RWSA remains momentarily rich, with liquid assets of over $38 million. That's a $7 million spike in the cash stash over the previous year and a clear windfall from hiking rates before building infrastructure.
The Authority holds more money than the Charlottesville city government's General Fund. And yet at a 2008 meeting, Authority director Frederick took a moment to complain that pesky public questions were vexing his staff and threatening his war chest, having cost the Authority at least $10,000. Around the same time, Frederick invited the lead Gannett Fleming engineer back to give his usual PowerPoint presentation portraying dredging as messy, smelly, and hopelessly expensive. Frederick cut him a check for $12,000.
Like so many things, the history of dredging in Albemarle goes back to Thomas Jefferson. He took over his father's gristmill at Shadwell in 1765 and quickly realized that rather than rolling tobacco down to boats docked in Scottsville, local planters could speed their wares to Richmond by clearing obstructions from the Rivanna River. So by that fall, the 23-year-old Jefferson had won permission from the General Assembly, had privately raised the funds, and oversaw the enterprise. How proud was Jefferson of his dredging?
"When he drew up a list of constructive public services in which he had been useful," writes biographer Willard Sterne Randall, "he listed first his youthful Rivanna project and second his authorship of the Declaration of Independence."
Alas, Albemarle's first major dredging turned out to be its last. The reason, if the RWSA's advisors are to be believed: it's just too expensive.
During the run-up to the dam decision, Gannett Fleming slammed a previous consultant's estimate as too expensive at $40 million. By December of that year, Gannett Fleming came up with its own dredging estimate of $142 million.
"We were told it was too expensive at $40 million, and we were told it was too expensive at $142 million," says former Charlottesville Planning Commissioner Betty Mooney, who attended many of the water meetings.
As myriad private contractors would later assert, the sediment from the bottom of the lake has value as sand and topsoil, which can sell for 10 times its extraction price. But not to Gannett Fleming. The firm told Charlottesville that they'd probably need to hire a veritable convoy of dump trucks to haul the stuff, like so much toxic waste, to a landfill.
In 2007, something even odder happened. At a City Council meeting that November, someone questioned the $142 million dredging estimate. Frederick piped up that his experts had made a study showing it might cost as much as a quarter billion dollars. A few months later, the Hook asked Frederick for a copy. At first, Frederick said he couldn't find it. Several weeks later (and after the legal limit for producing public documents), Frederick passed along a six-page memo. Penned by Gannett Fleming's lead engineer and dated March 2008, it did portray a scenario under which dredging the Rivanna Reservoir might really cost $223 million.
A month later, a Belgian firm won a contract to dredge the Pacific entrance of the Panama Canal– for $46 million less.
Fits and starts
Gannett Fleming's not the only firm to benefit from the RWSA's largesse. By mid-November 2000, a Richmond firm called Vanasse Hangen Brustlin, VHB, had rung up over $846,000 in bills to secure environmental permits for a planned Buck Mountain Reservoir. But the local waterworks, deciding the effort was futile, never actually applied for any permits, and redirected the firm in 2002 to begin investigating other ways to augment water supply. VHB rang up another $140,000 in billings as it concluded that a four-foot bladder atop the Rivanna dam– combined with conservation, dredging, and recreational lake draw-downs– would slake citizens' thirst despite any drought Mother Nature could offer over the next 50 years.
But two years later, none of its recommendations had been enacted. That's when Gannett Fleming stepped in to malign dredging and suggest that VHB had botched the bladder numbers by overestimating the gains; so the now Frederick-led Authority ousted VHB from the payroll. Or did it?
As it turned out, VHB came back to the trough– as a subcontractor to Gannett Fleming when the latter firm was hired for part of what eventually became about $3.8 million in billings. In October 2007, the waterworks chose VHB– without VHB even having to state a price– as its preferred environmental "mitigation consultant" and negotiated a fee of $446,000.
"It appears to me that VHB got bought off," says former City Councilor Kevin Lynch. "They got used as the fall guys, but then they were promptly rehired on the team." The VHB project manager declined comment.
