Silicon Valley's Roots Return As "Urban Agriculture"

With the passage of AB 551, the State of California has blessed the concept and is encouraging local land use agencies to designate Urban Agricultural Incentive Zones. In this drought year especially, this is a signal that cities throughout California should be re-thinking their land use policies to foster more local food production, while reducing their dependance on industrial agriculture. In San Jose, we can leverage this new legislation to both increase our local food security and protect our local groundwater.

One of my greatest pleasures is growing my own vegetables and fruit both at home and in a nearby community garden, which holds the honor of being the first in this state permitted to use recycled water from our wasted-water treatment plant. This drought proof water source adds to a diverse water supply portfolio, which includes local surface and groundwater and three aqueducts that have dubious reliability and higher energy demands than our local supply options.


 Silicon Valley, also still known as Santa Clara Valley,  evolved from a major food production and processing economy to economies that function, in part, from the use of silicon-based microchips.



The mild Mediterranean climate and fertile soil of the valley remains above and below the engineered hardscape of nearly 400 square miles of urban development.

In addition, San Jose possesses another piece of natural capital that was essential to this valley  becoming both of these successive great economic centers: two adjacent groundwater basins capable of supplying up to 250 million gallons of water per day. The geology of the area blessed us with sand and gravel sediments that carry surface water into depths below a 200-foot cap of  fine silts, deposited in flooded wetlands over thousands of years of rising sea levels.

This geologic process  of layering sediment creates a special concern for how we use the land in the Coyote Valley. This upper region acts as a kind of a forebay for the groundwater basin in the northern part of the county, which serves the 13 cities that now comprise much of Silicon Valley.  As sediment eroded from the eastern mountain range into the valleys below, the gravels and larger materials settle out mostly at the top of the alluvial fans. These gravel deposits are often mined for aggregate for concrete and asphalt.

The high porosity of this gravel-filled narrow valley makes it extremely vulnerable to contamination from any pollutants that are discharged onto the land or into Coyote and Fisher Creeks that traverse the 10 mile length of the Coyote Valley.

Pollutants, once reaching the usually high groundwater table of the Coyote Valley, move quickly down-gradient toward the thousands of private and municipal wells serving nearly 2 million residents and workers in the urban areas to the north.





The Coyote Valley has been designated in the City of San Jose's General Plan as an urban reserve with a third of the land at the southern end designated for permanent green belt. Triggers are also described for under what conditions a transit-oriented Specific Plan would be allowed.

Under this new legislation, the City of San Jose could propose to designate this 7,000-acre Coyote Valley ALL as an Urban Agricultural Incentive Zone. Because of the potential for groundwater contamination, the area should also be restricted to organic agriculture only.

Here, it's good to mention a little wisdom from former New Jersey Governor Christine Whitman,  who also served as Administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency under George W. Bush: "Some watershed land simply must not be developed. Its natural value in buffering, storing, filtering and recharging far exceeds whatever commercial value it may hold." (Cover letter from "Protecting the Source" Trust For Public Land, copyright 1998)

This could be a plank in a mayoral candidate's platform for a creating a sustainable San Jose, addressing both food security and water quality protection. It could also be an excellent joint powers project of the Santa Clara County Open Space Authority and the Santa Clara Valley Water District (SCVWD). 


 There are other reasons that the Coyote Valley should be preserved as permanent open space:

•     Laguna Seca should be preserved and re-established as a vernal wetland, creating habitat and reducing potential flooding in downtown San Jose

•     A wildlife corridor across Coyote Valley should be established between the Diablo and Santa Cruz ranges

•     Buffer setbacks from Coyote and Fisher Creeks should be preserved to protect the ecosystem of the riparian corridor

A Joint Powers Authority with Santa Clara Valley Water District and the Santa Clara County Open Space Authority could be formed as a financing option for the Coyote Valley acquisition. The rationale for this is based on SCVWD’s water supply goal to aggressively protect groundwater from the threat of contamination. SCVWD also has a water resources stewardship goal to promote the protection of creeks, bays and other aquatic ecosystems from threats of pollution and degradation.

This partnership would give access to existing and future State and local water bonds as a significant funding source. The current Open Space Credit, applied to subsidized commercial agricultural pumping rates of $6.5 million per year, is enough to service the debt on $65 million in revenue bonds, providing funds for acquisition of conservation easements on 6500 acres @$10,000/acre.

This may well be the biggest pollution prevention project ever funded by the District, but one that will benefit future generations with a clean, safe and reliable groundwater supply in perpetuity.

I am also campaigning to extend that previously mentioned farm water subsidy to urban community agriculture, including larger commercial ventures like Veggielution in San Jose and Full Circle Farm in Sunnyvale. I’ve asked Senator Jim Beall to consider a bill to remove the “commercial” restrictions for receiving the subsidy so all community gardens in the county could receive irrigation water at the lower rate. 

 
 After all, the Valley of Heart’s Delight still exists; it’s just hidden beneath our feet.

Being Unretired

 

Being Un-retired

As a Former Director, Santa Clara Valley Water District

                                

Written for Association of Retired District Employees, June 19, 2013

After 23 years of service, in 1995, I resigned my elected seat on the SCVWD Board of Directors and took on the responsibility of leading a newly-formed non-profit organization named The Silicon Valley Pollution Prevention Center whose mission was to identify sources of water pollution in our local watersheds and convince polluters to change behavior to eliminate their emissions so the water would not require so much costly end-of-pipe treatment. The board of directors of this organization were themselves executives of industry, government and the NGO’s that had filed the Clean Water Act lawsuit against the South Bay dischargers who were then in violation of their discharge permits. Board discussions served as ongoing mediation to determine pragmatic solutions to preventing water pollution and avoid further litigation.

Through numerous educational symposia, we worked with our stakeholders to identify activities and sources, which produced degradation of local water quality.  We worked closely with municipal and industry officials and started with “low hanging fruit” like used oil filter collection/recycling, and began the long process of replacing plastic shopping bags with canvas totes.  We worked hard to get manufacturers to recycle high-quality deionized rinse water and reduce their water demand and sewer discharge by 80%. Harder issues like land use and extended producer responsibility of electronic products generated by many Silicon Valley companies were a tougher nut to crack and eventually made the industrial members lose interest in continuing the dialogue. The Board voted in 2003 to close the organization after eight years and not renew my employment contract.

