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Posted by: Kim_Hamilton on 08/25/2014 12:38 PM Updated by: thepinetree on 08/25/2014 12:50 PM
Expires: 01/01/2019 12:00 AM
:



A Tour Of The Calaveras County Water District~By Dennis Dooley

Calaveras County, CA....Please come with me on a tour of the Calaveras County Water District system. The information I am about to share with you is accurate to the best of my knowledge however, these statements are mine alone as one of the five CCWD directors, and I do not presume to speak for the district officially. I will start by taking you to all on a tour of the major district facilities that cover all four corners of Calaveras County. It would be nearly impossible to visit all these facilities in only two days. We will start this tour from the district headquarters at 120 Toma Court in San Andreas.....



The first facility we will tour is the Copperopolis Water Treatment Plant, which is 23 miles from the district headquarters via the slow, windy Pool Station Road, Highway 4 and then Little John Road. This plant serves 2,520 customers in the Copperopolis area with drinking water that is purified using an ozone generator, filtration systems and chlorine. It features infrastructure, tanks, intake pumps and all the other items that go with this plant.

Next, drive two miles to the Copperopolis Wastewater Treatment Plant, which serves 1,769 customers. Do a quick tour of the treatment plant, and keep in mind there are sewer systems, pumps, spray fields and holding ponds, which transport and treat waste. Much of the treated effluent is then provided to Saddle Creek Golf Course.

From Copperopolis, drive 34 miles up Highway 4, onto Parrotts Ferry Road and then Camp Nine Road to the Collierville Powerhouse on the Stanislaus River, which is nine miles up a narrow and windy road beyond Vallecito. This is a 250 megawatt hydro powerhouse that is owned by CCWD and operated by the Northern California Power Authority. This is a fascinating plant and deserves an entire article unto itself. The whole North Fork Power system has a value near $1 billion, but with the financing and operational costs, CCWD is only receiving about about $500,000 annually from this, much of which goes to subsidize water and wastewater rates.

From this facility, drive 12 miles back to Vallecito and up Highway 4 to the Douglas Flat wastewater treatment plant, which serves 254 customers. This plant collects sewer from the communities of Vallecito and Douglas Flat. By the way, it was recently the recipient of a $4 million state grant for a new, state-of-the-art membrane treatment system that is doing a really great job of treating the sewage. Also in the Vallecito area is Six Mile Village sewer plant, which serves 65 customers.

From there, drive three miles up to Murphys and out Pennsylvania Gulch Road to a small community leach field wastewater treatment system that services 20 customers in the Indian Rock Subdivision. There is very little to see above ground, but an operator must make a daily visit to this system to check the operation and collect samples for analysis.

Next, drive seven miles back to Murphys and up Highway 4 to the Forest Meadows Wastewater Treatment Plant, which serves 604 customers. Then drive five miles up Highway 4 to the Hunter Dam Water Treatment Plant near Hunter Reservoir. This is the plant that treats all of the water that serves the Ebbetts Pass area from Forest Meadows up to Camp Connell and serves 5,775 customers. The water main for this system runs some 15 miles along the Highway 4 Corridor and varies from fewer than 3,000 feet to more than 6,000 feet in elevation. Perhaps the biggest area that is not served by CCWD is Blue Lakes Springs in Arnold, which has its own mutual water system and gets its water from wells. Although it should be noted those wells have not produced enough water to serve the area and CCWD has been providing emergency water to the area during the summer for many years.

Next, drive one mile over an unimproved back road to the Collierville Tunnel Tap, which is the source of water for Hunter Dam Water Treatment Plant and is the primary source of water for Utica Water and Power Authority, Union Public Water District, City of Angels, and in-stream flows for Murphys/Angles Creek. This tunnel tap has a very complicated ownership and permitted arrangement between CCWD, NCPA and UWPA which is way too complicated to go into in this article.

From this Collierville Tunnel tap head back out to Highway 4 and up a couple of miles to Moran Road at Avery. Then drive down more than 7 miles of unpaved roads to McKay’s Reservoir on the Stanislaus River. This is the intake point to the Collierville Powerhouse, which is an 18-foot-diameter tunnel that supplies 2,200 feet of water head pressure to the Collierville Powerhouse. It is midway down this tunnel that a tap is located that supplies the water to Hunter’s Reservoir, which is the primary water source mentioned above. McKay’s Dam is primarily operated and maintained by NCPA, but CCWD is the licensed owner and stands to foot the bill for any major disaster.

From the McKay’s Dam, drive back out to Highway 4 and up several more miles to the Arnold Wastewater Treatment Plant, where wastewater is collected and treated for 460 customers living in the Arnold area. Then head up to Mill Woods sewer leach field, which serves 195 customers. Also in the Arnold area are Mountain Retreat sewer system, which serves 13 customers, and Sequoia Woods sewer system, which serves 10 customers, and Country Houses sewer system, which serves 25 customers.

The next stop is 35 miles up Highway 4 to Spicer Meadow Reservoir, where the Spicer Meadow Reservoir Hydroelectric Powerhouse is located at the base of the dam. This is another portion of the North Fork Project system that is owned by CCWD and operated and maintained by NCPA. Besides the powerhouse, dams, reservoirs, recreation areas at Spicer, Union and Utica Reservoirs, the reservoirs have a complicated ownership agreement and numerous water rights holders, all that claim to own some or all of the water rights, which can lead to many disagreements over who owns what water.