Free-wheeling or free-market?
It's no secret who brought the $143 million dam-pipeline plan to Charlottesville: it was the Nature Conservancy. A non-profit whose claim to fame is a hard-science approach to ecology, the Conservancy– rather than pestering lawmakers like some other eco-organizations– supposedly reaches into the pockets of donors to buy threatened land.
Claims of this can-do approach endeared the Conservancy to businesspeople grown jaded by watching government react with legislation when louder organizations got their way. As it turns out, however, the Conservancy is quite skilled at reaching into pockets– often the pockets of taxpayers.
The Conservancy pushed what may turn out to be one of the largest transfers of wealth in Virginia history, and perhaps in American history, when the group lobbied state lawmakers to rewrite land laws to favor land preservation. In 1999, the Conservancy declared victory in four states, including Virginia, with something called conservation tax credits. Heralded by the original law's Virginia sponsor, Creigh Deeds, as a way to save family farms, the credits pay large landowners not to develop their acres.
However, instead of rewarding struggling family farms, sprawling farmettes and horse farms for the upper crust in Fauquier and Albemarle have become the prime beneficiaries. And yet Virginia's low state tax rate originally meant that even wealthy landowners were initially unable to take full advantage– particularly when millions of credits might flow from a single conservation easement. So the Conservancy lobbied to permit landowners to sell the credits. That change unleashed a torrent that has cost Virginia taxpayers over a billion dollars, including $108 million just last year.
When an inner-city mom sells her food stamps for cash on a street corner, it's welfare fraud. When a land baron sells his tax credits to a broker, it's free enterprise.
The Conservancy's ability to earn fees and flip land has fueled its growth and endeared it to the financial world, including a remarkable cross-over with Goldman Sachs. Not only do the current Conservancy president and three members of the board hail from stints at Goldman Sachs, past Conservancy chair Henry Paulson was Goldman Sachs CEO under whom a product called CDOs brought billions into company coffers.
Don't recall CDOs? They're "collateralized debt obligations," the things that collapsed in the summer of 2008 and threatened global turmoil. Perhaps appropriately, it was Paulson, then serving as U.S. Treasury Secretary, who bailed out Goldman Sachs and other private businesses with over $700 billion in taxpayer funds.
In Central Virginia, the Conservancy remains a major player in the conservation tax credit scheme, which, despite carrying a controversial cloak of secrecy, blew up earlier this year when someone leaked documents revealing that a potentially fraudulent appraisal underpinned the taxpayer bailout of a housing development called Biscuit Run.
If the Conservancy steered clear of Biscuit Run, its dam has raised eyebrows– particularly over the fervent lobbying by Conservancy officials. A lot is riding on their success.
Mr. Bills pays the bills
In 2005, Nestlé Waters, the company that bottles such beverages as Poland Spring and Perrier, revealed that it was giving the Conservancy's Charlottesville office $1 million to make the Rivanna River the centerpiece of a pilot program to provide sufficient water for creatures both aquatic and human.
"The Nature Conservancy has a vested interest in this plan," says former City Councilor Rob Schilling, pointing out the millions in additional grants, donations, and consulting fees that may flow to the Conservancy if it succeeds in getting this national model constructed.
Just as it's hard to recall any mention of Nestlé in what's been called the Community Water Supply Plan, it's hard to discuss the Plan without the presence of Conservancy advocates. Just last week, former U.S. Senate and Congressional staffer and former Conservancy lobbyist Ridge Schuyler appeared in City Council chambers to excoriate dredging as "disgraceful" and claim that underprivileged children would suffer if Council continues to discuss the issue. Two days later in Riverview Park, Conservancy executive Bill Kittrell held a press conference to bash dredging and tout the corporate-assisted plan.
Kittrell may not have won mainstream acceptance, but he did win a front-page story in the Daily Progress.
Ever since the Progress' money-losing parent company, Media General, partnered two years ago with growth-focused news agency Charlottesville Tomorrow, readers of the daily have gotten much of their news not from the youthful reporters the Progress typically hires, but from a middle-aged veteran of County government who now reports to a deep-pocketed Conservancy donor named Michael Bills. That reporter is former School Board member Brian Wheeler, and the potential conflict doesn't sit well with Schilling.
