Fresno asking public for help with water concerns

FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) -- The City of Fresno is working to prevent a crisis as water levels are dropping to an all-time low.

The city says its infrastructure needs massive upgrades, but first the public says what it wants and is willing to pay for in the future.

Many ideas are on the table. Right now, the city says we're pumping out much more than is going back into the ground. The solution to this all depends on how much people are willing to pay.

There's plenty of water, on non-drought years anyway, flowing above ground that the City of Fresno says it can use. But right now systems are just not in place to capture and clean it all.

"We depend on the city to keep from ending up in a crisis situation," said Fresno resident Joan Bachant. She was one of about a hundred people who showed up ready to ask the city what it's going to do at the first Recharge Fresno Water Forum.

"If we have continued drought, we need to have a plan," Bachant added.

The city says so far the plan is to improve what we have now. "Infrastructure is old," said Thomas Esqueda, the city's Director of Public Utilities. "It ages, it wares, it deteriorates, and over time it fails."

Esqueda, like everyone else, is hoping the improvements come before a failure. "We do want to have some amount of funding available to keep the community's system robust, resilient so we can deliver the water at the pressure they need and the quality they need," he said.

Underground water levels between Fresno and Bakersfield are dropping about a million acre feet a year -- that's about the size of a full Pine Flat Lake.

The city, right now, wants to build a new system to clean and use surface water from the San Joaquin and Kings Rivers and pull water from the Sierra, treat that and ultimately use it to recharge underground aquifers.

"Hopefully we don't end up out of water," Bachant said.

That's what everyone wants, and everyone will be heard. The series of public forums is the result of a legal settlement between the city and Doug Vagim, the man who fought recent water rate increases to fund a now defunct $410 million water system project.

Water rates were not discussed Monday. That discussion will come in one of the next few forums to be held between now and November 10th.

Click here for a schedule of forums: www.rechargefresno.com.