: Fixed-gear rider Ian Lautze hides behind irony with his lipsticked tattoo. We know the truth. –>: The fixed-gear bike’s sleekness adds to its appeal for the chain gang. –>

Down from the dizzying heights of titanium rides comes the newest must-have item: the fixed-gear bike. Like it ever left.

By Gabe Meline

On the Fourth of July, I hopped on my bike with some friends for a ride out to the western reaches of Sonoma County. We’d planned it for a couple days, and I was ready for the challenge of riding with more experienced cyclists for whom a 35-mile ride is no sweat at all.

The plan was to stop by a Santa Rosa coffee shop on the way out of town and pick up a friend. The sun was starting to heat up, and it was going to be a sweltering day. The cafe was bustling and we found our friend in his spandex riding outfit, sipping coffee with an amiable fellow in corduroys and a long-sleeve sweatshirt.

“Hey, mind if I join you?” the guy asked us.

Joining up for a long ride at a moment’s notice in hot clothes seemed pretty bold, but I thought, what the hell, if he wants to suffer in cords and a sweatshirt, that’s his deal. He hopped on his bike and we pedaled westward. A swift 25 minutes later, we had already reached Sebastopol. I’d started to sweat when we stopped at an Occidental Road gas station, so I got an iced tea and offered some to the dude in corduroys.

“No thanks,” he told me. “I’ll be fine.”

I looked down and harrumphed to myself. He was riding one of those bikes.

There’s a back-to-basics method of transportation on the road, and its name is the fixed-gear bicycle. With as few moving parts as possible, it offers its riders utmost simplicity with no frills–a return to cycling’s roots in an age of spiraling technological advances.

A surging young demographic has curiously latched on to fixed-gear bikes in the last few years. Out in the garage, instead of souping up a hot rod for maximum power, kids fresh out of high school are minimizing by ripping apart Dad’s old 10-speed and removing all but the most necessary moving parts. Give me that old-time manpower, the defiant de-creationist says, it’s good enough for me.

To understand what’s going on here, some explanation is in order: a fixed-gear bike has only one speed and no freewheel. Essentially, this means two things: you cannot change gears and you can never stop pedaling. The chain is linked directly around a single rear-wheel cog, tight and immovable, so that when the bike is in motion, the pedals are in motion and your legs are in motion.

What to do with all this motion when you suddenly need to come to a stop? Remember the opening segment of The Flintstones where Fred and Barney stop their cars with their feet? It’s pretty much the same thing with a fixed-gear bike. A large number of fixed-gear riders remove all the brakes from their bikes, relying solely on their own legs to slow down and quickly pedaling backward in order to skid to a stop.

It doesn’t make any sense, I know. Yet considering that expensive mountain bikes with lavish accessories and all sorts of fancy extras now account for the majority of bicycle sales, the fixed-gear craze isn’t really all that bizarre. Culturally, it is an equal and opposite reaction by a group of passionate individuals to what they consider an illogical obsession with complexity.

Fixed-gear bicycles, after all, used to be the only bikes you could buy. In the early days of the Tour de France, the race was ridden entirely on fixed-gear bikes, and contestants would have to manually change gears for the mountains by removing their rear wheel and replacing the back gear. The freewheel offered riders the ability to coast in the 1930s; years later, shifters and derailers came along and changed the fixed gear forever. Disappearing from the mainstream entirely, the out-of-date design was useful mostly for diehards in winter training and for velodrome, or track, racing.

Some 70 years later, bicycle messengers in San Francisco and Manhattan started riding fixed-gear bikes for deliveries, and in no time at all, a fixed gear became not only de rigueur for messengers coast to coast, but an instant accessory to the modern lifestyle. Like making graffiti art or getting tattooed, riding a fixed gear succeeds to confuse most normal people, and thus achieves hipster status.

Obsessively distrustful of trends, I began cursing every fixed-gear bike I saw. Useless, I said. Inefficient. Unsafe. And the worst crime of all: increasingly popular. I couldn’t ride my bike anywhere, it seemed, without someone offering to turn it into a fixed gear. Even friends of mine who had also railed against them, who I had thought were on my side, turned up at my door one by one, riding loathsome two-wheelers of capitulation.