This timing coincided with my medical leave to get bi-lateral hip replacement, giving me back the mobility that I had suddenly lost earlier in the year. The next few years were the closest I came to being retired. My wife, Cari, was happy to have me home to complete many of my long-deferred maintenance projects on our creek-side home. I sold the last of the moving vans I owned, as I knew those days were certainly behind me. (Many ARDE members were former clients of Ferraro Van Lines.) I used the money from selling the truck to install 36 100-watt solar voltaic panels on my roof plus a solar water heater.

My desire to return to teaching to give back what I had learned during my unconventional engineering career took several years to materialize. I had applied to teach at both San Jose State and De Anza College soon after retiring from SCVWD. I had taught courses at Santa Clara University and Evergreen College during the mid 1970s, and in 1986 I taught a course at SJSU on Groundwater Remediation as a way to better understand the cleanup technologies and our precious groundwater basin.

In 2009, the SJSU Environmental Studies Department needed a lecturer, on very short notice, to teach Water Policy and Water Management to non-engineers in the College of Social Sciences. Since I already had prepared a syllabus for one of these courses when I had applied earlier, I was able to “hit the ground running” and was hired and have been on the faculty since then, enjoying the role of professor and resident “water guru,” as my department chair calls me. I’m also planning on applying to teach similar courses at Santa Clara University and give back to the Jesuit teaching syndicate that educated me at Loyola (Marymount) University in Los Angeles.

In May of 2013, I decided to get back into politics by applying for a vacant seat on the Santa Clara County Open Space Authority (OSA) Board of Directors to fill out the term of the director in my electoral district, who resigned when his family relocated.  This position also required someone who could “hit the ground running” so the OSA Board chose a candidate who had held the seat before the current incumbent.

However, when I interviewed for the OSA position I addressed the board in a way that would educate the agency and promote my passion for protecting water quality. Knowing the high porosity of the Coyote Valley alluvium and other ecosystem values it contained, I summarized all the reasons that the Coyote Valley should be preserved as permanent open space:

•       Laguna Seca should be preserved and re-established as a vernal wetlands, creating habitat and reducing potential flooding in downtown San Jose

•       A wildlife corridor across Coyote Valley should be established between Diablo and Santa Cruz range

•       Buffer setbacks from main stem of Coyote and Fisher Creek should be preserved to protect the ecosystem of the riparian corridor.

•       Remaining lands should be preserved as organic farming to minimize adverse impact to aquifer water quality

Finally I proposed a financing option for the Coyote Valley acquisition:

A Joint Powers Authority with Santa Clara Valley Water District. The rationale for this is based on SCVWD’s Water Supply goal in its ends governance policies to aggressively protect groundwater from the threat of contamination. SCVWD also has a Water Resources Stewardship goal to promote the protection of creeks, bays and other aquatic ecosystems from threats of pollution and degradation.

This partnership would give access to existing and future State and local water bonds as a significant funding source. The current Open Space Credit, applied to subsidize agricultural pumping rates, of $6.5 million per year is enough to service the debt on $65 million in revenue bonds, providing funds for acquisition of 6500 acres @$10,000/acre.

I followed this effort with discussions with four of the seven sitting directors of the SCVWD Board and received favorable responses.

In June 2013, I attended a SCVWD stakeholder meeting reviewing the Open Space Credit currently applied to commercial agricultural water rates and presented this proposal for their consideration as well.

This may well be the biggest pollution prevention project ever funded by the District, but one that will benefit future generations with a clean, safe and reliable groundwater supply in perpetuity.

After that, maybe I can really retire. What that will look like would involve continuing to raise fruit and vegetables at home and in the Guadalupe Community Garden, the first one in California permitted to use recycled water. It would also include continuing my campaign to extend that previously mentioned farm water subsidy to urban community agriculture, including larger commercial ventures like Veggielution in San Jose and Full Circle Farm in Sunnyvale. I’ve asked Senator Jim Beall to consider a bill to remove the “commercial” restrictions for receiving the subsidy so all community gardens in the county could receive irrigation water at the lower rate. After all, the Valley of Heart’s Delight still exists; it’s just hidden beneath our feet.

Take Me Shopping

My friend Frank Schiavo used to tell his Environmental Studies students "If you don't want to make garbage, don't buy garbage." This refers both to the product and the packaging. It also refers to the bags that your purchases come home in.

One of the low-hanging fruit we picked while I was running the Silicon Valley Pollution Prevention Center
(SVP2Center) was to produce and give away strong canvas bags to our seminar attendees. In green ink (of course), the bags were printed with our name and logo and the words "Take Me Shopping"

Today, more and more stores offer cloth bags to their customers for a dollar or less. They still offer paper and plastic bags, but the later may soon be a relic of our no-deposit, no-return society because they are being banned in city after city. The amount of plastic trash bags littering streets, parks and stream channels has finally reached our cumulative YUK level, as we see pictures of the devastating impact these bags have on wildlife when they float on the wind or stormwater runoff into creeks, bays and oceans.

The pollution prevention aspect of store bags took about dozen years to take hold in a major way since we printed those first bags in 1996 for our conference attendees. In fact, almost every issue we discussed during my eight-year tenure as Executive Director of the SVP2 Center, was often a sort of prophetic effort that would be on our radar for action long before it reached general knowledge as environmental problem.

The SVP2Center was created within a consent decree which settled a Clean Water Act lawsuit filed by a coalition of Environmental NGO's, calling themselves CLEAN South Bay. The suit was filed against the three municipal treatment plants in San Jose, Sunnyvale and Palo Alto that discharged waste(d) water generated in thirteen cities in North Santa Clara County. All these discharges were in violation of national limits for heavy metals such as nickel, copper and cadmium being dumped into the circulation-starved South San Francisco Bay.

