As the community gets ready for election day on November 6th,
Charlottesville Tomorrow
is preparing to mail our non-partisan voter guides featuring the results of interviews with each of the candidates for
Charlottesville City Council
and the
Albemarle County Board of Supervisors
.
Over the next few weeks, this blog will feature some of the questions that did
not
make the cut for the voter guide, but which still offer important insights into the candidates’ views on local growth and development issues.
Our
Election Watch 2007 website
includes the complete audio and written transcript for each candidate interview.
Subscribe to our e-mails
to get immediate notification of the availability of the 2
007 Voter Guides
. The content below are excerpts pulled from the verbatim transcripts.
BOARD OF SUPERVISORS, FIRST IN A SERIES
In June 2006, the City and the County signed off on a 50-year water supply plan that includes a new dam at the Ragged Mountain Reservoir and a new pipeline connecting it to the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir. Do you support this plan? Why or why not?
RIVANNA
Ken Boyd (R)-Incumbent
: Well, I’m actually very proud to have been part of the legislative team that signed off and put together this 50-year water plan and I’m a hundred percent behind it. I guess if there’s one disappointment I have it’s the amount of time it is taking to get through the 11 different state and federal regulatory authorities and approvals that we have to get.
Marcia Joseph (D)-Challenger
: I do support the plan and I do for a lot of reasons. The first one is that it’s a way that we can still control our water supply, our drinking water supply and it’s the best way that we can because all of the drainage that goes into our water supply we in Albemarle County control…
Number 2 is [that] I want to make sure that people here now are not dealing with drought conditions or conditions where they don’t have water, because I think that that’s the fear now is that we’ve got folks here and yet we keep planning for the future, but I want to make sure that we’ve got enough for everybody that needs it right now.
And the third one is that if you recall, it was about a year ago or maybe even two years ago that the concept was that maybe we would pull water from the James and that was very disturbing to me for a lot of reasons. One is that the environmental degradation of just coming up that far from the James by putting a pipe in and the other was the fact that there are many localities that are upstream from us that we don’t know what discharges into the James and when the water is low like it is now, it would be concentrated and I think it would be difficult and expensive to clean… so, yes, I do endorse that.
SCOTTSVILLE
Lindsay Dorrier (D)-Incumbent
: I support the 50 year plan, which includes finding new sites for future water supply and also conservation measures. I support the new Ragged Mountain dam and the new pipeline connecting it to the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir. We must monitor the measures mentioned in the 50 year plan on an annual basis. Also, we need to look at the Rivanna Water and Sewer Commission and the Albemarle County Service Authority to see if they have the tools necessary to deal with water shortages and whether these Boards need to be restructured to provide the public more protection and preservation of our water supplies.
Kevin Fletcher (I)-Challenger
: Yes, I do support this plan. I
think it was the most effective plan that was proposed. Also, it
provides us I guess with the cleanest water option and that because
there’ll be little silt or anything, that type of run-off that would go
particularly into the Ragged Mountain Reservoir due to development
which is the main reason why we’re in the situation as far as the South
Fork Rivanna, I think that many of the— Much of the silt from the
development in the western side of the County has filled up the
reservoir and that is why we’re in this situation so I think that it is
probably our best option and it also is the first option if we do have
to later on the future, you know, go to a second option of either
dredging or putting a bladder on the South Fork Reservoir to try to
raise its level.
Denny King (I)-Challenger
: Well, as you know, water is my number one quality of life issue. I support planning for the future adequacies of our water supply, both public and private in our ground water. I also support connecting the land use planning, the water and sewer planning…. I do not support, however, the community 50-year water supply as it’s written because it’s flawed…
The 50-year plan was created without the benefit of any master plan, especially for the designated growth areas, the very areas where the public water is going to be used. How can we plan if we don’t have an idea of what we’re going to build or where it’s going to be built?… Only the Crozet Master Plan had been completed at the time of the study. Irony is that Crozet was omitted from the study because of an estimated build-out population of 12,000 and the current water supply for that area was deemed adequate.
However, there’s a caveat here…. Another question mark— I’ll get back to that 12,000. That current water supply was based on those 12,000. The consultant was given 12,000 as the population number for Crozet and we found that was really wasn’t the actual number…. At 24,000, Crozet’s water supply obviously isn’t adequate. It isn’t adequate.
Another question mark is Biscuit Run and how it was factored into the 50-year plan. We didn’t even know about Biscuit Run when we created the 50-year plan. Crozet and Biscuit Run make me very uncomfortable, so that’s why I really can’t support the 50-year plan as it’s currently written. I worry about those underlying assumptions that haven’t been clearly defined yet and what about the impact of the University’s current $3 billion capital campaign, the UVA Hospital extension, South Grounds building… I don’t believe that [any] of those have been included in the 50-year plan and if they’re not included, how many more are not inclusive in the 50-year plan.
The next consideration is how we’re going to pay for all of these improvements and that’s a big if… The cost of the planned water supply expansion and the improvements, they’ll not be borne by the very people who benefit from the most from the expansion of these water supplies—the developers. The burden will be placed on new and existing residents and that’s an awful lot to ask of these people…
WHITE HALL
David Wyant (R)-Incumbent
: Yes, I support the plan and was heavily involved in it.… I’ve done a lot of work in water quality monitoring, storm water management, even erosion control. I developed a lot of those policies and procedures at the state level since VDOT was the largest state agency and I had worked with a lot of those regulatory agencies prior to us getting together with them with the City and the County and our citizens and the [Albemarle County] Service Authority. I was the one I’m pretty certain that recommended that we bring them all together at one time…
The role of civil engineering in society as we’ve just seen with the collapse of the bridges is to look at infrastructure and part of the infrastructure is the needs of our communities in water and the development of their trunk lines and service and impoundments, plus you’ve also got to protect the environment and I did a lot of work in my 30 years with VDOT in environmental and so when we worked on the mitigation plan with this which is not spoken of much, I knew of a couple situations where we could do some mitigation and trade off. It was a win/win for some property owners as well as allowing us to meet the plan’s requirements.
Ann Mallek (D)-Challenger
: Yes, I do support the plan, because the Ragged Mountain improvement plan keeps our water local, and our water quality predicable. We can protect our watersheds because they are within the County jurisdiction. Cities upstream have had failures in their stormwater-sewage systems, causing untreated sewage to dump into the James. I do not support James River water as a solution. In times of drought the needed volumes of water would not be available from the James anyway.
Two serious concerns are the location of the pipeline and potential ecological damage from building the pipeline to connect the two reservoirs. These will need careful study, fall publication of findings and transparent decision-making, and the highest performance standards. The Rivanna Water and Sewage Authority will present more information on the phasing of the dam project at its public meeting on September 13.
Kendall Singleton