Of course, I hated fixed gears, but had I ridden ever one? Hell no.

Our Fourth of July entourage rode along Occidental Road, up through the rolling hills of Mill Station Road and stopped at an intersection on Graton Road. “We can head back through Graton,” it was announced, “or turn left and hit the Harrison Grade.”

I wasn’t about to blow my chance. I had heard of this Harrison Grade, lauded in the same way as, say, a dangerous secret swimming hole is. All I knew was that it was very long, very winding and very downhill. It sounded like a total scream. We turned left.

Little did I know that in order to get to the Harrison Grade, we’d have to climb a lengthy hill. I settled into my lowest gear possible, but every time I looked ahead, there was nothing but more hill. At one point someone had spray-painted “no bikes” across the asphalt. I wondered if this was a threat from an annoyed local or a compassionate message of warning to turn back.

I finally reached the others at the top and we chatted about the different low gears on our bikes while squirting water into our dry throats. Some riders had used a “granny gear,” an especially low gear that I immediately coveted.

Meanwhile, the guy in corduroys said that he needed a cigarette. His bike didn’t have a low gear or, I noticed, any brakes. The Harrison Grade was right around the corner.

The others plunged down the hill ahead of me like rockets, and I soon lost sight of them. Just to be on the safe side, I kept my hands on the brakes, negotiating the plentiful sharp turns and keeping my increasing speed in check. Halfway down the hill, I released the brakes completely, and my bike accelerated to breakneck velocity. It was kind of scary, and about 20 seconds later I wrapped my white knuckles around the brake levers again.

Careening down the Harrison Grade is a thrill that I’m glad I saved for so long. It’s a lot like jumping off a high dive or slow-dancing with a girl for the first time. There’s a certain electricity to it that makes you feel young and eternal.

I caught up to my friends at the bottom of the hill, all of us flushed and excited. The guy in corduroys was beaming. He had just survived one and a half miles of steep downhill, sharp turns and all, with no freewheel, no gears, no helmet and no brakes.

Come to think of it, flirting with death is a young, eternal thrill, too.

The crazy guy in corduroys is 19-year-old Buck Olen. Sitting in his bike-filled garage a few weeks later, he’s very serious about one thing: he did not make a habit of watching the television show My So-Called Life. But his younger sister did, and Olen has a vague recollection of an important awakening.

“What was the curly-haired guy’s name, who was, like, a friend and wanted to be her boyfriend or whatever?” he asks. “He was a bike messenger and he rode a fixed-gear bike.” Surrounded by the fixed-gear bikes that he now builds, rides and sells for a living, Olen is understandably embarrassed that he first heard about them from a lame TV show.

Olen shares a suburban Bennett Valley house with a web designer, a Food Not Bombs activist and an artist who sometimes stays up until 7am. Here in the garage, with its token sagging couch and pile of laundry in the corner, is where Olen works. If you’re looking for a custom fixed-gear bike but don’t know where to find an old frame or how to convert it, he is your man.

“There’s actually a lot of fixed-gear riders around who don’t think what I’m doing is necessarily the right thing,” Olen explains. “For them it’s like a club, and they definitely think that the number of fixed-gear riders should be limited.”

When Olen finished Coast Guard duty earlier this year, he hadn’t so much as touched a bike in two years. All of the old friends that he used to ride BMX bikes with were suddenly riding fixed-gear bikes instead, and his fascination grew into obsession. He quickly bought his first fixed gear, got a bicycle delivery job for a sandwich shop downtown and hasn’t looked back since.

“There’s a lot of different things that appeal to me,” he explains. “Simplicity is a big one.” To make things even simpler, Olen also usually rides without brakes, “mostly for the challenge,” he says. “I like having it be up to me how I stop the bike. Fixed gears are so maneuverable and efficient that I haven’t had a problem riding brakeless so far.”

I mention the Harrison Grade and his ride down it without brakes. “It was great,” he recalls. “I haven’t felt fear while riding in a long time, and I definitely did that day.” He chastises himself for cutting a couple of corners too tightly and riding into the oncoming lane, “but basically,” he says, “I was constantly accelerating.”

