Scholarship applications for the 2008-2009 school have been received and reviewed. Announcement of awards will be posted after May 21st. Good luck to all who applied.

Since 1987 the DCVA has awarded over 70 scholarships ranging from $500 to $2500 per student. In 2007-08 recipients were Dry Creek residents, Porfiro Madrigal, Luke Wilson, Kayleigh Sharp, Celina Zuniga, Jillian Somers, Corina Zuniga and Beatris Aguado. Applications for the 2008-09 school year have already been submitted to the Community Foundation.

Water is a shared finite public trust resource.  Unregulated and unmanaged exploitation of groundwater, a vital resource, has led to a crisis in Sonoma County.  Sonoma County’s General Plan Update offers an opportunity to construct effective policy needed to respond to this crisis over the next 20 years.  Prompted by the seriousness of this situation over twenty organizations have joined together in a Coalition to monitor clean water issues.

Some Facts you need to know:

The DCVA's concerns are driven by our mission "to protect and enhance the natural resources, rural aspects and agricultural heritage of the Dry Creek Valley and its watershed, while safeguarding the interests of the Valley's present and future community".

The Sonoma County Water Agency (which also is the County Board of Supervisors in a different guise) is well along in its plans to redistribute Santa Rosa and other urban entities' treated wastewater for agricultural reuse. Target areas include Dry Creek Valley, Alexander Valley, Russian River Valley. The project, as detailed by the recently published draft Environmental Impact Report (EIR) includes:

• 19 wastewater reservoirs totaling 11,200 acre-feet of storage
• 112 miles of transmission pipeline, and (undisclosed amount of distribution pipelines on private land
• Numerous booster and distribution pump stations for conveying water from Geysers Pipeline to storage reservoirs and agricultural lands
• Irrigation of 21,500 acres with treated wastewater in North County

by Lou Preston

Acting on a motion by the Dry Creek Valley Association’s Board of Directors, President Ed Wilson fired off a letter to the California State Water Resources Control Board to protest the planned disposal of substantial quantities of Sonoma County’s treated waste water in the Dry Creek Valley watershed. The project, dubbed the Northern Sonoma County Agricultural Reuse Project or NSCARP, is in the draft stage of the State-mandated environmental impact review.

Your DCVA Board has devoted many meetings and long hours to the subject of potential water degradation in our Valley. The unfortunate consequence of municipal and County growth is the need to do something with the vastly increasing volumes of waste water. The grand plan to pump it all to the Geysers for deep well injection quickly became insufficient and agricultural areas have become the next target for the sweep-it-under-the-rug approach of government agencies.