“The food’s terrible, but at least the portions are small” – That old joke about an expensive restaurant could apply to a once-promising local water source rejected 4-0 Wednesday night by the City Council.
At issue is Municipal Well No. 7, drilled in 2002 at the Sonoma Garden Park on Seventh Street East as part of a plan to supplement the city’s Russian River water supply with local groundwater. Sonoma currently has six city wells, with two inactive due to water quality problems. Expected output on No. 7 was 200 gallons a minute, and preparations were made to install a disinfection unit and connection to the city water system.
But major changes in public-works staffing delayed the project until earlier this year, when the city applied for a water-connection permit in May with the state health department and signed a $359,000 completion contract in July with Santa Rosa-based company Bartley Pump.
And that’s when the problems surfaced, City Engineer Toni Bertolero told the council Wednesday. Not only did the 600-foot well produce half of what was promised, but what it produced was unusable by people or crops: high in manganese, dissolved solids and boron, with the latter between 2.6 and 5.3 times the safe drinking level.
With treatment alternatives estimated at $500,000, the council elected to cut its losses by paying Bartley Pump the $20,400 for the work it had done since July, plus approximately $22,000 in overhead and cleanup costs.
Kent O’Brien, whose consultant firm Winzler and Kelly helped prepare the health permit application, answered Councilmember Steve Barbose’s question about whether the low level reflected a general degradation of the local water table.
“When they ran they test, they essentially drained the well,” O’Brien said, noting that the standard test is to measure the pumped flow for two weeks, rather than check for sustainability of the well site and its effect on other local wells. “We said you can’t run the well like that forever.”
Mayor Joanne Sanders said the news was “another nail in the coffin” for Sonoma’s water situation, for which the city’s management plan is predicting a pending crisis by 2010. But Bertolero said the city has another four potential sites to explore, including one adjacent to Fryer Creek.
“You don’t always know which sites are going to be productive,” Bertolero said.