A Republican and a WINA radio talk-show host, Schilling is one of the five City Councilors who in 2006 unanimously voted to seek the dam permits, but like a majority of those Councilors, he has since renounced his vote, saying he was duped by faulty information. Reading Wheeler's July 20 top-of-the-fold story honoring Kittrell and company– "Report, groups agree: new estimates appear to back plan for dam"– gave Schilling a rude awakening.
"I almost gagged on my cornflakes," Schilling told listeners. "I can't believe no one's talking about this."
Who is Michael Bills? To investors, each of whom must put up a minimum of $3 million, he's a successful hedge fund manager with an office on the Downtown Mall. And like former Treasury Secretary Paulson, he has worked at Goldman Sachs. To the folks at the Virginia Nature Conservancy, he's the chairman of the board.
Schilling's anger starts with the fact that as founder and funder of the Charlottesville Tomorrow news service, Bills signs Wheeler's paycheck. Further rankling Schilling is that Conservancy employee Kittrell has found his way onto a government board setting water policy.
"What on earth is Albemarle County doing seating people on the board who are serving the Nature Conservancy?" asks Schilling. "Does that smell bad to you? Because it smells horrible to me."
It smells fine to the person who placed Kittrell on the Albemarle County Service Authority.
"I nominated him, and the board approved him," says Ann Mallek, chair of the Albemarle Board of Supervisors. "The reason I nominated him was because of the ecological balance issue. We need to make sure we have perspectives all over the place."
As for any question of Kittrell's lobbying, Mallek notes, "He hasn't lobbied me at all."
It's all about the Moormans
To understand how the dam plan emerged, it's important to start with the Moormans River, which begins in the hollows of Shenandoah National Park and includes the spectacular "Blue Hole" swimming area. The river's two forks come together in a reservoir which in turn feeds an old iron pipe that supplies Charlottesville with what the state health department calls the area's purest drinking water. Alas, one of the goals of the new dam is decommissioning the pipeline. The official reason is that the pipe may be approaching the end of its service life, and nearby property owners blame it for sucking the life out of the Moormans.
Conservancy lawyer Schuyler began touting the dam-pipeline concept back in 2005. The iron pipe is at least 80 years old, and it leads to the existing Ragged Mountain reservoir, which needs a new spillway. Why not discard them both?
Under the Conservancy plan, the Rivanna River would become the source of virtually all the area's water supply as it would be tapped with a new 36-inch pipeline to carry water to the mammoth new reservoir in the Ragged Mountain Natural Area. The idea has undeniable appeal. Not only does it replace aging infrastructure, it bolsters flows to the Moormans, and it attempts to tap the Rivanna primarily during times of high flow when Albemarle's largest river can afford to give up a few gallons.
Besides the cost and environmental destruction the plan entails, there are unnatural things about the Moormans. Below the dam, it's stocked every season with rainbow trout by a private group called Trout Unlimited. While prized as a sport fish by fly-reel aficionados, rainbows are not native to this river or anywhere else on the East Coast.
The Conservancy's Kittrell has appeared in City Council chambers to claim that the dam-centric plan "mimics" natural river flows. However, in a public presentation last year, Conservancy water planner Brian Richter conceded that the dam plan will actually create unnaturally high flows in the Moormans River during summer months. That might explain why those who live around the Moormans have been such vocal supporters.
But how to explain support from such groups as the Chamber of Commerce, or from ostensibly conservative politicians such as the two Republicans on the Board of Supervisors who took office on a promise of "zero-based" budgeting?
"I think the plan that is on the table provides the most water for the community at the lowest cost," says independent Supervisor Dennis Rooker. "If it actually becomes a 60-year plan, I don't view that as a bad thing."
However, Kendra Hamilton, one of those dam-vote regretting City Councilors, has called the scheme a "pig in a poke" and issued an open letter.
