The Friendship Court redevelopment is scheduled to take place in four phases over the course of seven years. Phase one, indicated above, will begin in the fall.
PC: City of Charlottesville
Do-over
Multiple public housing developments in Charlottesville are one step closer to getting a badly needed makeover. At its Monday meeting, City Council unanimously approved two ordinances regarding the redevelopment of Crescent Halls, South First Street, and Friendship Court.
The Piedmont Housing Alliance will take the lead on the first phase of Friendship Court’s redevelopment, while the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority will head the work at Crescent Halls, as well as the first phase of South First Street.
In this year’s budget, council allocated over $3 million to CRHA for its projects. At its meeting this week, council needed to approve the funds again into a community development corporation operated by CRHA. Constructing and redeveloping Crescent Halls and South First Street will cost an estimated $34 million in total.
Once redeveloped, Crescent Halls—which houses mostly seniors and people with disabilities—will have 98 one-bedroom, and seven two-bedroom apartments, as well as improved accessibility and amenities. At South First Street, CRHA will renovate the existing 58 units, and build 142 new ones.
For Friendship Court, PHA plans to build 35 new multi-family homes and 71 new apartments off of Monticello Avenue. Forty-six will be set aside for current residents, while others will be available to people making between 80 percent to less than 30 percent of the area median income.
Construction on Friendship Court is expected to begin in the spring.
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Quote of the week
“The grass around here looks terrible. It’s up above our knees. If we have a mayor that’s sitting on the housing board, have y’all really looked at Westhaven?”
—local activist Rosia Parker, calling out the poor conditions in the city’s public housing at Monday’s City Council meeting
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In brief
Trump train strain
On Sunday, Richmond City Council candidate Mike Dickinson led a “Trump Train”—a caravan of supporters in their cars—from Henrico County into the city. That caused yet another altercation beneath the Monument Avenue Lee statue, where protesters stood in the roadway, preventing the caravan’s progress. Police responded to reports that a gunshot was fired and one woman was pepper sprayed. No other injuries were reported. The statue’s days seem numbered—last week, a judge said Governor Ralph Northam can remove the Lee statue by executive order, pending one last period for appeal.
Whine and dine
A disgruntled bride is suing Pippin Hill Farm & Vineyards for $32,000 after the Albemarle winery refused to refund a deposit for a canceled wedding, reports NBC29. Heather Heldman and her fiancé pushed their May 2020 wedding back to October when COVID broke out, but even with the postponement, just 15 percent of guests said they were able to attend. Heldman asked for a full refund. Pippin offered to return $9,000, saying it will have hosted a dozen weddings by the end of the fall, and it’s not the vineyard’s fault the Heldmans’ guests couldn’t make the trip. The wedding is just the latest event that’s gone sour in 2020.
Wild times
The city continues to expand the Heyward Community Forest, a swathe of newly protected land near Ragged Mountain. Last year, the city used a $600,000 grant from the Virginia Outdoors Foundation to purchase 144 acres of land from a private owner, thus establishing the forest. At Monday’s council meeting, the city appropriated $65,000 in VOF grant money to purchase five additional acres.
The new Heyward Community Forest, near Ragged Mountain, is full of beautiful spots to explore. Photo: Steven Barling
Just a quick drive from the most urban sections of Charlottesville is a unique wild environment—acres of boulder forests, sunny woodlands where blueberries grow, and a creek with architectural ruins along its banks. It’s all part of a 144-acre property called the Heyward Community Forest, snugged against the Ragged Mountain Reservoir. The city acquired the land last November, and once trails are completed, it will offer a set of new adventures to local hikers.
“It feels like Shenandoah National Park out there, but you don’t have to drive 20 miles to get to it,” says Chris Gensic, the city’s parks and trails planner. He first became aware that the property was for sale about five years ago when he spotted a real estate sign while helping to rebuild Ragged Mountain trails after the expansion of the reservoir. “We thought it would be nice,” he remembers, “if that could be purchased as an adjacent property to Ragged Mountain”—already a favorite outdoor escape for city dwellers.
Along with the Piedmont Environmental Council, Gensic approached the landowner, a member of the Heyward family, the clan that had already donated the nearby Foxhaven Farm property to UVA. Through a community forest grant from the USDA, written by Gensic, the city secured about $600,000—roughly half the appraised value of the property—and the owner agreed to donate the rest of the value.