Today in the garage, there are 10 assembled bikes, with five more in various states of repair throughout the room. His work counter is absolutely overrun with sockets, Q-tips, cables, washers, spokes and hundreds of other tiny things in no discernable order. Olen fishes a derailer out of the pile and offers it to me for a bike that I’m working on for a friend. It’s no big deal, he says. When you take 10-speeds and turn them into fixed gears, you wind up with a lot of extra 10-speed parts.

Lately, more and more people are asking Olen for fixed-gear bikes; he has a waiting list of six customers on his schedule at the moment. As for the elitist attitude that many young fixed-gear riders have, Olen instead respects the level of experience required to achieve truly chipped shoulders. “There’s just as many old guys out there,” he says, “who are maybe even a little more pretentious about it because they have been riding fixed-gear bikes their whole lives.”

Olen advises first-time fixed-gear riders to use brakes and start with a low gear for ease in climbing hills. If you ride brakeless, expect to replace your rear tire every two months or so as a result of skid-stopping. The shock of not being able to coast takes some getting used to, and be sure to keep your chain well-maintained. Oh, and another thing, he says. Be prepared to be insulted out on the bike trail, particularly by those known as the spandex-wearers.

“There are some riders out there who really get kind of grumpy about it for no apparent reason,” he warns.

Freewheels are good!” says Jason Silverek, mildly irritated at having to state the obvious. “They were invented for a reason!”

The 33-year-old cyclist has had just about enough of all this fixed-gear nonsense, especially because of his job at Santa Rosa’s Bike Peddler, where he has to deal with it every day. “It’s good that these kids are into bicycles,” he acknowledges, “but it’s kind of directly related to hanging out at the coffee shop and being one of the ‘fixed-gear kids.'”

Silverek points out that such amenities as freewheels, different gears and brakes make riding a bike easier in every way, whether it be hopping up a curb or even turning a sharp corner without scraping the pedals on the ground. Fixed gears can make crashes worse, he says, “because once you panic, the bike can really throw you. It’s all your weight moving the bike forward. The pedals aren’t gonna stop moving, no matter what.”

Silverek, like many a serious cyclist, actually owns a bike with a fixed-gear option and rides it from time to time. But he can’t understand why someone would want to ride a fixed gear as a primary bicycle, especially around town. “Maybe fashion, cycling and high gas prices finally mixed,” he offers, “and spawned another fixed-gear surge.”

The Bike Peddler sells mostly mountain bikes these days, and the store’s front counter displays some of the accessories designed for the ultimate riding experience. Silverek predicts that most fixed-gear riders will eventually discover mountain biking. In his three years at the shop, he says, “you can see them go through the progression pretty quickly.”

While we’re talking, a middle-aged woman test-riding a bike takes a spill out in the parking lot, and Silverek quickly rushes to her aid. She’s fine, but he returns with a cautionary observation. “It’s a good thing she wasn’t riding a fixed gear.”

Up the street from the Bike Peddler is NorCal Bike Sport, where there’s almost always a quiet-spoken technician working in the back named Bill Schum. Schum has worked at local bike shops for over 20 years and has a veteran’s expertise with virtually everything bike-related.

“It’s amazing what these kids can do,” he says, impressed by the special tricks that a fixed gear allows. (For example, only on a fixed-gear bike is it possible to actually ride backward.) “But I wish that they would wear helmets and use brakes. I mean, it just makes sense.”

Moving to Sonoma County in 1971, Schum himself used to ride fixed gears almost exclusively for years with a pack of likeminded friends. They’d go riding every day before and after work, discovering as much out-of-the-way countryside as possible.

Riding conditions have changed in the last 30 years, and so has Schum. He, too, has been into mountain biking lately, though he still sometimes rides a fixed gear and counsels the new breed of enthusiasts. He knows their secret communion, their defensive sense of pride. “We always felt like anybody could ride a bicycle,” he smiles, “but fixed gears were for the special people.”

The hands-on experience of actually riding a fixed gear is what has most riders hooked, and many of them dust off the old saying that if you try it once, you’ll never go back. Being on a fixed gear is touted as providing a mystic connection to the bike and the road, a communion of man and machine. With legs in constant motion at an unwavering rate, it is as if you and the bike are one.