The largest discharger of nickel into the sewer system was a hard drive manufacturing facility owned by a company named Komag, whose CEO at the time was Bill Whitmer, who served as a board member of the SVP2Center for most of my tenure as Executive Director. The design of this Board was intended to have executives from industry and business, seated with government executives, both elected and appointed and the executive officers of the environmental NGO's. Our mission was to identify the sources of various pollutants and determine the extent that these directors' respective organizations, from the top down, could modify behavior and thereby prevent pollution from reaching local water resources.

The trilateral Board was evenly balanced, with at first three, then four members from each sector. The seed money of $375,000 was contributed from the enterprise funds of the San Jose -Santa Clara Water Pollution Control Plant and the San Jose City Council appointed all but the environmental members of the Board. In 2000, the Santa Clara Valley Water District committed $350,000 for pollution prevention out of the $15 million per year revenue from its new parcel tax called Clean, Safe Creeks and Natural Flood Protection Program. This allocation was split between three pollution prevention programs: the Santa Clara Valley Urban Stormwater Pollution Prevention Program, The County Pollution Prevention Committee and our NGO. With the Water District's commitment to providing $150,000 per year of funding to our organization came a bylaw change to split the appointing authority between the SJ Council and the District Board.

The Board always included one member from San Jose and the Water District. Trixie Johnson, of the San Jose Council and Stan Williams, CEO of the Water District were charter members of the Board, with Stan serving as the Board's first president. Since Stan and I could not be properly evaluating each others performance, I was offered the position of Executive Director contingent on my resigning from the Santa Clara Valley Water District Board of Directors. Not willing to lose my vestiture in CALPERS, I was offered a position on the staff of the District, which would be under contract to allow me to serve as XO of the SVP2Center, with my performance and salary to be controlled by the NGO Board.

In order to have the greatest influence on business and industry, it seemed prudent to have both the Silicon Valley Chamber of Commerce and the Silicon Valley Manufacturer's Group represented on the Board to better disseminate practical pollution prevention initiatives to the broadest possible audience. These two organizations normally lobbied to prevent environmental regulations from impacting their members. If this new paradigm of ongoing mediations could avoid the long delays previously incurred through the litigation and appealed regulations, environmental protection could occur sooner and without the costly delays incurred during administrative hearings and court expenses.

Other industries, represented at various times on the Board, included Agilent Technologies, a spinoff of Hewlett Packard, the San Jose Mercury News, Pacific Gas and Electric, Pacific Bell, and IBM. IBM had learned the enormous value of pollution prevention after the $90 million cleanup costs from their leaking underground storage tanks which dumped solvents into the local groundwater basin in the late 1980's.
San Jose Water Company was also represented on the Board, having the largest corporate interest in protecting the quality of the water in the valley.

The Government sector directors included small cities like Milpitas and Santa Clara, and the County of Santa Clara. While the County had its own Pollution Prevention Committee, their program focused exclusively on business ("I'm from the Government and I'm here to help") Not willing to take the wrath of other departments within county government, the County P2 Committee refused to ever identify and try to prevent pollution generated by the County's own activities. Our organization had no such fear, although in the end, our successful efforts to move the County away from pesticide use resulted in a very oppositional director, who could not block this effort that was strongly resisted by his boss, the County Executive.

Another of our first initiatives was funded by the Integrated Waste Management Board in Sacramento. We received an $80,000 grant to identify ways and means to have oil filters removed from the solid waste stream and recycled at curbside in a safe and user-friendly manner. We ran a short-term pilot to determine the best container to issue to residents to place used oil filters in along side the used oil containers. This program was funded by a four cent fee on every quart of motor oil sold in the state. The goal was to remove the 2 million oil filters per year from the local solid waste stream that were previously going to landfills, some of which, unfortunately, were sited at the top of our watersheds.

I used to tell my Board that the most valuable product of our organization was the conversation that took place between the directors, and the resulting agreements to change the behavior which was causing pollution of our air, land or water. They may have agreed, but they generally felt funders were not going to contribute resources for us to just talk among ourselves. What the Board wanted was to increase our visibility in the community by holding some large events that could attract other decision-makers and the media. I was asked to organize such an event during my first year on the job.

The Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) held an annual three-day event called the State of the Estuary Symposium. I volunteered for the conference planning committee, with a notion that we could help contribute reports on our work, which focused on the South Bay watersheds and efforts to protect and restore health to our end of the Bay. The committee chair did not have a vision of having separate segments devoted to each geographical portions of the estuary. Once I realized this, I resigned from the committee and decided to hold our own one-day conference in San Jose, calling it simply the State of the South Bay.

While I served on the Water Board, I was also appointed to the Board of the California WateReuse Association, that was staffed by a law firm, which included former state legislator John Knox.
One of the staff members, Terri Taylor, acted as the event coordinator. Having been impressed again and again with her extremely well-organized events, I contacted her to see if she would consider assisting me in planning and staffing our event. Once she agreed, she gave me a punch list of the details and sequence we would need to follow to craft a successful event.

An essential element for a good conference was lining up a keynote speaker that would attract both attendees and other speakers. My first choice was Felicia Marcus, who agreed immediately to be our keynote speaker. I had met Felicia Marcus at another recent event and was quite impressed with her brilliance and wit, which charmed her audience while encouraging people to do their best to protect the environment. Felicia Marcus had been recently appointed as Regional Director of USEPA by President Clinton after demonstrating her incredible negotiation skills in settling a 75-yr. war between Los Angeles and Inyo County over the Owens Valley water appropriations. As Chair of the LA Public Works Committee, appointed by then Mayor Bradley, she was able to craft an agreement that allowed Mono Lake to refill by replacing the diverted water from the lake's tributary streams with some of LA's recycled waste(d) water, with financial aide provided by the State of California.

Our first symposium was a great success, impressing my Board and Silicon Valley at large. This of course lead to the expectation of more of the same. Over the next seven years, we held numerous other conferences focusing on the Bay and protection of our drinking water supply and the County's streams from urban stormwater pollution. We also held seminars for elected decision-makers to help them understand the linkage between land use and pollution of the groundwater and water demand, in general. My favorite conference was on the subject of industrial water use efficiency and recycling, delighting in hearing local companies dueling over who could use the least amount of water per widget or successfully reuse their process water, rather than simply discharging ultrapure rinse water to the sewers.