“Chris is a bulldog,” says Devin Floyd, of the Center for Urban Habitats, which completed a natural resource inventory on the property in February. “He’ll have a vision and just keep going until he figures out how to do it.” In this case, the Heyward Community Forest became part of a sweeping swath of public land straddling I-64 and anchored by the reservoir—a place for solitary hikers and birders, naturalists, state ecologists, and schoolkids alike.
“There’s a big educational component to this,” says Gensic. Eventually he’d like to see a pavilion on the property for school groups to use, but the more immediate goal is to create trails. CUH’s survey work found a number of special features on the property that the trail design will showcase and protect.
Floyd emphasizes that the Ragged Mountains are a special environment—a higher-altitude terrain, rising from surrounding plains, where the underlying geology makes for strong biodiversity. At the Heyward property, his team cataloged plant and animal species, mapping the different habitat types that form a patchwork over the property. The CUH report declares this forest “uncommonly rich and varied.” Asked what’s notable about it, Floyd first mentions an unusually large collection of rock outcrops north of Reservoir Road.
“We find patches of that,” he says, “but we don’t find 20 acres of that. The ground cover is dominated by outcrops that are dome-shaped and flat. It’s just the most extraordinary forest.”
Associated with these rocky places are occasional old-growth trees—not especially huge ones, stunted by the shallow soil, but up to 300 years old, spared by the loggers of previous generations precisely because they were small and gnarled.
The property also includes small stretches of grassland, which Floyd points out were once a lot more widespread in Virginia than most people realize, and what he calls a “rip-roaring stream” that he hopes will be closely approached by the new trails. “This stream reaches a steep gradient on the east side of the property, so there’s falls and slides and a geologic element that really fills the air with sound and smells and everything associated with a mountain stream,” he says.
Along the creek is evidence of human activity from the past—remnants of drylaid stone buildings. “What we’ve come to understand is the families that lived in the Ragged Mountains had very little access to resources and they made do with what they had on their land,” Floyd says. “That produced an architectural signature that is unique in this area, possibly unique to the Raggeds.”
Finally, there’s a combination of habitat types the CUH identified as unusual enough to merit protection as a preserve within the community forest. One is an environment known as a Piedmont mafic barren, which features exposed bedrock on which native prickly pear cactus grows alongside lichens, mosses, and stunted trees. The CUH report stresses the rarity of this habitat—with less than 20 sizable, healthy examples known worldwide—and calls this habitat type “the crown jewel of ecosystems in our region.”
These barrens are found next to xeric woodlands, also locally rare, with widely-spaced trees over shrubs like huckleberry and blueberry. Trails will skirt around these remarkable habitats, offering visual access from a spur trail while protecting the preserve from the impacts of human traffic.
Floyd and Gensic are both excited about the potential for this property to host environmental education, given its easy accessibility from UVA and every primary and secondary school in town. “It’s pretty special because of its proximity to the urban core,” says Floyd. “It’s a resource for the citizens of Charlottesville to come and reboot, and there’s a lot to learn in the Ragged Mountains. Every time we look, we see something new.”
Recent low water levels in the Sugar Hollow Reservoir caused some community members to voice concern. Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority’s Bill Mawyer says the company’s strategy allows the reservoir to drop 19 feet below the top of the dam before transfer of water to Ragged Mountain is suspended. Photo by SkycladAerial
Bill Mawyer often asks a question that few can answer: Do you know where your water comes from?
“Frequently in our business, people are shocked by the amount of time and money it takes to maintain a reliable water system,” says Mawyer, executive director of the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority, the agency charged with collecting and treating water in Charlottesville and Albemarle County.
Though the governance of water issues is relatively calm today, the last two decades have been contentious, with deep divisions in the community over the best way to manage the region’s water resources. Albemarle County Board of Supervisors representative Liz Palmer recalls moving to the area in 1996 and observing the Moormans River near Crozet with almost no flow, while the dam at Ragged Mountain was overflowing.
“They were basically draining the Moormans dry, diverting all the water to Ragged Mountain Reservoir,” she says, “and nobody was protecting the river.” A severe drought in 2002, the worst on record, brought the city to within 60 days of running out of water and heightened public concern about overall supply, as did last fall’s water restrictions due to drought conditions. Palmer gained a seat on the Albemarle County Service Authority board in 2006 and was dismayed by the state of the infrastructure.
“The system was horribly antiquated,” she says. “The city and county had treated the Rivanna terribly.” After beginning the slow process of solving the myriad equipment problems, the RWSA turned its attention to preparing a long-term Community Water Supply Plan—a set of interrelated projects to take care of the community’s water infrastructure needs for the next 50 years.