"The entire focus," wrote Hamilton, "is on building an enormous dam and pipeline and protecting the Moormans River– a lovely resource, but one that primarily benefits well-heeled private property owners and those with the transportation and the means to purchase a trout-fishing license."
Rate shocks and conservation
Back in 1999, a benchmark three years before the century's major drought, the RWSA was charging enough to cover its costs and putting something aside for a rainy day– well, hopefully, for a non-rainy day. At that time, the typical household's water/sewer cost to use 5,000 gallons a month was $26.70 in the county, $23.18 in the city. Today, the figures top $65 and $67, a 290 percent city increase.
The year 2002 changed everything. That was the summer when the skies failed to open, the summer of the "drought of record," according to the RWSA, which vowed to store more water and announced a $13 million-plan for dredging and augmenting the main reservoir.
But then something unexpected happened. Even after rainfall resumed, conservation continued. At first, leaders figured it was a momentary blip. Surely, they thought, citizens will go back to their water-hogging ways.
But long after the drastic measures (paper plates and "if-it's-yellow-let-it-mellow") were flushed away, long-term conservation has taken hold, and nobody's sure why. Low-flow toilets? Rain barrels? Wiser tooth-brushing? Or did relentless price hikes simply encourage water thrift? Whatever the cause, figures compiled by the Hook show that urban water use has gone down and stayed down.
In 2006, Frederick submitted to regulators his case for building the dam-and-pipeline and claimed the area would be in a water deficit within two years. He included a graph showing a steeply climbing demand line and a steeply dropping supply line. But at a dredging forum in 2008, the year the two lines were supposed to cross, former City Councilor Kevin Lynch had already noticed that Frederick's frightening figures were being contradicted by actual human practice.
"How many years of conservation do we need to see," Lynch asked, "before we can call that a trend?"
More remarkable is that consumption fell amid rising population and water hookups. Back in 1999, there were 25,596 local accounts buying over four billion gallons of water. By the end of fiscal 2010, there were 30,788 accounts, a 20 percent increase. And yet all these people were buying just 3.1 billion gallons of water, a nearly 20 percent decrease.
"To many, conservation means sacrifice, as in flushing the toilet once a day and two-minute showers," Dan Bieker recently wrote in a letter to the Progress. "Not so at all– true conservation means the incorporation of revolutionary water-saving technologies, many of which are available now."
An ornithology professor at Piedmont Virginia Community College, Bieker has volunteered his time for the Nature Conservancy and– "except on this issue where I think they're wrong"– Bieker says he holds great respect for the group. However, says Bieker, "Their focus should be more on conservation."
A "major modification"
In their state permit and in an effort to show better stewardship of frogs and fish, local waterworks director Frederick and the Conservancy have converted voluntary daily releases from all the local reservoirs into legal requirements. Frederick learned so much about "streamflows" that he'd eventually use them to undercut positive claims for dredging.
One can't tell if Frederick was wearing a straight face when he issued his last release to Charlottesville Tomorrow. It's just a little chart that compares dredging to damming, but it claims that repeated dredging only provides 10.3 million gallons of water a day. Currently, the undredged urban water system provides nearly 16 million gallons, or a little over 13 million if the streamflows are observed.
How can dredging diminish the system? It actually doesn't, and Frederick tells the Hook that the numbers should not be compared to the existing system. But other reporters have already done so with no obvious objection.
About three weeks earlier, Frederick found himself saddled with a particularly unwelcome set of data. He had just taken delivery of a report that– even though he commissioned it, and even though it rests on the questionable assumption that the local population will nearly double in 50 years– severely undercuts his quest for the new reservoir with an updated consumption forecast that's much lower than previously reported.
“This report confirms the community's need to expand the Ragged Mountain Reservoir,” Frederick said in a prepared statement. Indeed, it was prepared– as if for a more pessimistic report, one that didn't materialize.
In fact, Frederick didn't even want the so-called AECOM report to materialize this way. When issuing the call for proposals back in February, he initially advertised for just a 30-year planning horizon, despite his own long-time insistence– above and beyond state law– on a 50-year water plan. In a pre-study email to this reporter, Frederick defended the pursuit of a limited horizon as an effort to "keep this cost as low as possible."
