Friends of Bull Run Water are planning a rally at Portland City Hall Friday
Time: Friday, April 22 · 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Location: Portland City Hall
1221 SW 4th Ave.
Portland, OR
Kelly Campbell and Kent Craford penned an Op-ed on why we don't need to spend $500 million on the Bull Run water supply.The Portland Water Bureau needs to hit the pause button, which lays out the reasons. I have their permission to re-post in its entirety.
It's perfect, as only nature could have designed. For more than 100 years the storied Bull Run watershed has provided Portland with cold, clear, pure drinking water through a marvel of natural and original engineering. Old-growth forests catch and filter 130 inches of rainwater annually in the Bull Run and then deliver that water by gravity to nearly 900,000 residents in the metro area.
We couldn't design it any better. But federal regulators and engineers at the Portland Water Bureau think they're smarter than Mother Nature and our brilliant forbears. Portland is about to spend a half-billion dollars and sharply raise water rates to build structures in the Bull Run system that have no ostensible purpose other than to comply with a federal drinking water standard that Portland already meets.
As The Oregonian recently reported, the bureau has embarked on a $500 million program to protect our drinking water from cryptosporidium, a bug that has caught the attention of the Environmental Protection Agency nationally but is nonexistent in Portland's water. While the city has affirmed the purity of our water for years, it's only in the last year that we have solid proof. In 10,000 liters of water sampling from Bull Run and 7,000 liters from our open reservoirs, studies found not a single detection of cryptosporidium. Zero. The verdict is in: Portland's water is pure and already meets the goals of the EPA's cryptosporidium rule.
Given this new scientific evidence, and the overwhelming cost of the projects being proposed, you'd think Portland would be pulling out all the stops to prevent a waste of money on a phantom public health threat. Dr. Thomas Ward, an infectious disease specialist at Oregon Health & Science University, recently told The Oregonian, "This doesn't make sense, to use the public's money in this fashion." He has urged the city to request an "extended compliance time frame" from the EPA.
But Commissioner Randy Leonard has been unwilling to pursue this option. Work has already begun on the $137 million Powell Butte 2 water storage tank. Ground will be broken for a $100 million Bull Run treatment plant in the summer of 2012 if the city doesn't receive approval of a request for a variance. And work is planned to begin this summer on a $90 million water tank at Kelly Butte.
New York City, under the same federal mandates as Portland to treat its drinking water and cover or treat its open reservoirs, obtained a huge extension for compliance with the federal rule -- until 2028. That city is now seeking further postponement until 2034. Portland, on the other hand, is following a Water Bureau-proposed plan to complete the bulk of reservoir work within the next four years. Most of the $500 million project will be completed by 2015, which will balloon the bureau's debt load to $849 million by then.
Rochester, New York, is also under the same federal mandate but is spending merely $25 million to bring its system into full compliance, despite having similarly sized, historic open reservoirs set in city parks. Clearly other municipalities are doing everything within their power to extend the timeline to build and pay for these projects and/or minimize their costs. Portland can and must do the same.
On March 11, a diverse coalition of business, environmental and public health advocates called upon the Portland City Council to follow New York's and Rochester's example and push the pause button on the Water Bureau's ill-advised and unjustified cryptosporidium program, and instead seek a variance from the rules and/or an extension in the timelines. The single most effective and expedient action the city can take is to request an extended-compliance time frame. An extension would allow Portland to stagger rate increases while buying time to pursue other options.
At a time when Portland citizens and businesses continue to struggle in a weak economy, we can ill afford to capitulate to rushed timelines and inapplicable federal mandates that mess with the natural perfection of our Bull Run drinking water system. There are 500 million reasons to change course.
Kelly Campbell is executive director of Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility. Kent Craford is director of the Portland Water Users Coalition.