Jennifer Whitaker, Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority’s director of engineering and maintenance, calls the proposed pipeline connecting the local reservoirs fundamental, and says “we cannot do without it.” Photo by Eze Amos
The crux of the current system’s challenge lies in Ragged Mountain Reservoir’s dependence on an almost 100-year-old pipe to carry 4 million gallons of water per day down from Sugar Hollow to keep it filled—Ragged Mountain’s own small tributaries cannot do the job. “The 13-mile pipe runs primarily above ground in an undulating fashion, and tends to come apart because it’s not deeply bedded,” says Jennifer Whitaker, RWSA’s director of engineering and maintenance.
Instead of spending many millions to replace that pipe, the RWSA devised a plan to solve an additional set of problems at the same time by connecting the Ragged Mountain and South Fork Rivanna reservoirs with a new pipeline so that water can be stored and shared between the two. “An interconnected system will be better for supply, for storage, for treatment and for the [Moormans] river,” says Mawyer. When the new pipeline connector is finished, the old one will be taken out of service.
Streaming service
Due to geographical good fortune, our water comes from clear mountain streams that feed into rivers, none downstream from other cities or processed wastewater. Small creeks springing from the Blue Ridge foothills trickle into Sugar Hollow Reservoir, northwest of Crozet, which spills into the Moormans River. The Moormans joins the Mechums River, flowing in from the southwest and also stream-fed, where they are rechristened as the Rivanna River (South Fork). The Rivanna, along with water from a vast 259-square-mile watershed, fills the 800-million gallon Rivanna Reservoir north of Charlottesville.
The third major reservoir in the system is at Ragged Mountain Natural Area, which sits in the northwestern crook of the I-64/Route 29 Bypass interchange. Armed with a brand new 129-foot dam, Ragged Mountain Reservoir’s capacity is the largest—a 1.5-billion-gallon bowl of water filled primarily via a 13-mile pipeline from Sugar Hollow. (Crozet and Scottsville each have small independent water systems fed by their own reservoirs.)
The South Fork Rivanna Reservoir, which holds 800 million gallons of water, lies north of Charlottesville. Currently, the South Rivanna water treatment plant processes about 8 million gallons of water a day—the majority of the urban area’s clean water supply. Photo by Skyclad Aerial
To serve Charlottesville and the urban areas of Albemarle County, the South Rivanna water treatment plant processes about 8 million gallons a day—the vast majority of the urban area’s clean water supply. Ragged Mountain’s water is processed at the Observatory treatment plant on UVA’s Grounds, and then intermingled with the Rivanna water in the spidery network of underground pipes—67 miles long—that form the main water system.
In 1972, the city and county created the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority to manage those systems for the whole region. Governed by a board of directors that includes three city and three county representatives plus one appointed member, the RWSA is its own entity—neither the Board of Supervisors nor the City Council has control over it—and its budget is self-contained as an enterprise fund collected from water bill payments.
BILL BREAKDOWN: Why county and city residents pay different rates
The city and county bill their water customers at different rates and via different agencies, so your bill may vary depending on where you live. The Albemarle County Service Authority, an independent agency, sets rates, reads meters, coordinates maintenance and replacement projects and collects funds from county residents and businesses, while the Department of Utilities, part of Charlottesville city government, does those jobs for the city.
Each entity buys processed water “wholesale” from the RWSA and then adds its own costs to produce the rate it charges customers. In 2017, the RWSA’s wholesale rate was about $1.95 per thousand gallons, plus a flat debt service amount allocated to each entity based on large capital project financing (such as treatment plant upgrades). From there, the city and county diverge in how they charge for usage.
The county uses a four-tier system in which its monthly rate per thousand gallons goes up sharply after 3,000 gallons of use, and again after 6,000 and 9,000 gallons, to encourage conservation. “The lowest tier is basically at cost,” says ACSA Director Gary O’Connell. “If you want to irrigate your lawn, and you’re willing to pay quite a bit more for it, you can.” For a county resident in 2017, an average use of 3,500 gallons per month would cost about $24.
The city, by contrast, uses a seasonal approach instead of tiers, charging users about 30% more in the summer months than in the winter, again with an eye toward conservation. For the 3,500 gallons example using an average annual rate for 2017, a city user would pay about $29.50 per month. The city’s rates are higher than the county’s due to increased maintenance expense, particularly the recent capital costs of replacing aging or leaky pipeline under city streets, some of which is more than 100 years old. As well, a 1981 agreement allows UVA, an entity that represents about 30 percent of the city’s customer base, to be charged for water use at roughly half the rate paid by the rest of city users.