In the later years of my tenure, the Board took a noticeable shift. Two of my strongest environmental directors, Ted Smith of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition and Craig Breon of the Santa Clara Valley Audubon Society were forced to shift their attention to new business of their own NGO's and left the Board.
Both the Water District and San Jose's directors shifted their Board appointments to elected members, with Rosemary Kamei replacing CEO Stan Williams, and Chuck Reed replacing the ESD Director, Carl Mosher.
Bill Whitmer, who had been an industrial director originally, had resigned when he left Komag just before it declared bankruptcy. At the suggestion of Director Trish Mulvey, another environmental activist from CLEAN South Bay, Bill Whitmer returned to the Board as an environmental director and took over as Board President. This drastically shifted the governance of the organization from being managed by the Executive Director to being managed by the Board President.

With the environmental sector of the Board in a weakened state, the other sectors started to avoid discussing some of the thornier issues like land use decisions in vulnerable parts of the watershed and the lack of progress in marketing recycled water. At a public meeting, I had a very negative exchange with SV Manufacturer's Group's XO, Carl Guardino, about the proposed development of the Coyote Valley. This fiasco was being lead by John Chambers of Cisco Systems and one of Guardino's bosses. Guardino told my Board President that if I continued opposing this development, he would remove his representative from my Board. This resulted in a Board directive to submit all correspondence to the Board for review before transmittal.

At this point, it became obvious that our mission to prevent pollution was being subverted by the same forces that had decimated the environment during the last forty years of the valley's rampant growth and industrial laissez faire.

I decided to take an extended medical leave to have a bilateral total hip replacement. I attempted to hire a consultant to work with the Board to follow San Francisco's lead on adopting the Precautionary Principle in place of the inferior approach of toxic risk management. The Board flatly rejected this proposal and let the organization exist with no staff during the next four months.

During my recovery from surgery, while San Jose Water Company was replacing the water main and fire hydrants on my street, it dawned on me that this investor-owned water retailer had no interest in extending the recycled water system for use for firefighting or any other allowable uses, like landscape irrigation.
After trying to prevent the publication of an addendum report on the Obstacles to Water Recycling, San Jose Water Company offered their facilities for my Board to hold a clandestine meeting where they voted to not renew my employment contract and close down the organization.

Despite the fact that the current makeup of the Board precluded continuing our mission, it seemed inconceivable that Silicon Valley would lose two of its three pollution prevention programs in the same year. The County had disbanded its Pollution Prevention Committee, salvaging only the Green Business Program. Only the Urban Stormwater Pollution Prevention Program remained, which spent too much of its efforts hiring legal council to try to minimize the requirements mandated by orders of the Regional Water Quality Control Board.

When people asked why the Board shuttered the Silicon Valley Pollution Prevention Center, I would sarcastically reply that there was no more pollution to prevent. More to the truth, these directors probably believed that if no one was discussing pollution, then hopefully the community would not be hearing about pollution and not think about it, and then not get in anyone's way by trying to prevent it.

My retirement gave me a new sense of freedom that I had not enjoyed for these past eight years. Without a Board of Directors, I no longer needed to push an entire Board into alignment before I could engage in a political action. About a month later, I wrote emails to the circulation managers of both the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News. Some telemarketer had signed up all the duplex units on my street to get free delivery of both daily papers to households that only spoke Spanish. All these papers sat in the driveways, getting soaked in the rain, and pulped by the car tires, and the pulp and ink were starting to run into the storm drain inlet at the corner and directly into Coyote Creek. Citing both litter laws with $1,000 fines per incident and possible citizen suits for violations of the Clean Water Act, both newspapers responded immediately and were picking up their papers within an hour.

After a few years of freedom from being chained to my laptop to produce and transmit all the documents necessary to operate the Silicon Valley Pollution Prevention Center, I am again happily typing these stories into my blog. My hope is that some of this information will keep the spirit of pollution prevention alive in a more sustainable future.

Never Thirst!

Water Si, Drought No

A piece of a sheet of plywood, painted white with red letters saying, Water Si, Drought No, hanging above my garage doors is a remnant of a local water bond election held in November 1977, the end of a severe two year dry spell that re-taught all of California the meaning of the word DROUGHT

The practical meaning of drought is that there is less water available than we all cumulatively and separately normally expect to be using to sustain our normal daily activity. A great amount of California is plumbed together to share the same watering hole, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. When those watersheds don't fill up their respective upstream buckets every year, the State and Federal Governments step right in to divide the available amount of water to all the contractors who have agreed to pay for all the plumbing to divert this fresh water supply before it flows into the saline reaches of the San Francisco Estuary and the Pacific Ocean.

1977 was also the year that the Santa Clara Valley Water District signed up for getting even more of its future water supply from this already heavily shared watering hole. The District had argued and schemed to get as large a volume of water they could justify through this new straw in the Delta. Our straw, although relying on the Delta diversions, actually began at the western edge of the 2 million acre-ft. off stream storage reservoir on the county line called Los Banos Grande Reservoir, near State Highway 152, known as Pacheco Pass. This is the same pass John Muir walked through over 100 years ago when he first headed from San Francisco to Yosemite.

The price for this new aqueduct had risen from its initial cost estimate of $100 million to over $300 million in the five years since I was first elected to the Water District's Board of Directors in 1972. I had campaigned against this project during my first election, and continued to oppose it until the Water District signed an agreement with the State to reduce its take from San Felipe Aqueduct by 15,000 ac.-ft. and build a local water recycling system that delivered 30,000 ac.-ft., giving the District even more supply and greater control over its future supplies than just getting what the Feds decided was available during a drought year.
This good faith gesture came about only after the State withheld its support for their federal appropriations.

So in 1977, I actually campaigned FOR the bond election. And the political machine I brought to this campaign was my newly acquired 30 ft. bobtail moving van that was sent to me by my father, as we expanded our family moving and storage business from Southern California to San Jose. We had 8x16 ft billboards attached to each side of my truck reading Support Measure H (20). Our first female Board member, Linda Peralta, suggested we overlay the signs with something in Spanish, so we compromised with the slogan Water Si, Drought NO.

