As promised, Water Advisory Committee member Alf Brandt arrived at the WAC’s meeting Thursday armed with a motion to approve one of the three possible surface water project options.

The motion was to have staff begin drafting a recommendation to the City Council, which has vowed to put the project to a public vote in the spring, to adopt the reduced Woodland-Davis Clean Water Agency project option — with a capacity of 30 million gallons per day (18 for Woodland and 12 for Davis) — as the preferred project to bring surface water to Davis; not the West Sacramento alternative that has emerged in recent months.

“I think at this point there are just too many uncertainties (about the West Sacramento option) and its nature,” said Brandt, an expert on water resource law and policy for the state Assembly. “It’s not worth the millions of dollars and the four years or two years it’s really going to take West Sacramento (to get) up to really where we know what it’s going to be, and that’s why I’d like to get us moving in (the other) direction.”

But several committee members said they still had many questions about the WDCWA project, even at the reduced capacity.

Committee member Michael Bartolic agreed with some of the reasoning Brandt offered in his motion, but said the cost of the project still worried him.

“I’m concerned that we would be working on the most immediately expensive option, the one that most immediately hits people in their wallets, heavily,” Bartolic said. “It would triple, within four years of implementation, the average residential water bill. It would take it from roughly $420 a year to close to $1,300 a year, and I don’t think that seems quite what I would hope to come out of this eight months of work.”

Committee member and former Davis Mayor Bill Kopper reiterated those sentiments.

“The costs are a huge, huge issue,” Kopper said. “It’s certainly going to cause a lot of pain for people in the community who are on fixed incomes and don’t have that much money. And I think that when you do triple the rates in four years, it’s going to be very, very hard to get any sort of vote (for) schools and parks and things like that, so we’re talking about something here that’s very, very serious, and I think we all know that.”

Each committee member has been tasked to write staff with any questions, concerns, additions or subtractions to Brandt’s motion they might have over the next week, so that on Thursday the WAC will be as ready as possible to make a decision on the project, one way or the other.

Brandt already had three stipulations of his own built into his original motion, including:

* Woodland and Davis would share the cost of delivering the water equitably from the treatment plant to each city boundary;

* Cost sharing would be adjusted to reflect the percentage of water each city receives; and

* The project needs to be bid as a design-build, rather than design-build-operate as originally proposed, with the possibility that down the road it could be design-build-operate.

The City Council had asked the committee to make a decision by the council’s Aug. 21 meeting last month as several cost-related decisions must be made at the council’s next meeting.

Once the committee has the project settled, however, it still has several issues to tackle, including a rate structure — or how each segment of the city is billed for its water use.

The WAC will meet Thursday at the Davis Senior Center, 646 A St., rather than in Community Chambers at City Hall, where the committee usually meets.

— Reach Tom Sakash at [email protected] or (530) 747-8057. Follow him on Twitter @TomSakash.

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