The RWSA handles the “wholesale” side of the water business, maintaining infrastructure such as reservoirs, dams and pumping stations, and providing drinking water treatment at five plants spread throughout the county. The RWSA has two main customers—the Albemarle County Service Authority and the City of Charlottesville’s water utility department—and each of these manages the “retail” side, setting rates, checking meters and selling water to residential and commercial water users.
The water system has come a long way from its earliest days. “In the 1800s, Charlottesville’s only water supply was a well pump in the location where today’s Sacagawea statue sits at the intersection of Fifth and Main streets,” says RWSA’s Whitaker. More recently, rapid population growth has led to growing pains that culminated in the water wars of the late 2000s, and to new ways of looking at our future water supply.
Muddy waters
When unveiled in 2006, the Water Supply Plan proposed a new taller dam at Ragged Mountain Reservoir to store more water, and a nine-mile pipeline along Charlottesville’s west side to connect the reservoirs. The plan immediately sparked a pitched battle between community groups, city and county leaders and the water agencies. A conservationist group called Citizens for a Sustainable Water Plan, co-founded by Dede Smith, who would later be elected to Charlottesville City Council, raised questions about the necessity, expense and environmental impact of a new Ragged Mountain Dam.
Two more years of studies, presentations and public meetings addressed alternatives to the dam such as dredging the Rivanna Reservoir to make it deeper (which was rejected by the RWSA as insufficient and too expensive), as well as mitigation plans to replace the trees and woodland habitats that would be flooded by the expansion. The parties finally signed off on the Water Supply Plan in 2012, and construction on the dam was completed in 2014.
Originally a proponent of dredging, Smith’s current focus is on “freeing the Rivanna River” now that the dam has been built. “There is an opportunity here to realize the true benefit of the plan by removing the South Fork dam and relying on the Ragged Mountain dam alone to solve our water problems.”
In addition to conflicting views on the dam, the city and county also failed to see eye to eye on the need for an expensive new pipeline. During the plan’s negotiation from 2007-09, city representatives took the position that the pipeline was not a priority because Charlottesville wasn’t going to grow and thus didn’t need more water.
Gary O’Connell, now executive director of the Albemarle County Service Authority, was serving as Charlottesville’s city manger during negotiations between the city and county in 2007-09 to build a pipeline connecting the Ragged Mountain and South Fork reservoirs. He calls the city representatives who said Charlottesville wasn’t going to grow and thus didn’t need access to more water “short-sighted.” Photo by Eze Amos
Gary O’Connell, current ACSA executive director, was serving as Charlottesville city manager at the time and thought the city was being short-sighted. “All you have to do is drive up West Main or down Fifth Street and you’ll see [the idea of no growth] was crazy,” he says.
But county officials felt so strongly that both the dam and pipeline were needed for the community’s growth that they agreed that the county would shoulder the bulk of the projects’ costs—85 percent of the Ragged Mountain Dam’s $35 million, and 80 percent of the pipeline’s projected $100 million. “Without that agreement, the whole thing would have fallen apart,” says O’Connell.
Smith thinks the city made the right decision. “I don’t believe the pipeline will ever be built,” she says, “because the plan was premised on a water demand of 14 million gallons per day (MGD), and we have been stuck at less than 10 MGD for more than 15 years.”
To cover future eventualities, the Water Supply Plan contains a caveat: If the city should eventually use more than its 20 percent share of the new water capacity generated by the dam, it must repay its share of the cost of both projects to the county in an annual “true-up” process, which could run to the millions of dollars owed. To ensure accuracy, the county has installed meters in pipes at points all along the city/county boundary lines, to measure exactly how much water the city is using each year.
Pipe dream
The road to complete the next phase of the water plan is likely to be a long one, says Palmer, now a RWSA Board member. “Water will have to be on the city’s agenda again very soon, because we have to make a decision about where we place the pipe,” she says.
“The pipe” will be a 3-foot-wide ductile iron pipeline that requires a 20-foot easement to bury. Water-related construction projects are rarely low-cost affairs, often requiring deep tunnels or excavation through solid rock, navigating past roads and railroad tracks and around existing development. Though the pipeline’s projected southern wedge runs through mostly UVA-owned land around Ednam Forest and Farmington, the path becomes more congested as it has to skirt residential areas near Barracks Road and Albemarle High School and commercial tracts near Lowe’s and Sam’s Club. After the pipe is installed, says Mawyer, “we restore the land and replant it, and it’s generally invisible once it’s done.”
