Special DPW Meeting at Arcadia City Hall Slated Wednesday June 19, 7PM

Special DPW Meeting at Arcadia City Hall Slated Wednesday June 19, 7PM

Guest Opinion by Cam Stone

DPW has scheduled a meeting at the City Hall Council Chambers on Wednesday, June 19, 2013 at 7:00pm to outline it’s plans for the “restoration” of the Lower SPS. The meeting is not mentioned on the City of Arcadia’s on-line calendar however a concerned citizen, Cam Stone alerted us to this. “ This is the same modus operandi that the DPW used with the BSAC Dam cleanout project before we found out about it and it blew up in everyone’s face, “ according to Stone.
Stone send us an email with the following information:
“Here is a list of what the DPW told you (the news media), the LA County Board of Supervisors (BoS) and all of the concerned members of our community during the controversial run-up to the final approval by the LA County BoS to bring in the bulldozers and scrape the majestic oaks and sycamores into huge piles:
1.The Big Santa Anita Dam had 500,000 cubic yards of sediment that had to be removed. DPW engineers insisted that this was the correct figure.
2.The Arcadia Woodlands had to be destroyed to make way for half of the sediment (250,000 yards) to be dumped at the site. The remaining sediment (250,000 yards) would be dumped on the Lower Sediment Placement Site (SPS) within the facility which would fill it to capacity and that site would be closed to future sediment dumping.
3.The DPW insisted that there was not enough room on the existing Upper and Lower Sediment Placement Sites to take in all of the sediment from the BSAC Dam even though opponents hired an engineering firm that proved there was enough space on the existing sites.
4.The DPW told the City of Arcadia and the BoS that if they could not use the Arcadia Woodland area for the dumping of BSAC Dam sediment, they would be forced to run tens of thousands of dump truck loads through the streets of Arcadia, a prospect that caused many of our city residents to support the DPW’s plan to destroy the Woodlands.
Well, the BSAC Dam cleanout project is now complete and we have conclusive proof that the DPW committed a massive fraud on the local community and the BoS:
1. It turns out that the BSAC Dam held only 250,000 – 300,000 cubic yards of sediment – far below what the DPW engineers had “calculated”. Either the DPW lied about the amount of sediment behind the dam or their engineers are beyond incompetent. There is no other explanation.
2. The former Arcadia Woodlands site is currently completely devoid of sediment! None of the sediment from the BSAC Dam was “placed” here. The entire sediment load from the dam was placed at the Lower SPS. The former Woodlands site now contains only a large drain pipeline covered by sediment trucked from the Lower SPS (see my photos of the site). I vividly remember the spokesman for the DPW, Bob Spencer, telling the news media that if the DPW was not allowed to destroy the Woodlands and dump sediment from the BSAC Dam at that location, people living downstream of the dam would be at serious risk of dying from a massive flood. All Lies.

3. The former Arcadia Woodlands site (which I now call the Arcadia Wastelands) is now completely empty of sediment and is open and ready to receive literally hundreds of thousands of dump truck loads of sediment from dams and debris basins outside the city of Arcadia! All of these future trucks will have to drive through the streets of Arcadia to get to the Arcadia Wastelands site to dump their loads – exactly what many of the city’s residents and the City Council feared most and prompted them to support the DPW’s plan in the first place. The Arcadia City government, it’s residents, the BoS and the news media were all duped by the DPW.”

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