It's obvious what Frederick may find unpleasant in the new report: it shows that in the year 2055, when urban users were formerly predicted to be drawing 18.7 million gallons per day, they'll need just 16.3 million. That means that the leading dredge-centric alternate plan– offering 16.9 million– could handle demand. And that's a pretty big finger in Frederick's dike.
On the July morning he released the report, Frederick stood before the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors and congratulated them for their wisdom in approving his dam's local permits. Unfortunately for Frederick, just a week earlier, state regulators had pulled their permit.
On June 28, the Department of Environmental Quality decreed that Frederick needs to supply 12 things as part of what's called a "major modification." (Ironically, when pro-dam groups like Charlottesville Tomorrow were trumpeting the DEQ's alleged dismissal of the dredge-centric alternative last year, a "major modification" was one of the leading fears.)
Now that his more fiscally conservative dredge-centric water plan appears to reach the bar of supplying 50 years' worth of water, Charlottesville Mayor Davis Norris says he feels vindicated.
"It's incumbent on local officials," says Norris, "to adjust their plans."
Friends feeding friends?
The Roman Polanski movie Chinatown paints a sordid picture of a water diversion for future private benefit in Southern California. In Central Virginia, however, the benefits from following the Conservancy's lead have already begun.
"There really are only two questions that should govern the final decision on this plan," said Charlottesville Democratic Party chair and frequent dam lobbyist Jim Nix when framing the issue for City Council last August. "Does it provide adequate water for this community for the next 50 years, and does it do so with minimal adverse environmental impact?"
Nix is a volunteer for the Nature Conservancy, and, like the dam's opponents, he doesn't seem to have profited from conservation tax credits. However, many of this debate's major players have.
They include Supervisor Mallek, Conservancy chair Bills, all three publicly identified members of the "Friends of the Moormans" (including ever-present John Martin), Southern Environmental Law Center boss Rick Middleton, and Piedmont Environmental Council chair Tony Vanderwarker.
One of the frequent dam-endorsing commenters to City Council is Leslie Middleton, who heads a recently founded group called the Rivanna Basin Commission whose start-up money, $392,000, was raised by the Conservancy.
How about the three players that joined the Conservancy at the recent press conference? There was the Piedmont Environmental Council. Headquartered in the Fauquier County town of Warrenton, the Council recently was certified to accept tax credit easements. Also present was the League of Women Voters, which let veterinarian Liz Palmer do its talking. (A reporter's request for the League's donor list was not answered; and unlike public officials, water lobbyists don't have to disclose their donors.)
Then there's Robbi Savage. She formerly held a concurrent pair of six-figure positions at the helm of non-profit water organizations in Washington, but after a 2005 audit determined that one of them had funneled federal clean-water grant money into the coffers of a pork industry lobbying group, she moved to Stanardsville. The Environmental Protection Agency's audit of Savage's time atop America's Clean Water Foundation led to closure of that organization (and eventually torpedoed the candidacy of a UVA Law professor who'd been on its board and tapped for a high EPA post in the Obama administration).
Savage attributes her advocacy of the dam-pipeline plan, as the director of the donation-funded Rivanna Conservation Society, solely to the project's merits, not to any appreciation for the $5,000 grant her group recently received from the RWSA. (The grant assisted "The Year of the River," a one-time special event.)
In a recent telephone interview, Michael Bills denied that Charlottesville Tomorrow was under his sway and told a reporter that passage of the dam plan is "not a priority for the Conservancy." That was about a week before Conservancy employee Kittrell's press conference.
Back in 2008, a reporter uncovered an email showing that someone was quietly trying to strong-arm the Charlottesville-Albemarle Airport away from buying the dredged sediment. Although the ever-growing Airport had a history of spending millions to truck in dirt, and despite its location almost immediately adjacent to the silty reservoir, a member of the local Airport commission had button-holed the Airport director to tell her it was "not appropriate" to include the Airport in any dredging discussion.