Next, drive back down Highway 4 to the town of White Pines (near Arnold) and tour the beautiful White Pines Lake, which is used by thousands of community members and tourists each year. CCWD owns White Pines Lake and the land around it and leases a large portion of this land to the White Pines Park and a community baseball field.
From there, drive back down Highway 4 to Avery and then north on the narrow and winding Sheep Ranch Road to the small community of Sheep Ranch to the Sheep Ranch Water Treatment Plant. This is a rather small system that gets its primary source of water from releases out of White Pines Lake that run down San Antonio Creek. This plant serves 48 customers and requires an operator to come each day to check the plant, perform water tests and log data.

After seeing the Sheep Ranch Water Plant, drive 14 miles north on Sheep Ranch Road and Railroad Flat Road to the Wilseyville Wastewater Treatment Plant, which serves 28 customers. This is a small plant that will, hopefully, be replaced with a holding tank and pump station to move untreated sewage to the nearby wastewater treatment plant in West Point. But until that occurs, this is an antiquated plant that needs daily attention. The next stop is two miles away in West Point. The West Point Wastewater Treatment Plant – serving 165 customers – was replaced a few years ago with a new state-of-the-art treatment plant capable of handling the additional load from Wilseyville, which the district hopes to get a grant for in the near future.

The West Point Water Treatment Plant is only a mile away. This plant serves 564 customers and the surrounding water mains were recently replaced with a new plant funded by the state due to the disadvantaged community grant program. There are a number of future projects still to be done in the West Point area, but this new plant has helped immensely. Since the West Point and Wilseyville communities are considered to be disadvantaged, the district is doing all it can to apply and qualify for disadvantaged funding grants (actually, it is called a loan forgiveness funding).

After this tour, drive 40 miles west on Highways 26 and 12 to the Wallace Community Services District, which serves 103 water customers and 101 sewer customers. The District was recently asked by Wallace community members to take over the water and wastewater operations that serve this community. This is the only ground water system that CCWD has. Fortunately, both of the plants for this community are in the same area and can be serviced at the same time, with the requirement that the operations and tests for both systems are different.

The next system is a small community wastewater leach field operation off of Southworth Road, which is five miles away. Like the Indian Rock system outside of Murphys, there is not much to see above ground, but it does require a daily visit make sure it is operating properly and to make the log entries and to take samples for testing. This plant serves 56 customers.

After this system, the next stop is 11 miles at the La Contenta Wastewater Treatment Plant, which is east of the La Contenta golf community and north of New Hogan Reservoir and serves 964 customers. This is a fairly complex system that requires a lot of labor and monitoring. The wastewater is treated to drinking water quality and then this treated wastewater is stored on site and eventually pumped to the La Contenta Golf Course to water the greens and fairways.

Just three miles down the road is the hydroelectric New Hogan Powerhouse. While the district owns this powerhouse, it is operated and maintained by the Modesto Irrigation District, which pays CCWD a portion of power generation revenues. The rights to the water in the reservoir are essentially owned by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. CCWD contracts with the Bureau in order to use water stored in Hogan for the Jenny Lind Water Treatment Plant, which is one mile below the dam on the Calaveras River and serves 3,685 customers. Let it be noted that when the reservoir is at “minimum pool” all water releases cease except for CCWD drinking water and for minimum fish flows in the river.

And, finally, the trip back to headquarters is 14 miles. We have traveled about 280 miles with minimal backtracking and much of the routes on narrow mountainous and winding roads. If we assume that it would take a minimum of 30 minutes at each tour location that includes opening and closing gates (often twice at each location), accessing locked buildings, introducing yourself to the lead operators and walking around plant sites, a 30-minute timeframe at each location would be optimistic. I doubt that this tour could be completed in two days, but it might if you were to push yourself hard, but I suspect that it would take three days.

As you can see, CCWD is a very large and complex system and, yet, we have only 64 employees. A district this large requires a lot of vehicles, heavy equipment, tools and support and testing gear. The field employees are always moving around to cover all of the operations and emergencies. There are 288 miles of water pipe, 125 miles of sewer pipe, numerous water storage tanks, intake pumps, sewage lift stations and pumps, hundreds of fire hydrants and myriad of other apparatti that you will not see on this tour. Besides operations, the staff is involved in billing and collections, administering the finances, planning and submitting applications, addressing the many legal issues, addressing water rights issues, participating in numerous associations and organizations that are necessary even when it doesn’t appear to be necessary, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

To pay for all this, CCWD has only about 12,700 water customers and 4,700 wastewater customers. Additionally, the district receives some county property tax revenue (which has gone down since the recession of 2008 and each year since), hydroelectric revenue and a number of minor revenue sources to help cover costs. The majority of the property tax and hydroelectric revenues go to support the operations and maintenance costs of the district. CCWD has done a good job of controlling the budget and maintaining necessary reserves. The main exception to this is the reserves needed for Capital Improvement Projects, especially replacement CIP reserves. Since the financial crisis of 2008, all CCWD replacement CIP reserves had been exhausted and much had been deferred until it became unmanageable, thus the need for the rate increase that went into effect last year. All of the additional revenue generated by the rate increase will be put toward capital improvement projects.

Thank you for taking this tour with me, and please forgive me for throwing in some comments at the end. I don’t think most people realize how vast CCWD is. It is my hope that this will help people understand.



Dennis Dooley is a CCWD director for District 4. Contact him at dbdooley@sbcglobal.net.




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