Future of Tahoe Keys Water Company By Keiron McCammon, Board Member
During July’s Board Meeting Farr West presented the results of their analysis of the long-term operations and maintenance options for our Water Company. As I’m sure you recall, we faced a crisis last year when one of our three wells was taken offline due to excessive levels of uranium. It was feared a second well would soon meet a similar fate, leaving us with one operating well as we headed into the peak demand of the summer irrigation season. This crisis necessitated an emergency landscape irrigation ban to ensure our limited capacity of safe and uncontaminated drinking water was available for household use. At the same time, we started work on short and intermediate-term mitigation projects to stabilize our water supply. The good news is that these mitigation projects were a success, with all three wells running again (with reduced capacity) and a new intertie with Lukins Brothers Water Company (LBWC), which has allowed us to restore limited irrigation this summer, per the published schedule. However, while uranium treatment is in place at two of our wells, it is a stop-gap, not a permanent solution.
Keys Breeze
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The short and intermediate-term projects were intended to stabilize our water production and buy us time to identify the long-term direction for our Water Company. At the end of last year, the Long Term Facilities Plan, commissioned at the beginning of that year, was finally completed. Among many recommendations, it identified several options for the future of our Water Company, from continuing to operate independently to outsourcing its management to consolidating with another water company. The Board felt that whether we should remain in the water business as an Association or not trumped everything else. Therefore, we engaged Farr West Engineering to research our options, culminating in the presentation of their findings during the last Board meeting. Farr West developed a non-economic evaluation matrix of the governance alternatives for our Water Company. They created weighted criteria covering technical, managerial, and financial considerations against which they scored each option (putting aside upfront costs on the assumption each option makes the necessary capital investments).
AUGUST 2022
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