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11:15 PM EDT, September 22, 2009
dailypress.com Newport News
The King William Reservoir is dead.
By a show of hands, the City Council directed interim City Manager Neil Morgan and Waterworks Director Brian Ramaley to end the 22-year project after a presentation at Tuesday's work session.
“The time to terminate the project is now,” Ramaley said. “There will be no veiled attempt to resurrect the project at a later date.”
Ramaley’s report was the result of a 120-day assessment requested by the City Council, which indicated in June its desire to scrap the reservoir project after learning the U.S. Justice Department would not appeal a U.S. District Court ruling against the Army Corps of Engineers’ permit for the reservoir. In March, a U.S. District Court judge stated the Corps acted “arbitrarily and capriciously” when it granted the city a permit in 2005 to construct the 13 billion gallon dammed reservoir on the Mattaponi River.
The ruling was the final action in a suit by opponents of the project, including The Chesapeake Bay Foundation, the Alliance to Save the Mattaponi, the Virginia chapter of the Sierra Club and the Mattaponi tribe.
Ramaley said the only way to keep the project alive would be to revisit work the city had done in the mid-1990s, reassessing water needs and considering all possible alternatives in addition to the reservoir.
The cost of such a step backward would be at least two years and several million dollars, he said.
“There’s really nothing to be gained in pursuing it,” he said.
There was much to save, though. Ramaley said the city was spending about $1 million per month when it suspended work.
The project was originally estimated to cost $289 million. The projected cost at completion was about $300 million.
By the time the termination process is complete, the city will have spent about $54 million, he estimated.
Other factors weighed into the decision to end the project. Ramaley said the city is in good shape in terms of water supply because of the addition of the Lee Hall desalination plant in 1998 and aggressive water conservation practices on the part of water users in the decade since then.
While the city is supplying water to about 60,000 more customers, demand has remained static.
Ramaley said the department will “carefully restart the process of evaluating the city’s water needs” using a 10-year outlook rather than the 50-year time frame originally used for the reservoir.
He recommended involving a range of stakeholders and interested parties in the process and completing it over the next two years. City Council members pressed him to include opponents of the reservoir and residents who had volunteered ideas to increase water supplies.
The death knell was not quick. Council members peppered Ramaley and Morgan with questions about why the city had relied on faulty data and consultants who erred.
Councilwoman Madeline McMillan fired off at least two dozen questions and gave Morgan and Ramaley several pages of more questions to answer.
Councilwoman Pat Woodbury also wanted answers, concerned about costs and whether extra employees had been hired for the project.
Ramaley said most of the work had been done by current Waterworks staff, with the exception of eight teams of contractors and designers, and a legal team.
But even termination will take several steps. Contract work has stopped, but contracts and agreements must be terminated. Loans must be repaid. And the city must decide what to do with the property it bought for the reservoir.
Woodbury asked Ramaley if he would consider going forward with the project if the permitting process were easier.
“Not on my watch,” he said.
King William Reservoir
Size: 13 billion gallons
Estimated cost: $289 million
Money spent to date: $52.8 million
Money spent on land: $15.2 million
How long in process: 22 years
Fatal blow: In March, a U.S. District Court ruled that an Army Corps of Engineers permit was issued “arbitrarily and capriciously.” The Corps subsequently suspended the permit.
Copyright © 2009, Newport News, Va., Daily Press
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