Amador County – About two dozen members of the Amador Calaveras Consensus Group attended the group’s March meeting Wednesday at the Jackson Civic Center, and discussed various regional projects.

Members made reports. Among them, Amador County consultant John Hofmann said the Amador Resource Advisory Committee has about $40,000 yet to disburse to grant applicants for projects that benefit the National Forest, though they do not need to be located in the forest. He said the committee has not yet voted, and will probably meet again in May. It has applicants, but will wait and see if a better project comes along.

Katherine Evatt of the Foothill Conservancy reported that her group awaited a ruling in its lawsuit against the East Bay Municipal Utility District regarding expansion of the dam at Pardee Reservoir. She said East Bay MUD has been approached about joining the Consensus Group.

William Haigh, the Folsom director of the Bureau of Land Management, said the BLM will be “building a $1 million whitewater take-out facility” on the Mokelumne River, below the Highway 49 bridge, at Electra Road. He said the project includes $250,000 from Pacific Gas & Electric. Evatt said the project has been in the works for two years, and she gets almost weekly calls about it from the Calaveras County OARS rafting group. She said if East Bay MUD builds a bigger dam, the take-out facility could be under water.

A representative of Sierra Pacific Industries reported it was upgrading its Sonora sawmill to open sometime in May, to mill smaller diameter logs. He said he was “lobbying for the smaller, the better.” The mill previously milled logs in the 15- to 16-inch diameter range, and they are probably talking about 7- to 8-inch logs.

He said SPI’s fencing mill at Chinese Camp is now taking 5-inch logs, and will add white fir to its stock, instead of just using cedar material. He said the Sonora plant’s co-gen plant would reopen, and with the mill would be buying wood fuel in large 40-foot trailer quantities, as it would not produce enough biomass waste itself.

A PG&E representative said the Mother Lode region was hardest hit with heavy, wet snow in two recent outages. The utility had work crews in groups of 40-50 working on the outages, instead of its typical 3-4 groups at a time. He said the outages drew work crews from Washington, Oregon and around the state, and PG&E is “probably going to spend anywhere from $30 million to $40 million on restoration.”

Story by Jim Reece This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.