Point Reyes Light - October 3, 2002
Supes name director as NMWD OK's pipe bond
By Dave Mitchell
County supervisors on Tuesday named Barbara Munden, 59, of Novato to fill out Director George Amaroli’s term on the North Marin Water District board.
Also on Tuesday, the water board voted to use revenue bonds to finance new water facilities that will allow North Marin to draw more Russian River water. North Marin in the mid-1990s agreed to the expansion and since then has been building up reserves to pay for it.
The decision to name Munden to the water board fell to county supervisors, who made clear they didn’t want it, after North Marin directors could not agree on who should replace Amaroli, who died July 12.
Already served 16 years
Munden, 59, previously served on the water board for 16 years, retiring in 1991. She retired, she told The Light after the supervisors’ decision, because North Marin meetings were then lasting until midnight and she had to get up at 5 a.m. to commute to San Francisco, where she was the administration manager for a geotechnical company.
She has since retired from the job, and her husband Jerry Kenny has retired after 14 years as principal of Novato High. After her term expires in a year, she said, she will not seek reelection because she and her husband "travel all the time."
As it happens, Munden received much of her environmental expertise from the Environmental Forum in Marin at the same time Senator Barbara Boxer and Sue Jacob, founder of the Environmental Action Committee of West Marin, were in her class at the forum.
Environmental but rational
"I consider myself an environmentalist," Munden told The Light, "but that doesn’t mean, ‘Stop all development at any cost.’ I don’t have any political agenda. I just try to do what’s right for the community and the environment."
Director Munden said that when she previously served on the water board, Directors John Schoonover and Jack Baker were already on it. She added that she knows the director from West Marin, Dennis Rodoni of Olema, and is familiar with coastal issues. "I dealt with [the late rancher] Waldo Giacomini’s summer dam [across Papermill/Lagunitas Creek] for 16 years."
A Russian River pipeline
In her first night back on the water board, Munden had to vote on a major financial issue for North Marin – how to finance its share of costs for a new pipeline between two groups of caissons near Forestville, Sonoma County. The caissons pump water from the Russian River into two aqueducts. One goes to Santa Rosa and connects with an aqueduct to Sonoma.
The second aqueduct serves Cotati, Rohnert Park, Petaluma, and Novato. Although North Marin in the past has paid its share of water projects up front, it decided to use revenue bonds to finance its $740,000 share of the pipeline between the Wohler and Mirabel facilities. With bond interest rates currently low, the district figured that if return on investments average more than 6.5 percent during the next 30 years, North Marin will come out ahead.
Bigger aqueduct needed
Meanwhile, North Marin needs to help get rid of a bottleneck in the aqueduct between Cotati to Petaluma, which limits flows from Petaluma to Novato. North Marin’s $4.45 million share of that expansion will be paid for with reserves and possibly revenue bonds, said district manager Chris DeGabriele Wednesday.
The expansion under the supervision of the Sonoma County Water Agency will not occur for five years, DeGabriele added.