Tag: Rich Gullick

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Water line to nowhere: Former city councilor calls out ‘potentially illegal’ pipeline vote

Despite maintaining that it won’t decide when to build the full pipeline until the results of a new study come in next year, the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority plans to proceed in November with the $7 million, one-mile chunk of pipeline, which will stay empty.

At a meeting in late August, members of the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority’s board of directors voted to add $7 million to its budget to install part of a controversial water pipeline in Albemarle, even though just a month before, they said they had no plans to start building it.

Critics say the $7 million, one-mile pipeline is political and a “boondoggle.”

It’s part of an $82-million, nine-mile pipeline that will connect the South Fork Rivanna and Ragged Mountain reservoirs. The one-mile section that the RWSA now has the funds to build will run through the Birdwood Golf Course, which will be closed for reconstruction.

“I did say there was no plan [to build the pipeline], but that was really to the nine-mile section of pipe with exception to this one-mile section of pipe,” says RWSA Executive Director Bill Mawyer. “Maybe I should have put an asterisk in there [and said] except for the Birdwood section.”

Dede Smith, a former city councilor who has a long history of opposing the pipeline, says building at Birdwood now because it’s being renovated—and assuming it won’t be renovated again in the next 50 years—is “ludicrous.”

The pipeline was included in a community water supply plan created between 2002 and 2012, which deemed the project necessary to provide enough water for the community in the coming years. City Council has instructed that construction on the pipeline begin between 2027 and 2040 to meet those demands—but its necessity has been hotly debated.

“This isn’t about Birdwood, or the necessity of the pipeline, it’s political,” Smith said in an email to the board the day before it voted. “And the decision to spend $7 million turns to potentially illegal.”

She asked board members to consider what the city and Albemarle County Service Authority could do with $7 million to upgrade their infrastructure and further reduce water demand—the reason, she says, there’s no need for the pipeline.

In-depth research by Rich Gullick—a former RWSA director of operations, who resigned from his job in protest in February—concludes that actual water demand has been far less than what the authority projected, and the pipeline won’t be needed until at least 2048—or 2062, if the Ragged Mountain Reservoir water level is raised an additional 12 feet first, which Mawyer says can’t happen unless demand increases significantly.

According to Mawyer, the current water demand in the local service area is about 9 million gallons per day, compared to a supply of 16 million gallons per day.

Citing another study, he says the community will need more water by 2040—compared to Gullick’s calculation of two decades later—and the RWSA has commissioned a new study to reevaluate the projected demand.

Despite it maintaining that it won’t decide when to build the full pipeline until those results come in next year, the board plans to proceed in November with the $7 million, one-mile chunk of pipeline, which will stay empty.

“We’ll plug the ends and leave it in that condition,” says Mawyer.

Gullick calls it a “boondoggle,” and says it’s clear why the RWSA is rushing to build the first mile of the water line.

“All this is is a ploy to get the pipe started so that they can use it as an excuse to finish it,” he says. “They’re showing their hand, and they clearly don’t care what the new data says.”

The RWSA has claimed the pipeline won’t degrade while it sits unused and unfilled, possibly for decades, but Gullick says he doesn’t buy it.

“Water in the soil will be more corrosive than the water in the pipe,” he says. “What doesn’t degrade over time? It’s metal.”

Gullick was unable to attend the August 28 meeting where the vote to build at Birdwood was held. So was Smith.

“To selectively tax urban water rate payers $7 million for a project that has been both discredited by current data and politically motivated (worse yet by those who will not pay) is scandalous at best,” Smith said in her letter.

Smith and Gullick say Liz Palmer, a board member and Albemarle County supervisor, has been a main advocate for the pipeline, though her constituents in the Samuel Miller district don’t pay urban water bills. County rate payers will pay 80 percent, and city ratepayers will pay the remaining 20 percent.

Palmer counters that she has many constituents on public water, particularly south of I-64 and west of Fifth Street in developments such as Redfields and the many apartment complexes in the area. Once the pipeline is built, the RWSA will close the nearly 100-year-old Sugar Hollow line, and the Moormans River will “return to a more natural flow,” as required by a Department of Environment Quality permit, she says in an email.

Smith also says the most surprising vote came from Gary O’Connell, the executive director of the Albemarle County Service Authority and former city manager, “whose only role on that board is to protect the interests of county water rate payers. …And it is the county water rate payer who will be hurt the most when their rates go up to pay 80 percent of the cost of this pipeline to nowhere.”

O’Connell says the ACSA board has consistently supported the water supply plan, and within the agreement, its customers are also allocated 80 percent of the capacity of the new pipeline.