Considering we were in a terrible crisis with this two year drought, we still did not invoke mandatory rationing. The first year of the drought, water consumption spiked 25% above normal. The staff brought in its chief hydrologists to give us the extremely low odds of another dry year repeating the following year, which it, of course, it did. But this collection of politicians is the most conservative group you'll ever meet, present company excepted. They firmly held to the position that people should be allowed to reduce water voluntarily before being mandated to do so. Both San Francisco and Oakland's EBMUD had declared mandatory rationing, which included six cities in Santa Clara County that had delivery contracts from San Francisco's Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct from Yosemite National Park.

But 1977 was also the year I first learned the meaning of Public Relations. Because most of the media was reporting on how folks were responding to the mandatory rationing around the Bay area, our water consumption did actually go down, back to what we were using in 1975, but our staff at the water District didn't use 1975 as the base year, but instead used 1976, a year when every one's response to a dry year was to water their landscaping even more to make up for the lack of rain during that first dry year. So the Water District declared that they had managed to get a 25% reduction from its water users in the County without the use of mandatory rationing.

This PR was so obvious to the professionals, that the Public Relations Association of America awarded us their Silver Anvil Award, signifying, I guess that we had beat the facts into looking so shiny and to our advantage that our community good will would increase, though we did almost nothing to earn it. I was selected by our Board to travel to Houston, TX to receive this prestigious award, so I jumped on a plane and had my first experience with this steam bath for 6 million people called Houston.

While visiting my father's sister who was then living there, they informed me that an uncle of mine who worked for Hooker Chemical Company in my home town of Niagara Falls, NY would be stopping by also, as he was in town for business. When he arrived and I inquired of his business, he said he was there to receive some award from this Public Relations Association. Yes, we were both there to get the same award.

So we discussed what his award was for. He had chaired an industrial committee that had generated a report used by the municipal government in its prospectus for a new bond issue. The report detailed all the job and revenue growth projections for the major local industries in Niagara Falls, NY to garner a good rating with the bond market and convince voters to approve the bonds. The bonds passed and the city sold the bonds just in time to avoid filing bankruptcy. The local industry never expanded anything and the City of Niagara Falls got nothing more from industry except the toxic chemicals leaking out of Love Canal.
Today, much of the city's neighborhoods have decayed to slums, with roadways completely crumbled.

Back in San Jose, our own water District staff was getting ready to unload its own delusion on the Board. The $56 million dollars in revenue bonds that were just approved by the voters apparently was not nearly enough to pay for the in-county portion of the new aqueduct's delivery system. The Federal portion of the aqueduct was to end at a 12,000 hp pumping station next to Andersen Dam in Morgan Hill, giving the water enough energy to push water across the valley to Los Gatos, through Almaden Valley, where new pipelines would take water to and from a new 100 million gallon per day treatment plant close to the District headquarters. The bill for all this was suddenly over $150 million. The balance would not come from additional bond proceeds, but instead, cash reserves that would be built up by raising water rates. This essentially meant that current residents would be charged more so that they would be paying now for facilities to serve mostly future growth. And short of voting out the entire Water Board, there wasn't any way to stop this incredible ripoff.

The other shoe dropped in the next year when the staff highjacked the State's study for developing the additional 30,000 ac.-ft of recycled water. Instead of giving the water advanced treatment and recharging the recycled water into its efficient groundwater basin, a system was designed to deliver 30,000 ac.-ft of water to local farmers with a separate pipe irrigation system that would cost $2,000 per ac.-ft. which was immediately dismissed as infeasible. The District again dodged recycling water for a second time in the decade.

They would do it a third time in the mid eighties during Bill Clinton's administration after the new aqueduct went on line in 1987 at the beginning of a six year drought which saw the District draw $12 million from its cash reserves to buy water from the State water bank to put into its new aqueduct that was suppose to deliver 150,000 ac-ft. per year. This time, the recycled water would be made safe for recharging into the local groundwater aquifers, but the unit costs were still kept at $2,000/ac.-ft. by reducing the volume to 20,000 ac.-ft and designing a salt crystallizing disposal system for the concentrate from the reverse osmosis units that purified the water.

Ironically, the $12 million was the amount for the local share of a $100 million recycled water project that I designed for the County in 1971 that would yield 100 million gallons per day of recycled water, treated with reverse osmosis and clean enough for groundwater recharge. To sweeten the deal, US EPA offered to purchase the development rights on the entire Coyote Valley to preserve the valley as permanent agricultural open space, confining, for good, San Jose's southern sprawl.

Felicia Marcus, who was then Regional Administrator for USEPA, Region IX sent the Water District a letter indicating that the water costs for a groundwater recharge project using recycled water would be at competitive levels with other sources if the District would plan on using 80,000 ac.-ft. instead of 20,000 ac.-ft. But The District just ignored the letter, with Director Judge quipping that she wrote exactly what I wanted the letter to say. I'm glad someone, at least, admitted he heard me say it in a Board meeting.

A water recycling project was finally built despite all the District's attempts to avoid it thanks to the City of San Jose who built the project after the State issued a flow cap on their waste(d) water discharge into South San Francisco Bay. The City was found to be in violation of the Endangered Species Act for destroying salt marsh habitat of the California clapper rail and salt marsh harvest mouse. After trying to stall the project by pretending to be interested in being a parter in the San Jose recycling project, the Water District responded by paying the City less than $100 per ac.-ft. for delivered water, subtracting their lost revenue from a fictitious avoided cost they found in current literature.


So as the Delta ecosystem collapses and rains are again short of the state averages this year, drought is back again. The Water District is still studying recycled water. but is moving no where closer to it's green washed goals of meeting 10% of our water needs with this home grown supply by 2020. Instead, they have lobbied to get a purely ridiculous project authorized by Congress to get water from the San Felipe Aqueduct by bypassing the Los Banos Grande Reservoir to avoid the algae that grows in the lake when it gets down to 10% of capacity. This would probably cost as much or more than the original project, considering inflation and put the residents another billion dollars in debt with still no guarantee of water in dry years. Seems like what we've got is Drought Si, Water No, at least not recycled water and sometime no Delta water either.

