On Sunday, we posted an article providing a heads-up about this evening's (12/22/09) City Council meeting, wherein an item concerning approval of Boss Godfrey's proposed 36th Street water tanks appeared on the original Council agenda.
Please note that this item has now been pulled from tonight's Council calender. The amended agenda is linked below:
• AMENDED AGENDASorry about the false alarm, folks. The Council has apparently decided (quite rightly, we believe) that it will need to have further discussion regarding this item.
We'll keep our eyes peeled, however, and post notice here on WCF when the matter is put back on the Council calender.
9 comments:
There will be no council meeting on the 29th, so this item is apparently off the agenda at least until the new council is seated in January.
It's important to keep in mind there are two aspects of the water tank issue.
1. Boss Godfrey needs the tanks to lay the infrastructure for full build out of the east bench, including McMansions on existing open space, condos and a hotel at the golf course, etc. Therefore, the tanks threaten open space.
2. The mayor's own study showed the tanks are not needed (except for his vision of build out), and that the existing tanks at 36th Street are sufficient. In fact, the real issue Ogden needs to address is pipeline size and flow. Therefore, building the tanks at a cost of $7 million is a massive waste of money that is actually needed for other work.
Boss Godfrey's only purpose is offering the tanks as a carrot to his developer cronies who are licking their chops to think of bulldozing the golf course and ripping up the east bench. These people form the bulk of Godfrey's campaign contributor list. $8 million and a loss of open space is a small price to pay for the expected $200,000 in kickbacks Godfrey expects from the deal. And Godfrey needs this deal, because his kickbacks are dwindling.
Godfrey's new water tanks should be killed in their entirety for open space, financial, and engineering reasons.
Hopefully the city council can find an independent engineer to do an analysis of what is needed. This should resolve the entire matter for every person of good faith.
Comment bumped to front page
Bingo, OO. You've nailed it.
I'm not encouraged that the City Council will have an independent analsys for the current water tanks, they do not the guts to audit any entity of the current administration. They are just as responsable for the debts of the city and the fiasco funding of the Junction.
What are the real numbers and revenue of the water department, where do these funds go to fix the water and sewer.
It seems the administration comes up with thousands of tax money for special projects and payroll and incentives for favored businesses and persons.
I don't trust any financial numbers coming from the mayors office. Until the city council has a full independent accounting for the total cost of the junction, lease agreements, taxes colected will my respect for them be restored. Also like to see the enforcement codes enforced for the derilict, abondon homs by the river.
the council hired their own lobbyist ... and we will have NEW people on the council when the Water Tank issue comes up again -- get on the phone & email with these people, starting ... um ... now
js,
BB
Mr Garner- you seem to know more about pipelines and tanks than the rest of us. Wouldn't it be better and cheaper to build ONE 6.25 million gallon tank now, at the higher location proposed for the 1.25 million gallon tank, rather than TWO tanks ( a 5mg tank at lower elevation now PLUS a 1.25mg tank at the higher location later)?
QfRG:
I'm not Rob Garner but I'll try to answer.
If it were a given that the total needed capacity is 6.25 MG, and if a suitable site at the higher elevation could be found, and if all we cared about was construction cost, then the direct answer to your question would undoubtedly be "yes".
But because of all the "ifs", this isn't a viable option.
The 1.25 MG tank is supposed to go at an elevation of 5350 feet. That's 150 feet above the Bonneville shoreline--so it can supply pressure to future buildings on the Bonneville shoreline. At that elevation the slopes are very steep, so it's not even clear that there's a suitable site for a 1.25 MG tank, let alone a larger tank. And the larger the tank, the larger the excavation costs.
Also, the calculated capacity of the 5 MG tank includes nearly 1 MG for the purpose of filling the 1.25 MG tank. This makes no sense to me, but it would make even less sense if you merged the two tanks. So deduct about 1 MG from the total needed capacity if there's only one tank. Even so, it would be hard to find a sufficiently large site at 5350 feet.
Finally, there are operational issues to think about. The 5 MG tank is intended to serve the lower-elevation zones while the 1.25 MG tank is intended to serve the higher zones. You can, of course, always serve lower zones from a higher tank, by installing pressure release valves to reduce the excess pressure. But it's wasteful to pump all that water up high only to throw away the energy in a PRV as it comes down. Rob could probably give us a better idea of whether this would be a big concern or just a small one.
In my opinion, however, all of this is academic because the 1.25 MG tank isn't needed at all--at least not until WSU eventually develops its foothill property up to the Bonneville shoreline, decades in the future. Rob will also argue that the 5 MG tank isn't needed because the two existing steel tanks are adequate. I'd want to see an independent engineer's assessment before expressing a firm opinion on that question.
The long and short of it is neither tank (the 5.0 or 1.25 million gallon tank) is needed. The city has embellished all of the numbers relative to demand requirements of the tanks located at 36th St. When you remove all of the embellishments out of the tank size requirement numbers, the existing tanks there are more than adequate. Additionally the tanks at 36th St. have several years of life (decades) left in them if the city will maintain them.
A newly installed pipeline connecting the 23rd St. reservoir (a 60 million gallon reservoir) to the existing tanks at 36th St. could be extended from 36th St. to the 46th St. reservoir (see my comments in the article on WCF dated 12-20 for alignment). This extension with an incorporated pump station could meet all of the city’s current and future requirements for growth on the bench south of 36th St. including any requirements for Weber State University that Dan S. mentioned. This extended pipeline also would meet the demands for an additional water supply source to the reservoir at 46th St. (something lacking with the current CIP amendment that the administration is pushing and something that was to be solved in an alternative way within the Water Horizon project that the city raised bond funds to pay for) and could be designed to allow the city to operate the system in either direction should the need ever arise or if there was an economic advantage to do so.
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