CLEARLAKE— The Clearlake City Council held their bimonthly meeting Thursday, made a proclamation asserting the month of June as Pride month and also discussed the city’s water providers as well as the South Ballpark Road Rehabilitation Project.
Making the Pride Month proclamation was Mayor David Claffey. He said, “While further progress is needed, it is important to celebrate the substantial gains that have been achieved and the city of Clearlake stands with the community in the struggle to ensure equal treatment for all.” Clearlake resident Erin McCarrick shared in support, “This always means something for everyone in the community to know there are safe spaces out there, wherever you are on the spectrum – super gay, super straight, just support one another.”
In other matters, City Manager Alan Flora introduced Robert Roscoe with GEI Consultants who shared, “The topic tonight is water supply in the city of Clearlake, it’s a little unusual in some respects and quite common in other respects.” He explained there are three separate water purveyors: Konocti Water, a public agency, Highlands Mutual, a private corporation, and Golden State Water, an investor-owned company. Roscoe shared that through his research the market share is divided as follows; Konocti has a population of 5,928 with 1,807 connections, 26 percent of all connections in Clearlake. Highlands has a population of 9,510 with 2,882 connections, which is the largest at 42 percent of connections. Golden State has a population of 4,648 with 2,131 connections, 31 percent.
Roscoe compared water qualities, accessibility, affordability, and the capacity to enable water systems to consistently provide safe drinking water to the public across the three providers. Doing a rate comparison Roscoe illustrated that Konocti is on average most affordable, at about $109 per month, next is Highlands at $154 per month and lastly Golden State at $282 per month. Highlands water was also found to have a large amount of Haloacetic Acids over the past five years, which can be due to aging pipelines with improper metals.
Overall, Roscoe feels that consolidation of the three water districts would eliminate a lot of duplication in staffing and projects, and add resiliency to their system through coordination and increased access to grant monies. Lastly, he feels it will increase the water quality, as treating the cyanobacteria in Clear Lake can be very difficult.
There was much public response with Frank Costner, Manager of Konocti Water, noting the needed maintenance and namely the large water tank that can be seen leaking water. This fix, although overdue, is not set to be repaired for another one to six years. The city responded that they would see an increase in grant funding if consolidated and would be able to handle this maintenance more efficiently. Members of the public presented a petition with over 250 signatures strictly opposing any governmental takeover attempt of their local water districts. Council member Joyce Overton made a motion to end the meeting due to the lateness of the hour, despite the public still desiring to make more comments, final comments from Zoom were read and the item was tabled for a future agenda.