Never Thirst!

Coyote Valley Draft EIR Comments

San Jose recently avoided a serious mistake when development interests abandoned a multi-year multi-million dollar campaign to urbanize the Coyote Valley, a 7000-acre valley south of the existing urban service area.

The Water District remained suspiciously silent about this proposal due to the obvious sympathy for growth and development in general expressed in many comments by the Board of Directors. The staff response to the problems identified concerning water resources were that it offered "new challenges."

My response is below and I re-print it here to keep these comments available to address any future attempts to renew this development proposal, which will always be a flawed use of land that is so important to protecting groundwater and reducing flooding on downstream reaches along Coyote Creek:

Patrick T. Ferraro, Retired Director
Santa Clara Valley Water District
351 Brookwood Drive
San Jose, California 95116-2742
E-mail: ptferraro5@gmail.com

May 22, 2007

Mr, Daryl Boyd, Principal Planner
City of San Jose
Department of Planning, Building and Code Enforcement
200 East Santa Clara Street
San Jose, CA 95113
Email only to: darryl.boyd@sanjoseca.gov

Dear Mr. Boyd:

Attached, please find my comments to the Draft Environmental Impact Report on the Coyote Valley Specific Plan.

Thank you for extending the comment period for review of this document. This will allow additional time to coordinate comments between stakeholders.

I would be happy to meet and discuss these comments at any time that is convenient to you, your staff or any of the Council members.

I hope that this planning process will bring the City of San Jose to a policy position that places sustainability and resources protection above any short-term gains that the proposed CVSP might appear to offer. The loss of value of the region’s natural resources cannot be justified and the proposed project should be replaced with an expanded open space plan that strives to maintain the quality and quantity of our water resources.

Never Thirst!

Patrick T. Ferraro, Former Director
Santa Clara Valley Water District (1972-1995)

Coyote Valley Specific Plan Build-out Environmental Impact Report

Comments on Draft released by the City of San Jose on April 11, 2007

The Draft environmental impact report (DEIR) addresses a myriad of interwoven issues. The ecosystem of the Coyote Valley is addressed from various perspectives in the subject document. I will focus on the water resources in this piece of the greater Coyote Creek Watershed. Since water is a fundamental resource enabling most human and other living activities, the train of impacts on water will be reflected back to every other aspect of concern to us as a community.

A negative impact on water is essentially a lessening of its value to both nature and the economic metrics of the human community. Assessing how a community values its water resources is a challenge that the Santa Clara Valley Water District is constantly measuring. Polls are in progress even during this review period for this DEIR. An existing measure of our community’s value of water comes from reading the Water Board’s Ends Policies that records their direction for operation of the Water District in order to achieve its mission. These policies should be incorporated into this Final EIR by reference to the SCVWD Website link: http://www.valleywater.org/About_Us/Board_of_directors/Board_Policies/index.shtm

Protected water resources are more than a local value, as our own use of these resources impacts the state and the nation as a whole. Harming water resources harms the economic sustainability of the region that shares in our communities’ natural wealth. Former New Jersey Governor and George W. Bush’s head of EPA, Christine Whitman, stated the value quite clearly: “Some watershed land must not be developed. It’s natural value in buffering, storing, filtering and recharging far exceeds whatever commercial value it may hold.”

The following review of the Hydrology/Water Quality section of the Coyote Valley DEIR are my opinions alone, and are NOT necessarily the current Water Board’s policy or CEO’s interpretation, but I would argue that they should be. My comments are made with the intention of providing planners and decision makers with a clearer image of the impacts under discussion, and a stronger sense of the value of the water resources, which can be severely impacted by such a plan were it to be built.


Section 4.8.2 Existing Hydrologic Conditions:
From a hydrologic perspective the “natural" tendency of Coyote Valley is to gather, hold and store water in the ground. If we are to "Design with Nature" (ref: Ian McHarg) we should honor that tendency by protecting the most permeable areas as permanently preserved water shed and providing sufficient and appropriate storm water management to prevent unnatural elevations of groundwater.


Historically High Groundwater Levels Show Coyote Valley Unsuited
to High-Density Hardscape Development

The 7000 acres (+/-) of the Coyote Valley are situated directly downstream of 200 square miles of watershed of Coyote Creek, which is somewhat controlled by two dams, named Andersen and Coyote. Together, these two dams can impound up to 115,000 ac.-ft. of runoff water from this portion of the Diablo Mountain Range, located east, southeast and northeast of the Coyote Valley.

In 1982 and 1983, when an El Nino condition gave the Coyote Watershed two back-to-back record (30 inches/year) rainfall years, late storms produced nearly 10,000 cubic feet per second flows over the spillways of the dams. The two years of exceptionally high runoff eventually raised the local groundwater levels to a condition closely resembling a wetland for the entire 10 miles downstream of Andersen Dam. This condition lasted for several years, and, in places today, the groundwater levels continue to be relatively high and close to the surface.

Section 4.8.2.1Coyote Creek/Coyote Canal
In 1950, when the Andersen dam was planned and constructed, the then-current landowners in the Coyote Valley brought suit against the SCVWD's predecessor agency to request relief from anticipated negative impacts of future operational releases through the dam into Coyote Creek for delivery of water to recharge the groundwater basins to the north. The land-owners claimed that high groundwater was already a constraint on using the lands of the Coyote Valley for farming and related uses, and, that additional releases of water into Coyote Creek would exacerbate that situation. While the suit was never litigated in court, the water conservation district constructed an isolated canal above the creek bed to deliver water through the Coyote Valley to groundwater recharge ponds near Metcalf Road and points further north. These ponds are used for augmenting the yield of the Santa Clara groundwater basin. The recharge capacity of these ponds are about 50,000 ac.-ft. per year, nearly half of the current annual draft by all the wells in north Santa Clara County.

