{"id":105,"date":"2008-09-27T18:33:03","date_gmt":"2008-09-28T02:33:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/2008\/09\/cag\/"},"modified":"2009-05-01T11:20:59","modified_gmt":"2009-05-01T19:20:59","slug":"cag","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/2008\/09\/cag\/","title":{"rendered":"CAG"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today was my first meeting of the Community Advisory Group for the Water Pollution Control Plant. Another half of the group met this past Wednesday, and we&#8217;ll all be getting together on 1 November.<\/p>\n<p>Today we got a deluxe tour of the plant. Based on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sanjoseinside.com\/sji\/blog\/entries\/disneyland_comes_to_alviso\/\">Pierluigi&#8217;s description<\/a> of his tour, I was looking forward to the people mover, but our tour was evidently just a notch below the Council tour. We did get to see a lot more than on the regular public tour, <a href=\"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/2008\/04\/down-by-the-bay\/\">about which I&#8217;ve already blogged.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Again, the order of the tour differed from the actual order of operations; the raw sewage seems to arrive in the middle of the plant, and follow a very circuitous route around. But we did get to go to the top of the filter building<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm4.static.flickr.com\/3135\/2894065920_e0cf989dfa.jpg?v=0\"\/><\/p>\n<p>down into the very loud basement with the sewage pumps<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm4.static.flickr.com\/3185\/2893226063_4f95805f83.jpg?v=0\"\/><\/p>\n<p>into some of the miles of underground tunnels<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm4.static.flickr.com\/3250\/2894067770_ea8220c068.jpg?v=1222568497\"\/><\/p>\n<p>and over to the sludge-drying ponds<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm4.static.flickr.com\/3051\/2894068332_2c323d8893.jpg?v=0\"\/><\/p>\n<p>(that&#8217;s twelve feet deep in sludgy goodness.)<\/p>\n<p>As before, the ESD employees giving the tours were very straightforward; there is no sense at all of spin or flack. The tours and the CAG have the stated purpose of building community support for the $2 billion in capital improvements that the plant needs.<\/p>\n<p>My goals in participating in this group are to champion increases in the production and use of recycled water, and to advocate environmental uses for the land surrounding the plant. The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mercurynews.com\/ci_10489938\">Tesla giveaway <\/a> is seemingly a done deal, but there needs to be some counterweight to the attitude, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sanjoseinside.com\/sji\/blog\/entries\/teslarific\/\">expressed by Tom McEnery<\/a>, that &#8220;The land set aside is in the buffer area of the Water Pollution Control Plant and clearly unfit for housing or retail uses.&#8221; As if those are the only ones that count.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, the CAG has no legal standing, and if City staff or the Council have already decided what the area surrounding the WPCP is going to look like, then there is not a lot that I can do to change that. But developing the new plant Master Plan is a three-year process, so I&#8217;ll at least have plenty of opportunity to have my say.<\/p>\n<p>And yours. I applied for a position on this body saying that I, in some way, still represent the nearly 7,000  people who voted for me in June. So let me know what you want to see up there at 700 Los Esteros Rd.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<div class=\"entry-summary\">\nToday was my first meeting of the Community Advisory Group for the Water Pollution Control Plant. Another half of the&hellip;\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/2008\/09\/cag\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &ldquo;CAG&rdquo;<\/span>&hellip;<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wpcp","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}