He says the ACSA is very mindful of its rates, and the average residential bill is about 22 percent less than that of a comparable city customer. Adds O’Connell, “Our area is growing, so we need to be focused on a growing water system.”

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Leaky-gate, part 2: RWSA responds to cover-up accusations

The Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority declared a drought and imposed mandatory water restrictions when the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir, pictured full here, lost millions of gallons of water last fall. Most of that water loss could have been prevented. Photo by Skyclad AERIAL

It was late June when a whistleblower, who recently resigned from the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority to protest an $80-million water pipeline it wants to build between two reservoirs, went before its board of directors to denounce it.

Rich Gullick, the authority’s former director of operations, handed over several pages of in-depth analysis on why he believes the pipeline isn’t needed, and criticized the authority for attributing millions of gallons of water loss and mandatory water restrictions to a drought last fall, when two leaky gates were the culprit.

A month later, at the board’s July 24 meeting, RWSA Executive Director Bill Mawyer took the chance to respond to Gullick’s comments—in the form of a five-page public letter.

“We’ve always been upfront with that data to anyone and everyone who asked,” Mawyer told the board, adding that Gullick’s use of the words “misinformation, cover-up and conspiracy” were concerning.

Mawyer said the purpose of the pipeline project from the South Fork Rivanna to the Ragged Mountain reservoirs, which was included in a community water supply plan created between 2002 and 2012, is to ensure that the local urban area has an adequate supply of water for the next 50 years, including “during extreme drought conditions” like those in 2002, the worst drought on record, when mandatory water restrictions then included no outside irrigation, closed car washes and restaurants serving food on paper plates.

As for the water supply plan, “This was a well-vetted plan for 10 years,” Mawyer told the board. “This was not a 30-minute discussion someone had at a social event.” He did not mention that the plan was highly controversial then, and even today, many question the need for the pipeline.

Gullick, who has created the website cvillesensiblewaterplan.org for his extensive data on the pipeline, says Mawyer’s five-page response made him queasy.

“It actually churns my stomach to read this many misleading and false statements,” he says. “It sounds good on the surface, I’m sure, to a lot of people, but boy is it not.”

Perhaps his most compelling evidence against the pipeline is that projected demand for water has significantly decreased since the community water supply plan was created.

Local conservation efforts and plumbing improvements have caused a decrease in water demand since 2000, and the demand is now the same as it was in 1985, says Gullick.

The RWSA, however, has recognized this and is currently spearheading a new study to determine water demand, which will be completed in 2020. With current projections, Gullick says the pipeline won’t be needed until at least 2062. Even using the same rate predicted in 2004, the former employee says it will be 2048 before water demand meets the estimated safe yield, which is the maximum withdrawal rate available from the water supply to withstand the worst drought on record.

In Gullick’s original comments to the board, he said this could be met by filling the Ragged Mountain Reservoir its final 12 feet, and building the pipeline later when demand actually increases, but as Mawyer said in his response, “contractually, we cannot do that.”

The RWSA has an agreement with the city and the Albemarle County Service Authority to raise the Ragged Mountain Reservoir its final 12 feet only when demand reaches 85 percent of the water supply, which hasn’t happened, says Mawyer.

However, Gullick points out that at the April 4 board meeting, when Mawyer also said this, board member Liz Palmer corrected him. “If the city and county would like to fill the entire Ragged Mountain Reservoir, we agree, it could start tomorrow,” she said. Responded Mawyer, “True.”

The executive director also said in his response that last fall’s water restrictions were mandated in October “as the result of rapid decline in the [South Fork Rivanna Reservoir] water level from September 17-October 3.”

Gullick says Mawyer “cherry picked” that data.

From September 17 to October 3, the stored volume in the reservoir dropped 260 million gallons, but according to Gullick, nearly 230 million gallons were lost from August 3 to September 17, which was 46 percent of the total 490 million gallon decrease from August 3 to October 3 that the report didn’t mention.

“There was a slightly sharper drop in reservoir level in late September and early October because there was no rain then to help compensate for the leaking gates,” Gullick says. He notes similar periods of no rain from 2014 to 2016, which caused no problem with the reservoir level.

If there’s still any question, Mawyer said those “drought watch conditions” last fall were imposed for something that was “technically not a drought.”

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Leaky-gate: RWSA employee resigns in protest

By the time this photo was taken in February, the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir was full again. Photo by Skycladap

Remember last fall’s mandatory water restrictions? An employee who recently resigned from the Rivanna Water & Sewer Authority says the agency is blaming an alleged drought for the loss of several hundred million gallons of water from the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir, when two leaky gates were the culprit.