Many high tech manufacturing firms, such as Apple Computer held options on much of the lands in the Coyote Valley in the early 1980’s. They took heed from this extremely wet two-year event, and relinquished their options and abandoned plans to expand their facilities in the Coyote Valley. Engineers from the City of San Jose met with the Water District staff to explore methods of lowering the water table in the Coyote Valley, but no feasible alternative was ever developed or proposed.

Section 4.8.2.3 Flooding Conditions
Being a relatively flat, porous area, the flooding conditions are somewhat dependent on the groundwater table elevation. When the basin is nearly full or beyond, and the area becomes a wetland, the capacity for the land to store runoff is greatly diminished since less of the rainfall can enter and store in the basin, except when surcharging the Laguna Seca on Fisher Creek. This historic flood detention basin in the northern section of the Coyote Valley received surface flows from Fisher Creek, which nature did not connect to Coyote Creek as it does today. Overflows from the Laguna Seca reached Coyote Creek from sheet flows moving down gradient. Ponding of the waters of Fisher Creek resulted in fine clay deposits in and around the Laguna Seca, sealing off the porous alluvium and contributing to the long-term (sometime multi-year) detention of the floodwaters.

The two dams upstream are operated in a manner that often prevents the runoff of storm events from flowing through Coyote Valley. However, when the dams are both full and spilling, subsequent storms will flow through Coyote Valley and then through south San Jose, then downtown San Jose and finally along Alviso & Milpitas and finally discharges to the South San Francisco Bay. Suddenly, a valley that had virtually no upstream watershed will have 200 square miles, capable of generating five to ten thousand cubic feet per second from a storm dropping only an inch or two of water in the watershed above the dams.

In a winter with heavy rains that last for many months, dam releases or spillway overflows occur for extended periods of time, like the El Nino induced weather patters of 1982 and 1983. In those years, the water table in most of the Coyote Valley reached the ground surface and often above. This condition is not conducive to either growing orchards and vines or urban development and damages from rot would be proportional to the level of development. Damage claims from the ’82-83 wet spell were not available, but many high tech companies with options on lands in the Coyote valley cancelled their plans for developing in this narrows. One company that had begun construction was ordered by EPA to cease construction and restore the site because they were in wetlands.

4.8.2.4 Coyote Valley Subbasins/Drainage Patterns &
4.8.2.5 Groundwater Resources
The soil material that constitutes the Coyote Valley is large alluvial gravel, deposited on the top of the bedrock valley during early geologic periods of Coyote Creek. It is these gravel deposits, often shaped into long, twisting lenses, that runoff water can recharge, be transmitted down gradient and then be easily extracted, where needed for human uses.

The Coyote Valley is directly upstream and tributary to the main Santa Clara Groundwater Basin that serves as the de facto largest water reservoir in our county. The Coyote Creek streambed, the adjacent Coyote Valley lands and the downstream percolation ponds combined have the capacity to recharge an average 50,000 ac.-ft. per year into the basin. Currently, 100,000 ac.-ft. per year (90 million gallons per day for one year) of water is produced by public and private pumpers from the main Santa Clara Basin, but well fields are operational, which can extract nearly 200,000 ac.-ft., if, and when, necessary.

In locations where gravel lenses intersect the surface, the SCVWD or its predecessor agency would ordinarily purchase the land and create a recharge pond. These ponds would then be seasonally filled with local runoff stored in reservoirs. After 1965, water imported from the lower Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta through state and federal aqueducts was also delivered to the recharge ponds. The federal San Felipe aqueduct, with a capacity for delivering 150,000 ac.-ft. of Delta water, terminates at the base of Andersen Dam, at the upstream end of Coyote Valley.

Recently adopted stormwater regulations issued by the State of California now require most major new and redevelopment projects to mitigate the impacts of runoff from a "hardened" landscape. One of these impacts is in the form of increased flows from more frequent storms, causing bank erosion and sediment problems. The other impact of major concern is water quality impairment due to pollutant discharge into the creeks and groundwater basin.

The Coyote Valley is of exceptionally high value for recharging, filtering and transmitting surface water that enters the groundwater basin. In order to best protect the water quality and stream bed morphology, a regional urban stormwater plan should be developed as part of the San Jose general planning process to have clear knowledge of stormwater impacts and mitigation costs available for local decision-makers. Within this plan, stormwater treatment and export in an isolated facility should be considered to protect the regional groundwater resources of the County. Such a regional stormwater plans will also be subject to review and approval of the State Regional Water Quality Control Board and the USEPA, Region 9 Administrator, under the Clean Water Act.


4.8.2.6 Groundwater Quality
Perchlorate: UTC used to operate a rocket test site on lands north of Andersen Lake about 1000 feet from the high water line. Unknown tons of perchlorate were generated during the testing of rockets as large as a Titan missile. These tests used to shake the entire Santa Clara Valley and send a plume of perchlorate and other chemicals for miles throughout the surrounding airsheds and watersheds.

4.8.3 Hydrologic Impacts
4.8.3.1 Thresh hold of significance
The paragraph after the bullets says it all. “The proposed project would result in the conversion of land that is currently vacant, fallow or in agricultural production to urban uses, thereby upsetting the existing hydrologic balance in Coyote Valley. Urban uses contain significantly more hardscape which are impermeable and result in an increase in stormwater runoff and less groundwater recharge. Other hydrologic impacts from urbanization include increased water demands and changes in (Read: degrading) water quality”

4.8.3.2 Flooding Impacts within the Development Area
4.8.3.2.2 Fisher Creek, Coyote Creek
The explanation of the FEMA process documents the perverse process that allows land to be developed in floodways. Our math wizards claim this impact is only 0.8 feet, less than one foot of rise of the flood stage, which is precluded by the National Flood Insurance Act. After using a similar model in 1994, the City of San Jose received similar advice and declared 2000 cfs of discharge from the Evergreen Valley’s development would be insignificant when it reached Coyote Creek. Those folks along Coyote Creek who were flooded in 1997 would argue that such large discharges are significant, if not within Coyote Valley, then certainly downstream. Mitigation capacity upstream exists only until the two reservoirs are full. Downstream landowners that receive damage from these increased flows are possibly involved in an inverse taking of their private property rights.

