The City of Renton will discuss the alignment of any pipeline the Cascade Water Alliance will build to bring drinking water from the alliance’s newly acquired Lake Tapps in Pierce County to the Eastside.
The alliance, a consortium of suburban water purveyors that includes the Skyway Water and Sewer District, recently reached a final agreement with Puget Sound Energy (PSE) on the purchase of Lake Tapps.
The board of directors of the Cascade Water Alliance approved the agreement on March 26. Earlier, Puget Sound Energy had approved the agreement, too.
Renton is not part of the alliance; it draws its water from an aquifer underlying much of the downtown area.
But the city is paying attention to the consortium’s routes for what the city’s top public-works administrator calls a “major interceptor” that could run in the city’s potential annexation areas east of the city or along Lake Washington.
“We want to make sure that we are part of the planning, the decision making and the alignment,” said Gregg Zimmerman, administrator of the city’s Department of Public Works.
Cascade estimates it will be the mid-2020s before it can begin to use Lake Tapps as a regional water supply.
Mike Gagliardo, the alliance’s director of planning, said the alliance won’t look in detail at a final route for a pipeline for about 10 years. However, for budgeting purposes, the alliance has looked at some possible corridors for pipeline, he said.
One possibility is to run the pipeline along the Interurban Trail through South King County, through Renton along the south end of Lake Washington to the right-of-way of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad tracks north of Renton.
A route east of Renton also is possible, he said. Gagliardo said that members of the alliance board have met with City of Renton officials about general issues related to the alliance’s plans.
“We really don’t know what the route will be,” he said of the pipeline.
For now, the alliance must build its drinking-water facilities at Lake Tapps.
The Cascade Water Alliance also is developing the so-called Tacoma-Cascade pipeline that will bring water from the Green River to its Eastside customers. That line runs east of Renton, including through part of Fairwood.
Gagliardo said the alliance could receive its first set of construction bids sometime this year. The first part of that project could occur in the Issaquah area, as part of a state Department of Transportation widening of State Route 900.
The final deal to buy Lake Tapps totals more than $39 million, more than the water purveyor’s original 2001 offer and the 2007 offer by the cities of Sumner, Auburn and Bonney Lake and will give Cascade control of more than 150 pieces of property – including all the facilities used to manage the lake as well as the old White River power house and all hydropower and municipal water rights.
Lake Tapps is a man-made reservoir built to supply water to PSE’s White River Hydroelectric Power Plant. Soon after the plant was closed in 2004, the utility began working with the cities and homeowner associations around the lake to try and ensure the viability of Pierce County’s second-largest recreational lake.
In April 2005, PSE signed an agreement with the Cascade Water Alliance, agreeing to sell the lake and its water rights to the company for use supplying drinking water to several Eastside cities.
Brian Beckley with the Reporter Newspapers contributed to this report.