Who was the person trying to derail the chance to save the Airport cash and make dredging profitable? It was Gregory Edwards, a full-time fundraiser for the Nature Conservancy.
"When you tear back the curtain," says retired engineer Richard Lloyd, "you find one very selfish group."
Lloyd finds himself aghast at the undisclosed underpinnings of the dam plan and fearful that money has corrupted the debate. Like a group consisting mostly of former officials (including Lynch and Mooney) called Citizens for a Sustainable Water Supply, Lloyd wants dredging. And he notes that the local chapter of the Sierra Club stands nearly alone– both for its absence of paid staff and for its steadfast support for dredging.
Unlike some of the players in this debate, it's hard to see where the Citizens would benefit from the thousands of hours they've spent filing info requests and countering what they call the "red herring" allegations about dredging. High cost, heavy metals, regulatory hurdles? The Citizens provided facts to counter them all.
And yet the Conservancy may be winning the war. It sure looked that way in January when a 3-2 City Council vote suddenly undid Mayor Norris' plan. But it turns out that this is an election year with three seats up for grabs, and Norris has indicated that he's eager– especially with the fresh demand figures– to go back into the water.
While the election won't technically occur until November, with no Rob Schilling or other Republican in the mix, the ultimate victors will probably emerge August 20 when anyone who calls himself a Democrat can choose among seven Democratic candidates. There are four pro-dredging candidates: Brevy Cannon, Dede Smith, Colette Blount, and James Halfaday. And there are three clearly pro-dam candidates: Satyendra Huja, Kathleen Galvin, and Paul Beyer. Interestingly, there are also four independent candidates, all in the pro-dredging camp.
We need a bigger dam
There was a cringe-worthy moment during the Reagan Administration when budget director David Stockman said the president's "trickle-down" economic theory wouldn't work. Now comes Liz Palmer with another trickle-down shocker. A key presenter at the Conservancy press event, Palmer quietly admits the new dam doesn't actually provide what most backers say it offers: additional water supply.
"The interim storage volume provides no new water for growth," Palmer revealed in a supposed-to-be-secret email to City Councilor Kristin Szakos before going on to deride the dam as a political compromise by "elected officials, who are not well versed in the objectives or methodologies of the plan, coming in at the 11th hour and altering a well thought-out, holistic plan developed by competent engineers."
Indeed, Rivanna documents clearly indicate that a 30-foot reservoir increase adds nothing to the local water supply– only to those all-important "streamflows." The email was leaked to radio man Schilling. Anyone reading his blog can see that Palmer tells Szakos the dam "benefits rivers but not people."
Conservancy and the Corps
Palmer wasn't entirely correct. The dam does benefit some people: the ones connected to the Nature Conservancy. In addition to gaining a national model for river health, the once-independent non-profit can show Nestlé how it used that million-dollar grant.
Years of savvy partnerships have helped the Nature Conservancy become what it is today: a company with nearly a billion dollars in annual revenue and assets of over $5 billion. It's still a non-profit, but some of its hallowed independence has been lost.
For instance, the Conservancy has a 16-year history of partnering with the Norfolk Office of the Army Corps of Engineers to give developers a novel way to disturb habitats without having to creating new ones. The program has every appearance of serving both as a win for the environment and for business because instead of forcing each developer to painstakingly create new habitat, the developer can simply pay into a trust fund that oversees the work of restoring woodlands and wetlands at a two-to-one ratio across the Commonwealth.
Wanna ruin an acre? Just pay $65,000 into the Virginia Aquatic Resources Trust Fund.
With the Conservancy's prestige and scientific prowess, the Fund presents a huge opportunity for ecology. Unfortunately, it may also present a huge opportunity for conflict.
Since 1995, the Army Corps has made the Conservancy the sole party to tap the Fund for over 112 "mitigation" projects from Tidewater marshes to the Blue Ridge. The Conservancy has overseen the disbursal of $39.7 million on nature and, according to the latest figures, $4.2 million for itself, as the Fund's annual report reveals that the Conservancy receives an "overhead fee" of three percent of each payment.