With a timeline that estimates three to four years to acquire the necessary easements along the pipeline’s nine-mile route and eight or more years to design and build it, along with managing various financing and environmental issues along the way, it’s a long-term project with a hefty price tag.
“The misnomer is that the pipeline is just a pipeline,” says Whitaker. “It’s also pump stations and intakes and pretreatment and treatment plants, and all of those pieces have to be built simultaneously. But the new pipeline is fundamental to the community meeting its long-term water needs and we cannot do that without it. The only question is when.”
The RWSA Board met in January and decided that beginning the full-scale pipeline project immediately would mean unwieldy spikes in staffing needs and debt financing, so they are currently looking at a time frame that would begin construction in 2027, but could shift that earlier as other items on their to-do list are completed.
Go with the flow
After last fall’s city and county water restrictions were enacted in response to drought conditions, many in the community wondered why the much-touted Ragged Mountain Dam had not prevented the need for restrictions. The answer is that the Water Supply Plan is only partly complete—the proposed pipeline is the linchpin to a full circuit that will assure a reliable water supply in the future.
Right now, low water levels in the Rivanna Reservoir, such as the September/October 2017 drop to 42 percent of capacity, mean that the whole system has to rely on the 64-year-old Observatory water treatment plant, which can’t fully sustain the urban area by itself. “It’s built to treat up to 7 million gallons per day, but practically it can only treat 2 or 3 million, and it really needs to be more like 10,” says the ACSA’s O’Connell. O’Connnell says increasing the plant is the next short-term project on the horizon, and that it can be completed in the next three or four years.
Bill Mawyer, a North Garden native, spent 15 years as assistant director of Henrico County’s public utility operations before taking the helm at the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority in November 2016. Photo by Eze Amos
And once the pipeline is built, explains the RWSA’s Mawyer, we’ll have a “circular circuit.” “If the Rivanna Reservoir gets so low that the pumping station there can’t function properly [as happened last fall], then we can switch it over and bring water up from Ragged Mountain Reservoir, where we have a huge amount of storage,” he says. “And when Rivanna is overflowing, we can store that extra water at Ragged Mountain.” The two sources will be connected, providing needed redundancy and reliability in the system.
Acquisition of the right of way easements along the new pipeline’s route is already underway, as are improvements to both the Rivanna and Observatory water treatment plants. Also ongoing is construction of an additional water line to connect the southern Avon area to Pantops, to ensure the eastern-most part of the county is in the loop. Next up will be projects to replace older Ragged Mountain water lines coming into the city, and pumps to increase their capacity and reliability and to be ready for the core pipeline project.
Sea change
The past two decades have also ushered in a keen awareness of environmental issues that water management policies can address. “In the early 2000s, in part because of the drought, the community started looking at meeting the ecological needs of rivers,” says Whitaker, “to make sure we maintain environmental health as well as human health.”
That new perspective meant a change in water release policies, particularly for the Moormans River, which is now allowed to flow freely downstream from Sugar Hollow Reservoir with limits on how much is fed through the older Ragged Mountain pipeline for storage. Similarly, the Rivanna Reservoir, when not spilling over the top, releases water to replicate what its feeder streams are contributing from the watershed, to better preserve aquatic life downstream.
Palmer wonders about the expectations of the public regarding the most visible measures of the water supply. “Reservoirs are meant to be drawn down, but what is the public’s tolerance for going into water conservation on a regular basis and watching levels go down?” she says. “That’s the way they’re supposed to work, but it makes people nervous.”
Marlene Condon, Crozet nature writer and photographer, recently sounded the alarm about reservoir levels in Sugar Hollow. “The streams in my area were drying up by last summer,” she says, “and the water authority should insist that people start conserving sooner during times of drought. When reservoir levels fall it means more is going out than coming in, and they should only be transferring water to Ragged Mountain if it is absolutely necessary.” The RWSA’s current water supply strategy allows the Sugar Hollow reservoir level to drop to 19 feet below the top of the dam before suspending the transfer.
CLEANUP CREW: Filtered water is constantly monitored for contaminants
Despite a flash fad in California and Maine where some are paying $15 for a gallon of completely untreated stream water for its supposed health benefits, water supply professionals recommend strongly against drinking raw water. “Crazy,” says Dave Tungate, the RWSA’s water manager, who goes on to list the ways in which water is processed to make it clean for drinking.