Impact H/WQ-3 The project will cause downstream flooding impacts due to the build out of the CVSP. (SIGNIFICANT IMPACT)

4.8.3.4 Groundwater impacts
From a community perspective, the greatest impact is to the downstream groundwater basin, which would be deprived of 10,000 to 20,000 acre-feet of water that currently flows through the subsurface from the Coyote Valley. What water did manage to escape around the local water pumps, would be degraded with the pollution loading, which enters the water through the new stormwater detention swales and porous pavement in roadways and open parking areas. Water quality in the groundwater in the Coyote Valley will continue to get worse as pollutants recycle through the basin or until connection to the basin for safe potable use is removed as a beneficial use.

Water demand of 22,500 ac.-ft. by the CVSP would use essentially all the storage capacity of the entire Coyote Valley sub-basin, which in some years would be insufficient. Recycled water plans of the Santa Clara Valley Water District are in early stages of development and cannot be assumed to be available to close the gap in the water balance of the CVSP.

How will the SCVWD know how much water extraction will cause subsidence? Mostly, it is clay deposits that are the type of alluvial deposits to subside. The subsidence occurs when the floodwaters that deposited the clay seeps through it into lower aquifers. This process has been going on for centuries in the area of the Laguna Seca. Since there will be no urban development in this periodic wetland, ground surface subsidence should not be a concern. Any other areas in the Coyote Valley with thick deposits of clay that would be used for urbanscape would be in danger of subsidence.

Impact H/WQ-4: Groundwater extraction will be a significant impact both within the Coyote Valley and in the downstream connected Santa Clara Basin. Impacts will be to both the quality and quantity of water available. Water in both the Coyote and the down gradient Santa Clara Basin will experience a continuous degradation of water quality. Ten to twenty thousand acre-feet of subsurface inflow to the Santa Clara Basin will be eliminated from the water balance of the northern basin. (SIGNIFICANT IMPACT)

4.8.3.5 Water Quality Impacts to Surface Waters
All the water quality impacts prescribed for surface waters are potential impacts to the groundwater quality that is connected by the very porous alluvial materials on the creek bottoms and some banks.

4.8.3.8 Impacts from Stream Erosion
There seems to be even less scientific certainty about the impacts to stream erosion than the other impacts discussed in the draft report. If the proposed CVSP is built as described, the stability of all downstream banks and channel bottoms will be impacted due to increased flows. The proposed Fisher Creek realignment may attempt to create a stable channel, but this might not occur due to unforeseen consequences, which is often the case when trying to understand and reproduce complex natural mechanisms like stream geomorphology and riparian ecosystems.

The CVSP downstream erosion impacts on Coyote Creek, all the way to the South Bay, will add to the cumulative impacts of all the hardscape created in the watershed. When critical velocities are exceeded, banks will fail, and sediment transport will increase, changing the cross sections in downstream reaches, thereby reducing channel capacity and/or destroying spawning areas.

Impact H/WQ-9 Higher flow duration caused by the proposed project will be a significant impact to downstream reaches of Coyote Creek. If implementation of Hydro Modification Plan basins is not feasible in the Coyote Valley, contributions to downstream in-stream improvements would be a futile ongoing and expensive effort for a problem that would exist in perpetuity. (SIGNIFICANT IMPACT)



4.3.8.9 Dam Failure

While the discussion of Andersen Dam describes the probability of failure of the structure to be extremely remote, no mention is made of the stability of the upstream Coyote Dam. For over a decade, the California Division of Safety of Dams has required the SCVWD to keep the Coyote Reservoir at half full due to the west abutment of the dam being on a massive landslide that could cause the dam to fail when the landslide moved down gradient, as it is certain to do at some time in the future. Keeping the reservoir only half full reduces the risk that failure of the upper dam would cause the failure of Andersen Dam, causing a flood wave that would certainly cause death and destruction all the way to the Bay. Coyote Valley residents and businesses would have the least amount of time to evacuate and would suffer the most casualties if such a catastrophe were to occur.

Impact H/WQ –10: The failure of Andersen Dam is a managed risk due to the instability of one abutment of the upstream Coyote Dam. Failure of either dam would cause a significant impact on the CVSP and everything downstream to the Bay. (SIGNIFICANT IMPACT)

4.8.4 Mitigation and Avoidance Measures for Hydrology and Water Quality Impacts

4.8.4.2 Long-term Water Quality Mitigation Measures

This entire section of mitigation/avoidance measures omits the one crucial element by which mitigation can be measured: PERFORMANCE

Without knowing what removal rate of stormwater pollutants entering each type of drainage device, the discussion proceeds as if pollution was not occurring. If performance standards could be in place for each local drainage device, with operational and maintenance budgets secured, better assurance could be made that all these mitigations are maintaining the real value to the water resources of Coyote Creek watershed.

An honest evaluation of this approach would be that it probably would not achieve the satisfactory result of preventing water quality degradation in the Coyote Valley subbasin and the main Santa Clara Basin. Since the State’s water policy is based on non-degradation of its water resources, it is doubtful that the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board would permit any stormwater management plan that allowed discharge of any of the usual stormwater detention devises within the unconfined alluvial material in the Coyote Valley or even some distance north of the valley.

The recreation of an isolated conveyance around the valley, like the original Coyote Canal, might be the only safe method of managing stormwater to protect the aquifers in the valley. The Coyote Canal was built by the Water District in 1950 to enable them to transport the water captured in Andersen and Coyote reservoirs through the Coyote valley without losing it all to the groundwater basin, as would be the case if they had used the Coyote Creek bed. Without using the Coyote Canal, the water table in the Coyote Valley would have steadily risen until the basin became a ten-mile long wetlands.

Collecting all the CVSP stormwater in watertight containers and pumping it through a suitable bypass conduit could conceivably be done, but the costs would be enormous and unlikely to be spent.

MM H/WQ 1.0.0.0 Withdraw the proposed CVSP as an urbanization proposal and begin to fund and transfer the development rights to a local public open space agency. If agricultural leases are granted by the agency, organic and sustainable farming only will be allowed by actual family farmers, marketing all produce for consumption within the state.