If you don’t understand the feeling, the fixed-gear riders say, then you never will. It’s just something that you have to do firsthand, which is why I took my grumbling to the road. Since fixed-gear riders speak mystically of “pushing themselves,” of “setting their mind to it” and similar high-minded goals, I decided to ride one to the beach.

Is there anything more immediately liberating than riding a bike on a beautiful summer day? It’s all there, wrapped up in one simple act: freedom from walking, freedom of movement, the joy of discovery, the thrill of one’s own ability and the excitement of velocity.

Except today it’s overcast and my feet are strapped to the pedals, to whose constant motion they are slaves. It’s jarring at first, threatening to eliminate all freedom, joy, thrill or excitement. Luckily, there aren’t too many others out on the Joe Rodota Trail, so it looks like I don’t have to worry about losing control and clobbering a small child. Thankfully, the fixed-gear bike I’ve borrowed for the day has a front hand brake–what some hardcore fixed-gear riders sneer at as a “cheater.”

I stop by a bike shop in Sebastopol and check out a map to decide which route I should take. I have never ridden a bike to the beach before, so I’m clueless. I stare at the map until, like pulling a name out of a hat, I settle on what sounds like a good enough route: Coleman Valley Road.

I’ve gotten used to the basic mechanics of the bike by now, but along Occidental Road the limitations of the fixed gear really kick in. There are a few uphill sections that are excruciating without a lower gear, but I slow down and pace myself, stopping sometimes to drink water or fix a clip that comes loose from a pedal. Finally my legs dance up and down during the welcome, mile-long descent into the town of Occidental.

After a brief taqueria stop, I find Coleman Valley Road. One glitch: it’s brutally uphill to start, and it’s not long before I have to hop off the bike, hang my head and begin the walk of shame. My wobbly legs, having been in constant motion all day, are hot and burning. I’ve got an unaccountable, almost manic dedication, and as soon as it’s flat enough, I’m back on the bike.

So it goes for the rest of the day, riding most of the time but hiking up the big hills. Some baffled sightseers along the way ask about my funny-looking bike. When I explain to them what it is, how far I’ve ridden and how wrecked I am, I get an understated response: “It’s a good thing they invented different gears.”

The absolute euphoria and overwhelming beauty of the view keep me going. At the height of Coleman Valley Road, there are golden, rolling California hills as far as the eye can see, with a small patch of ocean in the far distance. It’s unbelievable that I’ve lived here my whole life without experiencing this length of asphalt, and the anticipation of further discovery keeps pushing me closer toward my goal.

After the long, winding stretch that terminates at Coleman Beach, I drop the bike to breathe in the salty sea air of success. I’m honestly amazed that I made it, and looking at my stripped-down bike, I reflect on what an amazingly simple invention it is. Wheels, pedals, a chain and a frame. Just add a strong dash of determination, and a few hours later you’re shooting pinball at the Tides, the seals in the bay behind cheering you on.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that, all social trappings aside, riding a fixed-gear bike is pretty much the same as riding a regular bike. I could have taken my 10-speed along the hills of Coleman Valley Road and it would have felt the same. I’d still feel triumphant, it would’ve still been beautiful and man-oh-man, I’d still be sore for days afterward.

All of my grumbling about fixed-gear bikes seems frivolous and unimportant now. Like complaining about current hairstyles or annoying celebrities, it’s a lot like spitting back at rain. It’s also hard to justify giving a bad rap to something as self-affirming as riding a bike, no matter how ridiculous the bike may seem to be.

Still, I started wishing I had some options with me on my 43-mile beach ride, especially on the long way back home. Freewheels and gears give you the option to make your life easier, which is a valuable asset when your battered mind starts playing tricks on you. Six hours into my trip, pedaling deliriously past apple orchards and stray roadkill, I started mumbling to myself: just give me the illusion of ease, I’ll take whatever I can get at this point.

So when I finally reached the easy, flat stretch of trail back into Santa Rosa, I was filled with goodwill. I wanted to go back in time and hug Joe Rodota, whoever he was. I wanted to help strangers. I vowed to never criticize what I couldn’t understand, and I vowed to never curse at a fixed-gear bike ever again.

