Drinking Water Supply and Climate Change and Other Newsbits

A stray news item caught my attention the other day. The new draft Climate Assessment Report is out for public comment. The chapter on the Pacific Northwest contains this alarming map:

Creeks feeding the Santiam and Willamette Rivers will be low in 2040!

The dry-as-dust caption reads:

Across most of the Northwest, flows during the already low summer flow period would be significantly reduced in the 2040s compared to baseline (1915-2006) conditions under the same scenario (A1B) (Littell et al. 2011). This would put stress on freshwater fish species such as endangered salmon and bull trout and necessitate increasing trade-offs among conflicting users of summer water....annual hydropower production is much more likely to decrease than to increase; economic impacts of hydropower changes could be substantial, on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars per year (Markoff and Cullen 2008).

The report doesn't seem to address drinking water supplies, but those cities in the Willamette Valley that depend on mountain water will surely feel the impact. See that brown and dark brown in the mountains?  The creeks that feed the Santiam River are all in there!  The reservoirs will help manage supply, but it's hard to imagine that we won't be affected.

We all knew this in a vaguely general way already, of course, but to see the dark brown and reductions of up to 80%!  That's a lot of dry and a lot of thirsty in frightening droughty colors.

Couple of Third Bridge Notes

(Some recent developments on bridge maneuvering are of interest, but since facebook is a closed system with limited commenting options, it seemed easier make the observations here with pictures and links.  Apologies for the fragmented conversation.)

The traffic light on Front

Back on the 26th of Dec the No 3rd Bridge advocates posted a note about the traffic light on Front Street where the off-ramp from the Center St Bridge merges onto Front. The matter has come to the fore again in the proposed move to tranfer Riverfront Park property to the City proper from the Urban Renewal Agency.

Traffic Signal at Front from Center St Bridge - N3B

Back in the December note advocates wrote that "The 1998 Bridgehead Study recommended a free-flowing turn lane exiting the Center Street bridge north to Front Street."

Perhaps rhetorically they also observed, "It makes one wonder if the reason for installing the stoplight was to build up pressure to gain public support for a 3rd Bridge. It also makes one wonder what other tricks the City might consider to slow traffic if this ever comes up for a public vote."

Here is the official reason for the stoplight! - which of course may or may not be sincere:

In January of 2010, in a Staff Report to Council on the proposed signal, City Staff wrote, "The 1998 Bridgehead Engineering Study recommended installation of a traffic signal at the Center Street bridge off-ramp and the northbound Front Street intersection as a short-term capacity improvement to extend the capacity of the Center Street bridge."

There may not be an outright contradiction here, but there certainly is tension between the two statements!  Can anyone resolve this?

Riverfront Park transfer

In the discussion of the proposed transfer of Riverfront Park from the Urban Renewal Agency to the City, Walker pointed out that designating the land as Park could limit options to modify or otherwise improve the bridgeheads.  No 3rd Bridge advocates felt this was a strong enough concern that they went to Council to argue against the transfer and prevailed.

It's difficult to know how to assess this without more information.  As I see it, prompted by Walker's comment, the critical piece is the zoning, not the agency/entity who has the deed.  But there are many variables here, and there may well be other factors.  Hopefully someone can chime in with more detail on how ownership by the Urban Renewal Agency is better and offers more flexibility than ownership by the City proper?