The first step is to remove the particulate—dirt and organic matter like leaves, wood and bugs. Raw water collected in reservoirs is piped to a treatment plant, where a coagulant is added to make the particles stick together (in a process called flocculation) and settle to the bottom of sedimentation tanks. At this point the water is visibly clearer, but “it’s not the stuff you can see that can hurt you,” says Tungate. “It’s the stuff you can’t see.”
Next, the water is treated and filtered for micro-contaminants such as giardia and cryptosporidium, microscopic parasites from animal activity in the river that can cause sickness in humans and their pets. New “granular activated carbon” filtration systems have been installed at every treatment facility in the county and are set to go online this spring. These systems filter out even more organic material in the water so that no acid byproducts are released during the final chlorination step.
The last phase balances the pH of the water to keep it neutral, disinfects it with chlorine, mixes in a corrosion inhibitor to keep pipe metals from leaching into the water and adds fluoride. “Water is a biological and chemical system and we are constantly gauging what’s coming in, and standardizing what’s going out,” says Jennifer Whitaker, the RWSA’s director of engineering and maintenance.
Toward that end, the filtered water is constantly monitored using an online turbidimeter for any kind of suspended matter from clay or silt particles to viruses and bacteria, and lab samples are tested for bacteria, algae, metals such as lead and nutrients (like nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizer), as well as for residual byproducts from the treatment process itself. Charlottesville/Albemarle water meets or exceeds all federal and state standards for water quality.
Occasionally, city residents may notice their water taking on a milky or cloudy aspect, but the cause is usually benign. “The most likely cause of cloudy water would be dissolved air in the water,” says Tungate, which occurs more often when cold water from outside is piped into a warm house. Tiny microbubbles form as the oxygen tries to escape, and will dissipate after a minute or so of sitting still.
Gary O’Connell, whose office walls are covered with framed images of brook trout and fly-fishing lures, agrees with the need for greater public understanding. “I’ve fished a lot in the upper Moormans above Sugar Hollow and there were years where that part was dried up,” he says. “The natural flows come and go, so to think that a reservoir is going to be the same level year-round is not realistic.” Still, he and the other city and county water managers are focused on how to plan for future environmental uncertainty.
“There’s a lot of research being done on adapting to climate change for water utilities,” he says. “We’re seeing the peaks and seasonal variation, dry periods and extreme rain, and we know that has to be factored in to our projections. We’ll be doing a big study in 2020 to look at long-term supply and I think that climate change will have to be a factor in there.”
Regarding the pipeline project, Board of Supervisors Chair Ann Mallek is resolute. “As representatives, we have to make sure that we stick to our convictions and do not shy away from agreements and plans we already have, because that will create chaos,” she says. “Everything takes longer than you think it will, so let’s get started. To people who cringe because we have to build two pump stations—well, so what? You put solar power on them and you go to town.”
For her part, Whitaker, who joined the RWSA in 2003, says, “this is a fantastic time, from an engineering perspective, to be in this organization. We’ve taken parts of this system that were very broken, from a capacity, pollution and safety standpoint, and fixed them, and now we’re designing for the future. Watching this unfold is very rewarding; we get to see the execution of the Water Supply Plan actually starting to happen.”
No, this is not a new brewery. These 8,900-gallon tanks in Crozet at the water treatment plant provide carbon filtration to the water from Beaver Creek Reservoir, and they’re going in throughout the entire Rivanna water system. Rammelkamp Foto
Summer of 2012, Charlottesville was rocked by two events that were ultimately reversed because of intense public opposition: the firing of UVA President Teresa Sullivan and a plan to add chloramines to the water supply.
On the latter, in a rare show of unanimity, City Council and the Albemarle Board of Supervisors, along with the area’s two water authorities, voted to halt a previously approved plan to add chloramines to the water supply, and instead opted for granular activated carbon filtration to meet more stringent EPA mandates.
Five years later, giant carbon filtration tanks—they’re called contactors—are being installed in all Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority and Albemarle County Service Authority water treatment plants, and work should be completed by the end of the year.
The chloramine controversy erupted nearly a year after the water authorities had approved the addition of the chlorine/ammonia combo, which was blamed for the off-the-charts elevated lead levels in the early aughts in D.C. homes—and children.
However, chloramines are cheaper and safely used in 76 percent of Virginia’s public water supplies, according to RWSA’s former executive director, and are used in Henrico County, where its current director, Bill Mawyer, previously worked.
