Amador County – The Amador County Board of Supervisors last month made a grant to help rehabilitation of Well 14 in the Lake Camanche Village water service district, but the Amador Water Agency said last month that millions more in costs are there.
The $150,000 grant will address a priority list, to be made by AWA, and approved by Supervisors. It will first go toward Well 14, to return it to maximum capacity flow. Then it likely will go toward fire hydrant rehabilitation.
AWA General Manager Gene Mancebo said other projects need addressing, and funding requests have not all returned. He said it would cost $2.5 million to replace all of the leaky, wooden water storage tanks at Camanche. He said AWA applied for a $972,000 “disadvantaged community” grant to be applied to a new 500,000-gallon tank.
The agency was awarded $100,000 for the tank, Mancebo said, “and going to the people for the other $800,000 is just not going to work.” Funds left from the Water Development Fund grant may go toward leveraging grant funds for a larger water tank replacement.
He said a new pipeline is needed to connect Well 14 to Tank 9 and it would cost $832,000. “The state would provide less than $100,000 for this,” Mancebo said. He thought they could get about $400,000 in Prop 84 funds for the new line.
He said 450 service line connectors need to be replaced due to defective material or faulty installation by the county. A recent state grant award of $553,000 will replace 200 more connectors, and put liners on five wooden storage tanks.
Mancebo said Camanche fire hydrants are backward-threaded, so if they get torque in the wrong direction, they can break.
Critics said the county should get an outside analyst to look at Camanche. Supervisor Chairman John Plasse said the engineers AWA used, Dunn Environmental, is the same ones the County uses, and likely would have been hired by the County anyway.
Supervisor Richard Forster said the help in Camanche won’t fix all of the problems because they are too vast, but it may help Camanche build up its reserves. He said “these are improvements that should have been done a long time ago when the county was running the system.”
Supervisor Brian Oneto said a Water Development Fund grant might also be appropriate in his District 5, for the Fiddletown sewer service district. He said the same issue occurred there: The county put in the sewer system, and a lot of people in the community in Fiddletown have been putting in a lot of time to keep it operating. In both cases, Oneto said: “The County handed over a lemon. It’s their lemon.”
Story by Jim Reece This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
