"For Charlottesville City Councilor Holly Edwards, making the right decision on the future of the community’s water supply is one of the biggest she’ll have to make.

“Fifty years from now, certainly I won’t be here, but I’d like to believe that my legacies will,” Edwards said.

Charlottesville and Albemarle County have put together a $142 million water supply plan, which consists of constructing a new dam and expanding the Ragged Mountain Reservoir, followed by the addition of a pipeline to fill it.

As opposition to the plan has surfaced in recent months, city officials such as Edwards say they want to make sure they understand all the facts.

The plan’s critics have focused on dredging silt out of the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir as a better alternative to what opponents call an expensive plan that isn’t environmentally friendly. While dredging has been considered in the past, it was discarded in favor of what officials viewed as more effective and less expensive options. But opponents question whether a consultant over-estimated the cost of dredging, which was one factor that caused officials to drop it as an option.

None of the five city councilors said the city should consider dredging over the adopted water supply plan.

The council comes to the debate with little baggage. David Brown is the only current member who was on the council when the 50-year water supply plan was approved by a unanimous vote in 2006. The Albemarle Board of Supervisors joined the council in unanimously endorsing the plan, heralding it as a proposal that had garnered widespread support from residents, area environmentalists and government officials alike.

Criticism has come from a small group of notable city residents, including former city Councilor Kevin Lynch, who voted to approve the plan two years ago, and Rich Collins, a former chairman of the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority. The group, known as Citizens for a Sustainable Water Plan, also includes city activists Joe and Betty Mooney, among others.

The opposition’s claims are partly why Mayor Dave Norris has scheduled a meeting for May 6 to discuss water issues. He said the session is for a City Council that is largely new to the issues, something to provide background on the plan and lay out the facts.

The city is not, however, reconsidering the adopted water supply plan, Norris said. That’s an idea that provokes angst in the plan’s supporters, who have worked through a years-long process and are hoping the dam’s construction will come to fruition sooner rather than later.

“There’s a lot of concerns and ideas and suggestions floating out there, and we wanted to provide a forum for working through some of the possibilities and misconceptions and try to get as much accurate information out on the table,” Norris said.

Lynch said the plan he voted for included the idea of phasing, meaning it would be built piece-by-piece over time. As the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority has moved forward, it is now pushing to build the dam to its full height all at once. That would preclude what he views as less expensive options such as dredging, Lynch said.

He says that’s not the plan he voted for.

“They’re trying to lock us into something that is not flexible,” Lynch said. “They’ve abandoned their original plan.”

Dredging, Lynch and other critics have said, is a better option than what RWSA consultants have suggested. He said officials should not let the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir simply fill up with silt.

Mike Gaffney, the chairman of the RWSA’s board of directors, said he would support maintenance dredging of the reservoir so it could still be used, but not as a primary source for the community’s future water supply. The dam is being built all at once because it is more cost effective to do so, he said.

“We can study this forever,” Gaffney said. “We will come up with the same result each and every time. This [the adopted water supply plan] is the most practical solution for our community and it’s one we received almost unanimous approval by the community as a whole.”

Brown, the city councilor, said he hasn’t been swayed by the criticism.

“There’s nothing in my mind that shakes the foundation of our water supply plan,” he said.

Aside from whether dredging should be re-examined, the plan still has several hurdles before it becomes a reality. While state officials have approved the plan, federal officials still need to deliver a similar blessing. The city and county also have not yet worked out how to pay for the plan, something that could become a significant sticking point.

Albemarle Supervisor Sally H. Thomas, who pays close attention to water issues, said she once thought dredging was a great idea. She and others even studied how Decatur, Ill., had done it, hoping to learn similar lessons.

But it didn’t turn out to be all she had hoped, Thomas said.

“It seemed like a simple solution,” Thomas said. “Instead it turns out to be expensive and anything but simple.” One idea critics have brought up is to dredge the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir and put the sediment at the Charlottesville-Albemarle Airport, which is doing runway construction and could use the fill.

It’s unclear, officials said, whether that would be something that would work.

Thomas said that for dredging to work, officials would have to find a place to dry the sediment. Because silt continues to accrue in the reservoir, officials would have to find a place for copious amounts - enough to fill Scott Stadium, she said - to dry, and then find a place where it could be used.

That, she said, is an expensive, complex process that won’t provide enough water for the community’s supply needs anyway.

“I still am not convinced that there’s any reason why we should be looking at an option that was thoroughly examined and rejected,” Thomas said of dredging.

Councilor Julian Taliaferro said he’s fine with looking at other options, but wouldn’t want to necessarily slow the adopted water supply plan process.

“I guess I’d really like to take a look at it so we can put it to rest once and for all,” Taliaferro said. “I don’t want to see our community tagged as a community … that has a water shortage.”" (Jeremy Borden, The Daily Progress, March 24, 2008)