Carbon filtration “helps remove organic products from water so when we add chlorine, it doesn’t create disinfectant byproducts,” says Mawyer. It was the byproducts that the EPA was tightening up on, and by filtering, “there’s an incentive to try not to let them form in the first place.”
Rivanna’s largest water treatment plant, South Rivanna, is getting eight of the granular activated carbon contactors, says Mawyer, while Crozet, North Rivanna, Observatory and Scottsville are each getting two, a project that is “close to $30 million,” he says.
Even after the capital investment, filtration will continue to cost an estimated $1 million a year to replace the carbon in the contactors, says Mawyer.
And what about that nine-mile pipeline?
As controversial as chloramines were, that wasn’t the biggest water drama to roil the community. That would be the Ragged Mountain Reservoir mega-dam, which split the community for years into dam supporters and those who favored dredging the silting South Fork Rivanna Reservoir.
Part of the dam plan, which was approved in 2011, included a nine-mile pipeline from the Rivanna reservoir to fill Ragged Mountain, which is now 96 percent full, according to Mawyer, using water piped instead from Sugar Hollow Reservoir.
The nine-mile pipeline plan languished, and Mawyer says the water authority will turn its attention to determining a route and obtaining easements in the next few months. The pipeline will transport water both to and from Ragged Mountain, “uphill both ways,” says Mawyer, and require pump stations at both ends. In 2009, it was estimated to cost $62 million.
Some, like former city councilor Dede Smith, who opposed the Ragged Mountain dam, are dubious. “As for the pipeline, I have contended for a long time now, that it will never be built,” she writes in an email. “The irony is that what we have now is RWSA’s original plan for the Community Water Plan, and that is an expanded Ragged Mountain Reservoir using the clean Moormans River as its source. While the introduction of a South Fork Rivanna pipeline may have brought majority approval to the plan, the pipeline was always unrealistic both in logistics and cost. And in truth, now that the expanded RMR is filled, the original plan is working pretty well…at least for now.”
Signs prohibiting pets at Ragged Mountain Natural Area were recently posted in its new parking lot to limit confusion and people breaking the rules. Staff photo
In a 6-2 vote, the Charlottesville Parks & Recreation Advisory Board recommended on October 19 that City Council allow biking on some trails at Ragged Mountain Natural Area, but some sports enthusiasts still have their concerns about the endorsement.
Dave Stackhouse, an advocate for shared use of the trails, says he’s disappointed the board recommended no bikes in the southeast and southwest corners of the natural area because of its “unsuitable terrain” and a desire to protect sensitive areas.
“Terrain can be handled with good trail design, which is needed anyway,” he says. “And bikes wouldn’t cause any more difficulty or damage than hikers in the southwest corner. Plus, those areas being closest to I-64 won’t be peaceful for hikers, so why not have them as shared-use?”
Shared-use in this area, he says, would allow bikers to complete a loop around the site by riding across a floating bridge.
At the meeting, a series of motions led to the parks & rec board’s recommendation, beginning with a unanimous vote to not lift the natural area’s prohibition on dogs and to allow trail-running, hiking, fishing and non-motorized boats.
Cyclists, runners and dogs have been banned from Ragged Mountain since it opened as a natural area in 1999. Multiple meetings on the controversial topic have been highly attended.
“City Council still needs to decide this, so we’re concerned what the trail plan and what the specifics of the ordinance will be,” Stackhouse says. “We expect the hiker-only vocal minority to continue to exaggerate the impact of bikes and we expect them to speak strongly against shared-use during the public comment portion when the matter is before City Council.”
The planning commission will make its own recommendation November 9, before City Council ultimately decides on the fate of Ragged Mountain, which could happen as early as December.
“The purity of the water should be the main issue,” says Afton resident Cathy Clary, “especially with all the different water controversies that are bubbling up all over the nation.”
Those advocating against allowing bikes and dogs on the property have long cited the environmental effects of doing so.
About the bikers, Clary says, “They want to do what they want to do and they don’t want to accept the fact that what they want to do has negative consequences.”
She adds, “You’ve gotta draw the line somewhere. I would hope that the public interest would trump—if you’ll forgive me—these individual private interests.”
Rachel Thielmann is an advocate for allowing mountain biking at Ragged Mountain, and she says her whole family would benefit. Photo by Eze Amos
The city of Charlottesville has so far held nine public meetings on the long-discussed topic of whether Ragged Mountain should remain a natural area or be opened for other uses, such as mountain biking or dog walking. Though a final decision looms, some say public opinion is cut and dried.