But would I ever ride one again?

Hell no.

From the September 15-21, 2004 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

County officials say the glass is half full. Well owners say it’s half empty. Are groundwater sources evaporating?

By R. V. Scheide

There’s a deep-dish Gravenstein apple pie with golden, flaky crust cooling on the kitchen counter in John King’s family home in Penngrove, freshly baked by his mother, Florence. It’s been sitting there all afternoon like a prop from a Norman Rockwell painting, as King, whose family has farmed and ranched Sonoma County for five generations, recounts how the well on his parents’ ranch ran dry and he was drafted into the region’s water war.

“I’ve lived here all my life,” he says. Husky, with a thick lock of blond hair and wearing a Harley Davidson 100th anniversary T-shirt, blue jeans and cowboy boots, King, 47, looks all rancher, but he’s also a professional financial auditor. When his well started running dry in the 1990s, the numbers just didn’t add up. “The whole ranch used to be irrigated by a 100-foot-deep well,” he explains. “By ’96, that well was pumping mud. My parents lost their well, then all of our neighbors lost their wells. When you run out of water and you have a hundred head of cattle that need water daily, it isn’t pleasant.”

King was forced to spend $15,000 to drill a new 386-foot-deep well. The livestock were moved off the 132-acre Penngrove ranch. Concerned his ranch might permanently lose its water supply, King took action, creating a well survey form on the computer and distributing thousands of copies to residents who depend on the Southern Santa Rosa Plain groundwater basin for their water. He didn’t expect many well owners to answer, since the disclosure of water problems can torpedo property values. Yet five years later, the map of Sonoma County on one of the two flip-charts set up in King’s kitchen displays hundreds of tiny stars marking the wells of survey respondents, many of whom report such conditions as dramatically declining water levels, wells running dry and severe bacterial contamination.

Out of necessity, King’s become a self-educated expert on groundwater issues in Sonoma County. He first contacted the Bohemian to correct some of the facts in the paper’s previous installment on North Bay water issues, (Aug. 18). A great blue heron was misidentified as a sandhill crane. An acre-foot of water, he informed, isn’t three football fields as reported but slightly less than one football field. (Imagine that field under a foot of water, and you’ve got an acre-foot, 325,851 gallons, enough to supply two families of four for a year. Keep those figures in mind. They’ll come in handy later.)

One more error, King pointed out, concerned a lawsuit filed against Rohnert Park that has, for the time being, stalled that city’s development plans until it brings groundwater usage under control. King and the South County Resource Preservation Committee filed the suit, not the OWL Foundation, as stated in the story. The suit was settled in 2002, a year before OWL was formed. King wanted to ensure that the committee, comprising 200 Sonoma County families who donated to fund the litigation, gets credit where credit’s due. He good-naturedly admitted the mistake was understandable, given that he has worked with the Penngrove-based OWL Foundation and even came up with the group’s acronymic moniker, which stands for Open Space Water Resource Protection and Land Use.

But the mistake that really put a burr in King’s backside, and why he’s spending the good part of a perfect summer afternoon flipping through the charts he’s shown literally hundreds of times in city council meetings, community forums and courtrooms, is the claim that little is known about the aquifers underlying Sonoma County. There’s plenty that we do know about the groundwater supply in the county, he says, and he’s got the charts, culled from readily available public documents, to prove it.

The charts and presentation are dazzling: high-resolution blowups of maps and diagrams depicting the southern Sonoma County water basin flip by rapidly as he relates the existing data in a reasonably understandable but machine-gun-like fashion. Two diagrams feature black rings drawn around Rohnert Park’s city wells. The rings represent theoretical “cones of depression,” so-called because well pumps exert suction that radiates out into the aquifer, in some cases for miles, sucking up water in a pattern that looks like an inverted cone–or a martini glass–in cross-section.

The first chart shows 30 days of groundwater pumping; none of the rings drawn around the wells intersect. Flip. The second chart shows two years of daily groundwater pumping; the rings around the city’s wells expand into one giant cone of depression beneath Rohnert Park. “It clearly shows that the wells in Rohnert Park are competing for water,” King says. “The same thing is happening in the Petaluma Valley groundwater basin between southern Penngrove and Petaluma. We’re all competing for the same water.”

