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SAN FRANCISO -- San Franciscans approved a ballot measure to finance repairs and expansion of the city's Hetch Hetchy Water System, a proposition that divided environmentalists. Updated Nov 6, 12:20 am
The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission's $3.6 billion plan includes 77 projects to repair and replace old facilities, perform seismic upgrades, ensure water quality, add new hydropower sources and increase water supply.
Bond Measure A authorizes the city to issue $1.6 billion in bonds to finance improvements to the system, $700 million of which would be repaid by increasing San Franciscans' water rates.
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| The Calaveras Reservoir. Plans are underway to increase its capacity sevenfold, to 670,000 acre-feet, more than twice the capacity of Hetch Hetchy Reservoir. Photo by Marton Dunai. |
The measure also allows for half the increase in water costs to be passed from landlords to tenants through an amendment to a city rent stabilization ordinance.
The Hetch Hetchy system provides about 770,000 San Francisco residents and 1.6 million suburban dwellers with about 260 million gallons of water a day, 85 percent of which is Sierra Nevada snowmelt stored in Hetch Hetchy Reservoir.
"It's a real good system but a bunch of it is getting old," said Leo Bauer, water supply engineer at the treatment division in Millbrae. "There's always something in need of repair. We need more facilities put in place so we can take out some components and fix them or replace them."
Opponents of the initiative included real estate companies and hotel and restaurant owners, many of whom contributed generously to the Coalition For Fair Water Rates, a group of San Francisco homeowners, property owners, hotels and realtors. Donors included the San Francisco Apartment Association, San Francisco Association of Realtors, and the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, all opposed to the three-fold increase in water bills that they would face by 2015 if the measure passed.
A fiscal impact report from city controller Edward M. Harrington estimated that the measure would likely hike the monthly water bill for the average single-family residence to $40.85 by 2015 from the current rate of $14.43.
Contributors to the Save Hetch Hetchy Committee, a business and labor coalition, included countless small business owners, engineering and construction companies and politicians, including Senator Dianne Feinstein.
Environmental groups, however, were split over the measure. The San Francisco League of Conservation Voters and the Green Party of California issued endorsements of Measure A, while the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense and the Planning and Conservation League urged San Franciscans to vote against it.
Though environmentalists agreed that the water system is in need of repair, groups opposed to the bond measure insisted that such repairs should benefit the environment, not just simply do no harm.
In a July letter to Mayor Willie Brown, Environmental Defense director Thomas Graff and Planning and Conservation League director Gerald H. Meral warned they could not support any measure that did not include plans to study the feasibility of restoring the Hetch Hetchy Valley, adjacent to Yosemite. That would mean removing the dam that that holds 360,000 acre-feet of water for Bay Area residents and finding alternative, preferably local, storage sites.
"(The Hetch Hetchy Valley) is in a national park; it's for the people of America and the people of the world to enjoy. But right now it's locked up by the city of San Francisco," said Ron Good, executive director of the nonprofit organization Restore Hetch Hetchy.
The city's unwillingness to consider restoring the valley was not the groups' only problem with measure A.
The Sierra Club, which has opposed the damming of Hetch Hetchy since 1907, contends that the commission's plan includes unnecessary expansion of the system to bring water to new sprawl developments.
The plan, which will increase the size of the Calaveras Reservoir and the number of diversions from the Tuolumne River, will also lay a new pipeline across the Central Valley.
"We're concerned about the growth of sprawl with Proposition A," said Good. "More water is going to mean more people."
The Sierra Club has also said plans affecting the Calaveras Reservoir and Tuolumne River will damage local ecosystems, permanently destroying the habitats of threatened species such as the California red-legged frog and the Alameda whip snake.