That the Conservancy has a monopoly right to pocket $2,000 every time a developer disturbs an acre troubles Richard Collins, a UVA professor and former chair of the RWSA who has repeatedly attempted to persuade the Army Corps to revisit dredging.
Aside from the DEQ, the Army Corps is the only regulatory body standing in the way of the dam; and in carrying out its mission of enforcing the Clean Water Act, the Corps is supposed to ensure that any new water supply is "the least environmentally damaging practicable alternative." They even have an acronym: LEDPA.
Nationally, dredging reservoirs is the typical LEDPA. But not in Charlottesville, where– wouldn't you know it– dredging's just too expensive. Seen as less damaging and cheaper than felling forests and blocking waterways with dams, dredging was dismissed early in the local discussion thanks to those Panama Canal-level estimates.
Collins has noticed something else about the unique Corps-Conservancy relationship. The Conservancy gets to decide where to set up "mitigation" projects. One of them is about to start in Charlottesville, a $3.95 million effort to rebuild nearly two miles of degraded banks along Meadow Creek. Collins lauds stream restoration but says there are far worthier restoration projects than this one, which just happens to be coordinated with an RWSA sewer line project. Collins calls this a "sweetener" and a "greasing of the wheels," a discretionary infusion of dollars that could warm the hearts of local officials.
Back in 2009, a reporter reminded Army Corps officials that by law they must reevaluate the dam permit if any information turned out to be "inaccurate" or upon receipt of any "significant new information." The Corps' project manager replied by sending a copy of a year-old letter calling cheaper dredging proposals "cursory." Since then, multiple dredging offers have been advanced, including suggestions that it could happen for little or no net cost. Even an official RWSA study puts the range at $34-40 million before selling so much as a pound of sediment.
So last week, this reporter asked again about the permit.
"We're looking at it," says Army Corps project manager Vincent Pero, declining to give a timetable for when the Corps might decide, and declining to address the question of whether the Trust Fund puts the Army Corps too close to the people and projects that it's supposed to be regulating.
Bone dry in Sugar Hollow
The rationale of the dam-pipeline plan now rests on two concepts, each looking increasingly untenable: inflated cost estimates that pushed dredging off the table, and inflated water consumption estimates undercut by a decade of real-world declines. If only Frederick had built his dam faster, there wouldn't be so much data to reveal the flaws in his figures.
Over the years, the Nature Conservancy appears to have ceased to be the group that avoided government entanglement, as conservation tax credits have put millions in the pockets of already wealthy land-owners and served as a direct cause of the Biscuit Run scandal.
But at least the Conservancy still has its science. Or does it?
Last September, Central Virginia was in such a severe and sustained drought that Kevin Lynch wanted to see for himself how the RWSA was handling the Moormans River. Above the reservoir, in the part touched only by God, the Moormans was dry. Bone dry. Both forks.
And yet the reservoir, rather than mimicking the natural flow, which was zero, was spewing one million gallons a day into the lower Moormans.
"It looked like a water cannon," says Lynch.
While the neighbors must have been pleased to see RWSA equipment spewing a million gallons a day to wet the riverbed when Nature decreed otherwise, Lynch says the ultimate plan is to spew as much as 10 million gallons.
"The point is that there is nothing natural about releasing a steady stream of water into the Moormans in a drought," says Lynch. "They are forcing it to behave like an entirely different river."
Ironically, an effort to put stream gauges on the upper Moormans, a project that would finally show the public how the river really behaves, has been fought for years by the Authority, even though the cost might be under $80,000. Too expensive, according to Authority director Frederick.
"It has now been eight years," says Lynch, "since the City and County imposed substantial rate increases on water users in order to pay for a plan that originally included dredging the Rivanna Reservoir and repairing the Ragged Mountain Reservoir spillway. Since that time, the Authority has used the ratepayers' money to make dozens of consultants fabulously wealthy, but not one drop has been added to the water supply."
–-> more water stories from the past three years