Shell Games in the Headwaters (or Chicanery on the Mountaintop)

Shell Games in the Headwaters (or Chicanery on the Mountaintop)

by Jason Rainey

Editor’s Note: In our feature article for the Sierra Citizen, we engaged journalist Eric Winford to provide an overview of development pressures in the High Sierra and to present a multitude of perspectives on the largest proposal for development in the South Yuba and North Fork American river watersheds. The following piece by SYRCL executive director Jason Rainey takes a jab at the Foster-Syme proposal, dissecting the latest water supply options offered by the developers. We look forward to learning about their plans for dealing with headwater sewage.

In the summertime in high alpine environments, we expect to be greeted with the faint murmurs of headwater streams, springs, and seeps trickling toward river courses. On Donner Summit, those delicate sounds are being drowned out by a chorus of concern about the proposed Foster-Syme (F-S) development. And for good reason.

An increasingly vocal opposition to the proposal is growing in advance of Foster-Syme’s intention to submit their plan to the County of Placer early in June. Local Serene Lakes residents are justifiably up in arms over the plans to dredge and manage their lake as a water storage reservoir. Meanwhile, residents downstream of the project have looked to SYRCL for leadership in confronting the impacts to rivers and streams.

The list of concerns raised about the proposal to clear alpine lands for nearly 1,000 housing units, a suite of mixed-use buildings, and a network of roads encircling public land is predictably long and varied. The shaded green maps produced by F-S and the "conservation community" tagline aren’t fooling those who can do the math: with the Foster-Syme pledge to keep 70 percent of their 3,000 acres in "open space," we can count on a minimum of 900 acres of our headwaters converted to rooftops and asphalt. But that’s just the beginning of the funny number games.

Project manager Mike Livak convened a meeting with stakeholders on May 24 to discuss consultant memos prepared for addressing water demand and water supply for the proposed development. Upon reviewing the documents in advance of the meetings, I thought that perhaps I was being invited to a "where’s the water" shell game. At the meeting, Livak qualified the technical memos by stating that they were "preliminary and exploratory," that they are "not a plan" for water supply, that they should be viewed as "an outline of options," and that we should be mindful that the options before us are "not exhaustive" in scope. My shell game suspicions were confirmed.

Rules of the "Great Summit Water

Shell Game"

Assume less than half occupancy for your massive proposed development (say, 46 percent).

Determine a total acre-foot annual water demand to meet your occupancy projections (235 acre-feet, not including snow-making. Really).

Place water supply options on the table—and ensure that they total double your expected demand (say, 207 percent), so that you can claim meeting double your projected demand (despite your less-than-half occupancy projections).

Cover them with coconut shells, mix them around, and see who’s not paying attention.

Leave a few options under the table, out of view (because the game is just beginning).

Keep Your Eyes on the Shells

Behind shell #1 is … groundwater. Their engineers didn’t find any reliable supplies, determining that indeed "impermeable bedrock layers" of granite at the tops of mountains do not make good aquifers.

Behind shell #2 is … Serene Lakes. F-S bought the land under the conjoined Serene and Duzura Lakes, which is completely surrounded by the existing Serene Lakes subdivision. In this option, F-S would dredge the perimeter of the lakes to expand storage capacity, reengineer the plumbing of the lake to allow for greater draw down, and cut a channel between the lakes to ensure that they don’t become hydrologically disconnected when lake levels flucuate to serve their water needs. According to the math, this option supplies all but 5 acre-feet of projected demand. According to aesthetics, this turns an alpine lake into a bathtub ring reservoir. According to real estate values, this slaps the existing Serene Lakes property owners in the face.

Behind shell #3 is … groundwater, again. The F-S property may have "insufficient" groundwater supply, but the Sierra Lakes Water District has two productive groundwater wells, which they retain as backup water supply for drought years and emergencies. F-S could buy this water, which yields a total of 105 gallons a minute. If it can pump at this rate every minute of the year, in any climate conditions, the math tells us that the wells would produce 170 acre-feet a year, supplying "72 percent of the annual water demand" for their development. Now that’s optimism!

Behind shell #4 is … Lake Angela. You know, the highest lake in the South Yuba headwaters. This water is already allocated to serve existing needs and projections, but this lake could be seasonally manipulated, a new diversion point added, the water transferred out of the South Yuba and into the North American watershed, and then 67 percent of the F-S water demand could be provided during the July through February months. But, since this water is already allocated, all this reengineering of the Yuba headwaters would only supply water "on a short-term basis."

Behind shell #5 is … not a "dam," but an "impoundment" or two (the developers implore restraint in using the term "dam" when characterizing the "amenity" reservoir of their proposed "Lake Camp." I’ll oblige in this article.) One reservoir would be managed to be full and look pretty (maybe folks from Serene Lakes could take in the view when they’re looking at their "bathtub ring") and reflect the images of new condos and houses. The other excavated impoundment, in an intermittant stream channel, would capture and divert up to 85 acre-feet of water annually that would otherwise flow to Palisades Creek and the Wild and Scenic North Fork American River. This option gets you 36 percent of the way toward your projections, plus the cost of new water treatment facilities and conveyance piping.

Five shells have thus far been revealed, and a combination of all of them would be a hydrologic mess in the headwaters of two remarkable rivers. Okay, they could be cobbled together to satisfy the calculations.

Those of us who’ve spent time under the circus tent know that—when orchestrated by professionals—shell games are a masterful form of charades. The real prize is hidden under the table, and it is the South Yuba river flowing through Van Norden Meadow. If the grandson developer of a "Pave the Bay" sprawl mogul asks you if raising Van Norden Dam promotes meadow health, it’s time to start paying attention to the chicanery on the mountain top.

To learn more and get involved, visit www.yubariver.org or contact Jason Rainey: jason@syrcl.org. Send donations to "SYRCL—Yuba Headwaters Campaign Fund," 216 Main Street, Nevada City, CA 95959. And more info at:

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