Water Authority Told It Must Do Full Study of Pamo Dam

The Army Corps of Engineers sided with San Diego environmentalists Friday and ordered an exhaustive environmental impact statement on the proposed $82-million Pamo Dam and reservoir near Ramona.

The requirement perturbed the San Diego County Water Authority, which said completion of the environmental study would delay--if not outright jeopardize--construction of what is to become the largest emergency water supply in the county.

“We all better pray there won’t be an earthquake before the dam is built, and now it’s going to take two more years,” said Francesca M. Krauel, vice chairman of the agency, which buys wholesale imported water from the north and sells it to San Diego County’s various water purveyors.

“And politically speaking, any kind of delay is time for all the people who oppose this to come out of the woodwork,” she said. “Now we face some real stumbling blocks to it ever being completed.”

The Corps of Engineers in Los Angeles said the order for the environmental impact statement (EIS) was not a reflection on whether the federal agency was leaning one way or another on ultimately approving the project.

“The EIS is required whenever there is significant impact by a project. In order to avoid (preparing one), the water authority would have had to propose mitigation to bring the level of impact down to the level of ‘no significant impact.’ But they weren’t able to do that,” said Glen Lukos, a regulatory specialist with the corps.

Lukos said the EIS is required not only because the water authority’s mitigation plan is lacking in detail but also because of the level of public debate surrounding the proposed project. It calls for a 250-foot-high concrete dam allowing the inundation of 1,800 acres of a mostly pristine valley, treasured by environmentalists and conservationists for its riparian habitat.

Critics of the project say it is not needed because there are less expensive and less environmentally harmful ways of planning for the county’s water needs for time of emergency.

Water authorities, however, say the reservoir is needed to provide 100,000 acre-feet of water to be held in reserve in case a major earthquake strikes along the San Andreas Fault and severs the water lines that now bring water here from Northern California.

The reservoir would be the largest in San Diego County and would be the first to be linked to San Diego’s Miramar filtration plant, which currently depends on pipelines from the north.

“It may well be that, down the road when we know all the facts, the project will still have significant impacts on the environment but there will be overriding factors, such as the need for the water supply, for us to approve the project,” Lukos said. “That decision is still to come.”

Lukos said the preparation, discussion and approval of the more complete EIS would take about a year, and that a permit to build the project conceivably could be given within weeks of the completion of the EIS process.

Local water officials, however, had hoped to break ground on the mammoth reservoir later this year, and they say the delay will more likely be two years.

“Oh boy, that causes me problems,” Krauel said upon getting word of the corps’ decision. “We hoped we would not have to do an EIS.” The fact that controversy also sparked the need for the EIS was “out and out absurd,” she added. “There was virtually no outcry except from the Sierra Club, of course, and you could anticipate they would be against it. We tried to address all their concerns.”

Emily Durbin, a spokesman for the Sierra Club, hailed the corps ruling “because it ensures the public that a thorough and complete public review by an independent agency will be conducted. If the project turns out to be one of merit, then that will be amply evident after the study is completed. But the EIS will require more attention to alternatives (in providing emergency water), the value of the habitats and the value of the environmental resources that would be lost if the project is built.”

The water authority was told by the corps in 1983 that “an EIS would probably be required” unless the water authority could show that it could mitigate all the environmental impacts to such a successful degree that, in the end, there would be no negative environmental consequences from the construction of the dam and reservoir, Lukos said.

“We shook our heads because it would be really rough to do that,” Lukos said. “But their agent said they would try.”

Such a mitigation plan was presented to the corps about six months ago, sparking that part of the approval process in which public reaction to environmental issues is solicited. The mitigation proposals generated 48 official responses, mostly negative, from individuals and groups.

Finally, on Friday, the corps decided that the mitigation plan wasn’t good enough and that the more complete EIS is needed, both because of the mitigation plan’s shortcomings and the controversy surrounding the project.

“Their mitigation plans can be incorporated within an environmental impact statement, but it wasn’t sufficient to avoid doing an EIS altogether,” Lukos said.

Specifically, he said, the corps was unconvinced that the water authority’s offer to develop a 1,160-acre habitat in the San Pasqual Valley was sufficient to replace the loss of the 1,800-acre habitat in the Pamo Valley. The corps proposed a 1,720-acre replacement habitat.

Compounding the problem, said corps spokesman Larry Hawthorne, was that some of the mitigations proposed by the water authority called for changes in the environment at the replacement location--thereby possibly requiring mitigations for mitigations.

Other specific issues needing elaboration, Hawthorne and Lukos said, are dealing with the Pamo Valley habitat of the least Bell’s vireo, a bird species under consideration for the federal endangered species list; how the damming of the valley would affect water tables and vegetation downstream, and greater discussion on alternatives to the project.

The water authority already has completed a state-mandated environmental impact report, but the federal environmental impact statement addresses federal laws not considered in the state-mandated study, Lukos said.

The Corps of Engineers is involved in the project because it oversees development along the nation’s wetlands and waterways--in this case, Santa Ysabel Creek, which winds through the valley floor.

Friday’s decision, Hawthorne said, was made by Col. D. Fred Butler, commander of the corps’ Los Angeles district, after review of the comments made by critics, proponents, environmental groups and other government agencies including the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the state Department of Fish and Game, all of which had argued that the full EIS should be completed.

“The decision reached today to require an EIS is a prelude to the much larger consideration of whether or not the project is in the public interest,” Hawthorne said.

Larry Michaels, general manager of the water authority, was participating in a water seminar in Los Angeles Friday and could not be reached for comment. A statement issued by his office made matter-of-fact reference to how the corps was “under pressure from some environmentalists” in making its ruling.

Water director Krauel said she was confused by the corps’ decision, but conceded that the water authority may have been naive in thinking it could escape the EIS process.

“What is lacking in our plan that they could possibly quarrel with? We gave them our very best plan. We thought we had something to give the public that was even better than what they had before, from a mitigation standpoint not to mention from a water safety standpoint. It’s hard to understand how anyone can reject our gift. From that standpoint, maybe we were naive,” she said.

“But from the reality standpoint, nobody thought a dam could go through, no matter how good the plan was, without a lot of hassle.”