Water district suspends effort to build Pine Mountain Dam

The push to build Pine Mountain Dam has ended.

Board members of the River Valley Regional Water District voted Monday (Aug. 30) to suspend efforts to identify a long-term water supply for the district that were focused on building Pine Mountain Dam on Lee Creek in northern Crawford County.

“Given that current conditions indicate an adequate firm yield for our region for the foreseeable future, coupled with the recent trend of slower growth and less than stellar economic conditions, the board felt that the best course of action was to suspend the study in the absence of data that clearly demonstrates a pressing need,” noted a statement from the District. The RVRWD was formed in June 2000 for the purpose of building a long-term water supply for western Arkansas.

The RVRWD faced a significant environmental hurdle with the Extraordinary Water Resource designation placed on Lee Creek. According to the ERW regulation, lifting the designation requires two triggers: “(1) the sole purpose for the funding and construction of the reservoir is to provide a domestic water supply; and (2) there are no feasible alternatives to constructing a reservoir in order to meet the domestic water needs of the citizens of the State of Arkansas.”

More than 35 bodies of water in Arkansas are named Extraordinary Resource Waters, which prevents mining, construction, dams and other activities that would alter the quality or nature of the water. The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, The Nature Conservancy, the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Arkansas Heritage Commission and the Sierra Club were on record opposing Pine Mountain.

Mark Yardley, project manager for RVRWD, said in October 2009 that the ERW tag was not a deal killer and the public hearings conducted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers were scheduled for later in that month.

RVRWD officials and the Corps agreed in May 2009 to pursue the Pine Mountain Dam Study. The study was appropriated $1.709 million in federal funds as of April 2009. Between federal fiscal years 2010 and 2014, the Pine Mountain Dam study was scheduled to receive $3.44 million. The money was to fund a long process. A draft report and more public comment was scheduled for the summer of 2013, with a final report and public comment scheduled for summer 2014. All of the draft and final reports and public comments were to be encapsulated in a final Final Report in 2017.

According to the statement issued Tuesday (Aug. 31), documentation could not be found to support previous assertions that a Pine Mountain Dam would impound enough water to create a yield of 21 million gallons per day (mgd). Yardley explained in the statement: “As we prepared to provide the Corps of Engineers with documentation concerning this matter, neither we nor the Corps were able to locate the detailed analysis that stated Frog Bayou had a firm yield of 21 mgd. In the absence of this data, the water district began to query experts around the country to determine the proper method for determining firm yield of a basin. Using these techniques, our engineering firm was unable to replicate anything close to 21 mgd. Our only assumption is that either the previous study was flawed or it utilized data that predates the 60 years of rainfall data on record for our region.”

By way of comparison, the expanded Lake Fort Smith contains almost 28 billion gallons when full and can generate up to 35 million gallons of water a day.

The RVRWD said it would remain active to help cities in Crawford County “work together to facilitate small water distribution projects as they may arise.” The board also eliminated a 50-cent per meter assessment used to pay for the long-term water supply study.