The cities, with more powerful pumps and deeper wells, are winning this competition at the expense of residents in the unincorporated areas of the county, King insists. It’s a persuasive demonstration that he finishes off with dessert.

“It’s like this pie,” he says, snatching the cooling pastry off the kitchen counter. The amount of available groundwater is a fixed quantity. “If it’s just you and me, there’s plenty,” he says, proffering the pie so that its tantalizing aroma can be sensed before quickly whisking it back to the counter. “But suppose four people come over? Eight? Sixteen?” The implication for Sonoma County’s growing population is clear. “Mom’s apple pie is a lot like water,” he says. “Enjoy it before it’s gone.”

John King’s not just talking pie in the sky. According to the California Department of Finance, Sonoma County’s population is projected to increase some 35 percent, or by 163,000 people, by 2020. That’s 163,000 new guests lining up at the water trough. To quench much of this growing population’s thirst, the Sonoma County Water Agency (SCWA), which currently supplies 600,000 people in Sonoma and Marin counties with potable water, has petitioned the California State Water Board to increase Russian River diversions by 35 percent from Lake Sonoma.

The increase is necessary, the SCWA says, in order to meet the future demand of those contractors to which it wholesales water: the cities of Cotati, Petaluma, Rohnert Park, Santa Rosa and Sonoma; the Forestville, North Marin, Marin Municipal and Valley of the Moon water districts; the Larkfield, Penngrove and Kenwood Village water companies; the town of Windsor; and various customers in the agricultural and government sectors. In fiscal 2001, demand by contractors on the agency’s aqueduct system was 62,023 acre-feet (AFY). By 2035, that demand is projected to increase by 43 percent, to 88,400 AFY.

Two-thirds of the agency’s water deliveries, which are measured in millions of gallons per day (1 mgd equals 1,210 AFY), go to residential use. Because the agency can’t meet the total demand for water in the county, many local contractors–as well as private landowners in unincorporated areas like Penngrove–depend on existing groundwater supplies.

For example, in 1999 the SCWA supplied an average 2.68 mgd to Rohnert Park via the Petaluma Aqueduct. But Rohnert Park’s total demand averaged nearly 7 mgd. To meet that demand, the city’s 31 active wells pumped 4.19 mgd, nearly two-thirds of the total need. Rohnert Park’s 20-year general plan projected the city’s population to increase from 41,000 in 2000 to 50,400 by 2020, with average water demand increasing to 8.5 million gallons per day.

At least that was the projection before John King and the South County Resource Preservation Committee entered the picture. By 1999, when Rohnert Park began accepting public comment on its 2020 general plan, King and a growing number of county residents were convinced the city’s voracious pumps were sucking their own wells dry. The city’s figures showed that its average daily groundwater usage for the past two decades exceeded the amount required to recharge the aquifer, a condition known as overdraft. If left unchecked, overdraft conditions can permanently damage an aquifer’s ability to store water.

To add insult to injury, the new general plan proposed building 4,500 new homes and 5 million square feet of commercial and industrial space on 1,250 acres designated as an aquifer recharge area by the state Department of Water Resources. The land, annexed from Sonoma County, lies about a quarter mile from the King family’s home.

The city wasn’t just proposing to use more water in the future; it was proposing to pave over the aquifer’s ability to recharge itself and protect the water supply, right in King’s backyard.

At the time, few people in the county were as prepared as King to enter battle. He took his flip-charts to the city council and jaws dropped. Then, with the South County Resource Preservation Committee, many of whom he met by going door to door, he hauled the data into Sonoma County Superior Court, which, as a condition of the settlement agreement reached in 2002, ordered Rohnert Park to cut its groundwater pumping nearly in half as a prerequisite for expanding beyond its 1999 city limits. Groundwater concerns, apparently for the first time in recent Sonoma County history, had halted a development plan in its tracks.

“People used to laugh at me when I talked about declining groundwater supplies all the time,” King says. “They’re not laughing anymore.”

