From: Valerie Gardner
To: Council
Subject: Public Comment on Item #6
Date: Monday, July 15, 2024 2:55:21 PM
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Dear Anthony and Town Council,
I am submitting this comment regarding the Agenda Item 6, approving an agreement with Tetra Tech for over $750,000 to assess and design “Relining” of the Upper Atherton Channel.
I respectfully submit that "business as usual” relining of the Atherton Channel is not in the best long-term interests of the town.
$750,000 is huge amount to pay for an assessment and design to “reline,” an existing channel.
I think the town would be better served spending these funds with a firm that can provide some meaningful alternatives to simply continuing to channel our rainwater out to the bay.
For too long, Atherton has done the expedient thing and allowed our rain water be seen as a pure nuisance to be disposed of. Yes, rainwater can cause flooding if not handled well—but rainwater is also the sole source of all of our drinking and irrigation water and most of what we use comes from very far away. These sources are increasingly at risk.
Climate change, as I believe this council knows, is severely altering weather patterns with rising levels of heat and increasing levels of drought. One very clear likely effect will be a lack of snow pack in the Sierra’s in the not-so-distant future. Snow pack built up in the winter has always been the way we store water, so that we have some in the summer, as that snow pack melts.
Although we have recently had an few good winters with an abundance of rain and snow, for years we had droughts that forced people to suck water out of wells, drying up subsurface aquifers. Aquifers do not fill up quickly—a problem—and low levels of water in aquifers contribute to subsidence, which is happening almost everywhere. Unless we take action to accelerate the re-absoption of water down into the aquifers, we will find that Atherton continues to subside and our backyard wells won’t even reach the reduced acquirers to provide the water support we need from them.
Atherton and surrounding areas also have the benefit of having a local reservoir. This reservoir, Bear Gulch, was built generations ago at great expense and benefits us now, by providing between 10 and 20% of our water needs. I understand that it may hold as much as 215 million gallons. I have no idea what the water level is for Bear Gulch but having this local source is definitely of high resilience value to residents in the event that Hetch Hetchy fails, as an added layer of water security.
So, I propose that, rather than continue to ignore climate impacts and pay such a large sum just to plan to reline our cemented in water channels that serve to dump our water into the bay as if it were sewage, perhaps this three quarters of a million dollars can be used to provide the town with some basic assessments of alternatives in how we might incorporate improvements to the Atherton Water channel, that can include ways to conserve this water.
The three most obvious ways that we could help ourselves and future Athertonians would be to include:
1. Designing more water absorption areas into the upper channel area that serve to allow more of the natural rainwater to be absorbed back into the aquifers in the Atherton hills area;
2. Designing and adding a dedicated channel that diverts and directs some of this rainwater back into the Bear Gulch Reservoir or interim water storage areas.
3. Combining relining and a few absorption pools in the upper channel area with incorporating more absorption areas or restoration of portions of the lower channel that are flatter such as along Holbrook-Palmer Park on the side of Watkins Avenue, to create a more natural stream, that permits water absorption and creation of natural habitats (which I have previously proposed).
In sum, I respectfully submit that the proposed funds could be used more productively to give the council a sense of what these and/or other options are that exist for treating rainwater as the valuable resource that it really is. We don’t know what those options are and it is not clear whether the town will have the appetite to engage in a meaningful improvement project. But clearly, this is the right time, before we commit really large sums of capital to yet another channel relining project, to look at options to invest in improving our long-term water sustainability in ways that could provide critical water service dividends to residents in the long term.
Thank you for considering.
Valerie Gardner
Atherton, CA 94027