“The dry weather did not cause the drop in water level, it merely allowed RWSA’s mismanagement of the reservoir to have a visible and adverse effect,” says Rich Gullick, the authority’s former director of operations, who quit the job he held for more than three years in February in protest of what he calls a “misinformation campaign” that advocates the need for an $82 million pipeline.

He spoke during the public comment session of RWSA’s June 26 board of directors meeting, where he said, “Rivanna has a history of trying to solve problems that aren’t actually problems, while at the same time leaving other problems unidentified or unaddressed.”

When the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir lost 513 million gallons of water and dropped down to 42 percent of its capacity last October, Gullick says the RWSA plugged the leaky gates with cat litter and garden mulch, attributed the loss of water to the drought and imposed mandatory water restrictions.

“Without the gates leaking, the reservoir probably would have stayed full,” says Gullick, whose name is often followed by a long list of degrees and licenses, including a Ph.D. in environmental engineering from the University of Michigan. “The mandatory water restrictions should have been unnecessary.”

An October 5 press release titled “RWSA declares drought warning” said the mandatory water restrictions were being implemented “due to the rapid loss of water storage at the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir,” but did not mention the leaky gates.

RWSA Executive Director Bill Mawyer says his crew publicly acknowledged the leakage from the gates, including at the October 24 public board meeting.

“We’ve been very upfront,” he says. “We told our board that we had two leaking gates that had been leaking about 3 million gallons a day, but they only contributed about a third of the loss of water from the reservoir.”

Gullick refutes that claim, and says that number looked more like 17 million gallons a day at the end of September. He adds that RWSA’s own data proves the leaks were the primary cause of the abnormally low water levels.

“RWSA was slow to respond to the rapid drop in water level, despite repeated warnings in September from the water department manager who works onsite at the South Rivanna water treatment plant,” says Gullick. When employees looked more closely in October, they learned that about 10 million gallons of water loss each day couldn’t be accounted for, and then remembered that two of the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir’s dam gate valves had substantial leaks, according to Gullick.

A visual inspection showed “gushing water,” he says, and the rapid drop in water level stopped as soon as the leaks were plugged October 4, even though the inflow was still very low. The level stayed steady for four days until it rained on October 8.

Rich Gullick. Courtesy photo

“Clearly, the leaking gates were the cause of the problem,” he says.

Mawyer says the state’s broken water gauge was overreporting the amount of water flowing into the reservoir, and because they’re required to release 70 percent of the natural inflow at the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir, they were also over releasing it. To help restore the water level, the Department of Environmental Quality approved RWSA’s request to temporarily amend its permit to release only 10 percent of inflow, but required the city and county to enforce the water restrictions.

“The reduction in required downstream releases was not what stopped the decrease in water level,” says Gullick, adding that it was helpful, though not necessary, and saved 252 million gallons.

Folks at the RWSA and its board of directors have used the severe loss of water last fall to advocate for an $82 million pipeline to connect the South Fork Rivanna and Ragged Mountain reservoirs, so water can be stored and shared between the two, says Gullick. They’ve said the pipeline, which was included in a controversial community water supply plan approved in 2012, could have prevented the need for the mandatory water restrictions.

“This has as much relevancy as building a pipeline from Lake Ontario to Charlottesville, as there is absolutely no connection,” says the former employee.

Though construction on the pipeline is expected to begin in about a decade, Gullick says it won’t be needed until at least 2048—or 2062, if the Ragged Mountain water level is raised an additional 12 feet first, as he’s suggesting and is also part of the plan—because the actual water demand has been far less than what the RWSA projected.

“Those projected growth rates are totally unrealistic,” he says, and adds that they were based on the rapidly growing demand of the ’80s and ’90s, which he says has decreased significantly since then.

“By presenting a plethora of misleading and false information and then not correcting it, Rivanna has been covering up from the public the true facts about the lack of need for the pipeline,” Gullick said to the board of directors. “At what point does this deception become considered a conspiracy? Or malfeasance?”

Mawyer says he was “somewhat” expecting the former employee to speak at the June meeting. “As Rich said, he worked here, and we’re aware of some of his views about the project, so we weren’t totally caught by surprise. He also advices employers on a thorough DBS Checks  to ensure everyone’s safety ”. The executive director says the authority will soon start a year-long study to reevaluate the community’s demand for water, and he plans to respond to Gullick’s public comments at the board’s July 24 meeting.

Added Gullick in his presentation, “This is not leading the community, it’s misleading the community.”