A year-old poll taken by Charlottesville Tomorrow showed that 83 percent of voters would prefer to see some shared-use trails on the property. Updated tallies, presented by the Charlottesville Area Mountain Bike Club and Rivanna Trails Foundation member Jon Ciambotti, show that while 84 people at public meetings since November 2014 have spoken out against bicycle usage at Ragged Mountain, 220 have asked the city to let the people ride.
Those numbers, according to the city, include some of the same people who are counted multiple times.
Rachel Thielmann, a mother of three girls on a local mountain biking team, is one of those advocates for shared usage.
“It would be awesome if my kids and I had the opportunity to get over to Ragged Mountain for a quick ride and be home in time to get dinner ready,” she says. “The reality is that nothing exists that fills that need.”
Opponents of shared trails at Ragged Mountain often cite Preddy Creek as a better place to ride, she says, but its Albemarle County location up Route 29 is nearly in Greene County and a 40-minute drive.
“Charlottesville is our community,” she says. “We live and work here, send our kids to school here, pay taxes, shop here and eat here. We are constantly encouraged to think local in our choices and this is an awesome mentality that we support. So why not be able to ride local, too?”
City spokesperson Miriam Dickler says biking is currently allowed in all city parks except for Ragged Mountain and the Ivy Creek Natural Area. But on a map of city parks, Ciambotti points to the three largest green areas: Pen, Darden Towe and McIntire parks, which are dedicated to other uses. At the first, he says a golf course spans across a large chunk of what would be a riding area, sports courts cover the second, and the third will soon be a botanical garden designated as a natural area. So shared-use trails at Ragged Mountain, he and Thielmann agree, are the perfect fix.
Thielmann calls shared-use opponents a “relatively small, but extremely vocal group” who often cite the ecological benefit of only allowing walkers and hikers on the trails. That’s a claim that has “absolutely no scientific support,” she says, because multiple studies have shown that bike tires on trail systems are no more impactful than hiking shoes or boots.
Though former city councilor Dede Smith, who has long advocated for keeping the area around the reservoir natural, did not respond directly to those studies, she says protecting Ragged Mountain is a matter of public health.
“To deliberately remove those protections at a time in our history when this original water supply has again become our only clean water reserve for the future, and when contaminated drinking water is in the news on a daily basis, is simply absurd,” she says. “To do that is comparable to denying climate change.”
As for the public opinion polls, she says the biking community brought large families of bikers to the first few public hearings, while those advocating for maintaining one of only two natural areas in the community “dominated” most of them.
“We’ve been amazed at how this process has not been based on facts,” Ciambotti says. “And how it’s mostly been based on hyperbole, fear and emotions.”
Mountain bikers often get a bad rap, he continues—they’re not all ripping Red Bulls in between backflips on their bicycles. In fact, many have the same overall goal as those who hope to keep the ban on bikes: preservation.
Members of CAMBC—the mountain biking club—are stewards dedicated to building sustainable trails in the city and county, he says. In fact, he estimates that they have already built about three miles of trail at Ragged Mountain in conjunction with the city.
Most of the mileage mountain bikers are proposing to make shared use is on the backside of Ragged Mountain—about an hour-and-a-half hike from the parking lot—leaving a good deal of the most convenient trails to be designated for hikers only. Some trails would remain for walkers only, his group proposes.
And when detailing damage to the environment, Ciambotti says the real factor of human impact is the level of use.
To be considered a natural area, Virginia state parks guidelines require 5 percent or less of the acreage be used for trails. Ragged Mountain, which has 980 acres and about eight miles of trail, is at 1.9 percent, according to Brian Daly, the director of the city’s parks and recreation department.
CAMBC has also offered to enter a memorandum of understanding with the city that would make the group liable for any accidents and require it to maintain the trails—to keep them clean and alert staff of any fallen trees across the path.
At the end of the day, Ciambotti says the argument is about exclusivity and who should be able to enjoy the great outdoors.
“I don’t want to bike on the road next to a garbage truck,” he says. “I want to bike in nature.”
Parks and Recreation Advisory Board members have indicated that they would like to make a recommendation to the Planning Commission and City Council, which will ultimately vote on the matter, at their October 19 meeting.
Updated October 7 at 9:25am with a more accurate headline and to reflect that nine public meetings, instead of nine public hearings, have been held on the potential shared use of Ragged Mountain.
Updated October 11 to note that the numbers of those for and against biking include some of the same people who commented multiple times.
