Construction of a new Russian River “water education center” is scheduled to begin next month on Sonoma County Water Agency property located on Westside Rd. near the historic Wohler Bridge.
The Sonoma County Board of Supervisors approved an approximately $2 million contract for the project this week with the low bidder, Diede Construction, Inc. awarded the $1,995,000 contract.
“It’s great to see this moving forward,” said 5th District Supervisor Efren Carrillo.
“We have thousands of kids throughout the year visiting the Water Agency facility at Wohler Bridge. They learn about where our water comes from and understand the dynamic of the river, the importance of water conservation and promoting stewardship of our watershed,” said Carrillo.
The Water Agency’s Westside education project “has got to be one of the more successful programs statewide where we engage our grade school students,” said Carrillo. “They actually get a chance to come on site, see the work that gets done and understand exactly where their water comes from.”
More than 2,000 students annually visit the education program, now located in an “undersized and dilapidated” portable mobile unit next to the Water Agency’s Wohler water pumps.
The new facility “is finally going to get us out of the leaky doublewide currently out there,” said 4th District Supervisor McGuire. “If you have seen it, it’s not a great sight, to say the least. This is going to be fantastic for generations of school kids in this county.”
The program is going to be focused “on all the species that call the watershed home, including a special focus on coho, Chinook and steelhead and on conservation programs,” said McGuire.
Since 1981 the Sonoma County Water Agency has provided a Water Education Program to public and private schools located within the Water Agency’s service area in Sonoma and northern Marin counties.
It is estimated that the project’s construction period would be two construction seasons starting in Oct. 2014 with completion set for July, 2015. The Water Agency’s Board of Directors (county supervisors) approved appropriations for the Project with $900,000 from the Water Transmission fund and $300,000 from the General fund, $450,000 from the agency’s water transmission fund and $350,000 from the county General fund.
The project will be constructed on Water Agency property located at 9560 Westside Road, just west of the Wohler Bridge, adjacent to Maxwell Grove in the unincorporated area of Forestville. The 5,000 square foot building will provide a new classroom for the Water Agency’s Field Study, a location to hold teacher workshops, and a starting location for quarterly community tours of the Water Agency’s Water Transmission System.
The site is currently an abandoned quarry that will be improved by the project’s environmentally sensitive architectural features, including a low profile design, low intensity lighting, water efficient landscaping, and interpretive displays, said a county report for the project. Use of the new facility building will generally be limited to Water Agency activities and will not affect other ongoing uses of Maxwell Grove, operated by Sonoma County Regional Parks.
