GUESTWORK | Don Hanrahan

In December 2008, federal and state regulators told city officials (for the third time) that Hunter Dam was a turkey. They demanded yet more information about the supposed need and the claimed insufficiency of alternatives. Advocates for the dam claim that donothing, unreasonable bureaucrats have this wonderful project tied up in red tape. The truth, however, is far different.

CWLP’s cost comparisons used to tout Hunter Dam over the alternatives would embarrass any credible economist. They cite a completely irrelevant metric (“the lowest cost per million gallons a day capacity”). The dam project is sized for 21 million gallons a day (MGD), while the claimed “deficit” is only 9.1 MGD once every 100 years! Alternatives were sized at 12 MGD – inflating their cost by a third. The cost per gallon of water needed is the proper standard, and when that is used, Hunter Dam is by far the most costly way to get more water. Regulators bound by law to only approve the effective alternative that meets the need at the lowest cost and is least destructive to the environment are likely not fooled. They also know CWLP failed to include expensive items: riprap for the shoreline, costs for monitoring and protection of their claimed “mitigation plan,” costs for sewer plans (some made necessary by the dam), and costs for cemetery protection or relocations for burial sites.

Regulators know CWLP refuses to do obvious things within their immediate power to substantially reduce drought risk, such as a promised 1.6 MGD ash pond water recycling program, and a promised conversion to dry ash handling that could save another 1 MGD. Regulators know that installation of the South Fork pumping station largely resolved problems which caused the severe mid-1950s draw-down on the lake. They know actual water usage today is little different than it was 30 years ago, and they are keenly aware of the dam proponents’ history of inflating demand figures to sometimes absurd levels.

Knowing a dam can’t be justified based on real consumption data, dam hawks claim that in the 100-year drought (which statistically has only a 39 percent chance of actually occurring), there will be a deficit of 9.1 MGD. CWLP’s environmental impact study claims that 3.6 MGD of this is excess drought demand, but its own study found only 0.6 MGD excess during the drought of record, thus inflating the “need” by 3 MGD. CWLP also admitted that it overstated by 1.1 MGD the amount needed for consumptive use by the power plant. Regulators know of these and many other flaws in the claimed “need” (e.g. claimed increases in the size of the current service territory, hypothetical new  industries, keeping the lake an extra foot higher, not accounting for decreased demand from huge rate increases necessitated by dam costs, etc.).