BEND, Ore. -- There’s a fight brewing in Bend over water. Last year, the City Council approved a plan to rebuild Bend’s surface water system. It’s the largest capital project in the city’s history. But recently the city has been hearing from citizens and business leaders who oppose the project on environmental and economic grounds.
About ten miles west of Bend, in the Deschutes National Forest cold, clear fresh water rushes over a man-made dam on Bridge Creek. Today the city gets about half of its water from here. The other half comes from wells.
Heidi Lansdowne says when the city first began taking water from the creek nearly a century ago, it was the only water source. She’s a civil engineer with the city of Bend.
“This dam here is the original dam built in the 1920’s to allow the city of Bend to take water off of Bridge Creek,” said Lansdowne.
Next to the dam is the intake facility, a two story building that once doubled as housing for the system caretaker. Poke your head into the attic and you can still see an old bed frame tucked away.
Standing in an echoey room where concrete troughs channel the water, Lansdowne says the system has deteriorated. And new federal regulations will require municipalities to filter surface water for cryptosporidium. So, she says the city council had to make a decision.
“We had to really dig in and do a feasibility study and determine the best approach for the city of Bend to keep our surface water and reinvest at a large cost or find another water source,” said Lansdowne.
In the end, the city decided to spend close to 70 million dollars to keep its ground water source. The plan is to replace the intake facility and the pipes that go into town. The city also plans to build a treatment facility and a small-scale hydro power component, which officials say will help offset costs.
But Bend’s isn’t the only straw sipping out of this source. On the western outskirts of town, the Tumalo irrigation district diverts even more water than Bend does for agriculture. That concerns Bruce Aylward,Bend resident and an environmental economist. He thinks the decision to rebuild Bridge Creek was a bad call.
“If the city were not to divert that water up there, high in the watershed but to leave it in stream and in fact go to ground water, then that water would be able to be protected and flow on through here,” said Aylward.
Aylward says that would triple the flows during the summer months and help native species in the river.
Eric King is Bend’s City Manager. He says City Council considered going to an all groundwater system, but that the costs outweighed the benefits.
“From an operational perspective it’s much less expensive to be able to take water that’s gravity fed than it is to pump water 750 feet below the surface of the earth,” said King.
King says the city commissioned multiple economic analyses. All of them concluded that from an economic perspective, pumping would be more expensive. But some, like attorney Bill Buchanan, believe the city’s analyses are deeply flawed.
“The amount of interest alone exceeds the pumping costs by about 5 times," said Buchanan.
That interest will come from bonds issued to pay for the project. He says those analyses failed to consider the economic value of restoring water to the creek and what it would mean for tourism.
Buchanan is part of a group of prominent Bend residents who oppose the plan on both economic and environmental grounds. They say the project will raise water rates, and put additional burdens on the people living. They believe higher rates will also discourage businesses from setting up shop.
Opponents are circulating a petition asking the city to re-open the process for public participation and reassess the alternatives. Buchanan says the petition has garnered more than 650 signatures so far and has been signed by three former Bend mayors, the developer of Bend’s Old Mill District and the sitting chairman of the city’s budget committee.
He says the city could replace what it takes from he creek by digging three new wells, at a fraction of the cost of the project that was approved.
City Manager King says he hasn’t seen any studies from professionally certified engineers that back up Buchanan’s contentions. But Buchanan says his numbers all use the city’s own internal studies.
In the meantime, Bend is moving ahead with the project. The city council recently signed off on the purchase of 4 million dollars in steel piping, and is close to purchasing membranes for its filtration system.
Heidi Lansdowne, the city engineer, says she believes the council made the right call.
“From a municipal water management perspective, you would never give up a second source -- the diversity, the reliability, the decreased risk to your water quality -- there’s just no municipal water manager that would ever dream of doing that,” said Lansdowne.
The project is expected to break ground sometime next summer.