Penngrove resident Steve Carle, a geohydrologist for Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and chief science adviser for the OWL Foundation, calls the Rohnert Park settlement agreement “the only effective groundwater management action” taken to date in Sonoma County. It also appears to be the sole groundwater management action taken in the county, period.

As Carle notes on OWL’s website, the court encouraged Rohnert Park to formulate a groundwater plan with the SCWA, but the agency declined to participate. Similarly, the agency previously declined to participate in the Department of Water Resource’s 1997 groundwater-management program, which provides state grants and educational materials to counties that choose to establish such programs.

The agency’s reluctance is perhaps understandable, considering that surface water, filtered through the Russian River aquifer, accounts for the main portion of the water it supplies. The SCWA currently operates three groundwater wells in the Santa Rosa Plain, which pump a combined 7.6 mgd, or 8,520 AFY, amounting to about 12 percent of the total it supplies to contractors. While the agency tends to downplay groundwater’s contribution in the mix, King points out that the amount pumped is equal to Rohnert Park’s consumption, and refers to the three wells, located near Sebastopol, as a “phantom city.” Because Sebastopol is the only incorporated city in Sonoma County that doesn’t receive water from the SCWA, it pumps groundwater from the Santa Rosa Plain, competing directly with this phantom city.

The current water-supply agreement encourages the development of local groundwater sources but leaves growth decisions up to the contractors–the cities and local water districts–none of whom currently has a groundwater management program in place. Carle believes the days of city and county officials ignoring groundwater management of Sonoma County’s 40,000 domestic wells may be over.

“Now the limits are being reached, and they’re looking for other options,” Carle says. “The contractors are trying to figure out how to squeeze as much as possible from the existing capacity.”

But this squeezing of Sonoma County’s surface and groundwater resources is coming under increasing scrutiny, from state and federal regulators, and from environmental groups and ordinary citizens living in unincorporated areas who just want to know why their wells keep running dry. During the past year, a whirlwind of legal activity, organizational efforts and public-education forums have heightened the sense that the region’s ability to provide water for the growth projected in city and county plans may be in doubt.

The Sonoma County Water Coalition, an alliance formed between members from a cross-section of local environmental groups, including OWL, the Redwood Chapter of the Sierra Club and the Sebastopol Water Information Group, is attempting to shape the county’s general plan update, which for the first time will contain a separate water element. The coalition hopes to have language that calls for “a countywide policy for sustainable groundwater management” inserted into the revised general plan, scheduled to be finalized early next year.

Crafting such bureaucratic language can be a painfully slow process, particularly when the editing and revising is being done by volunteers with day jobs and real lives. More often than not, the language gets watered down by county and city officials when the final product is released. In addition to such duty, many of the same activists made presentations at public water forums held earlier this year in Sebastopol and Bennett Valley.

The complex scientific jargon of water at such forums can be, ironically, dry, and you get the sense it makes King just a little bit antsy. At a recent Bennett Valley water forum, he directed a pointed question at Sonoma County supervisor and SCWA board member Valerie Brown, one of the evening’s panel guests: “How is it that this county can consider moving forward with a new master water agreement between the Sonoma County Water Agency and the cities of Marin and Sonoma counties to commit to and export more groundwater supplies for people that don’t live here yet when we have so many problem areas here in the county, including these people here in the room tonight?” he boomed to raucous applause.

Looking a little piqued, Brown collected herself before replying.

“I wish that you would all recognize that whenever you moved here, that’s not the last time anyone’s moving here,” she said. “We are still going to accept growth in this county. Thankfully, we have a general plan with development at a reasonable rate that can be absorbed. That means that we think differently about sanitation, land use and about water. Those all get incorporated into the growth. But is it unreasonable growth? Are we going to become San Francisco? Look at the plan, it’s not in there.”

If you don’t agree, Brown added, you can always move to Cloverdale or, better yet, Lake County.

King has looked at the plan, and is still mystified where water for the 163,000 newcomers expected by 2020 is going to come from. So are the 18 members of the Sonoma County Civil Grand Jury, who during the past year considered evidence presented by organizations such as OWL as well as the managers from the SCWA and the Permit and Resource Management Department.

Released in July, the grand jury’s report recommends that the county and each of the cities implement groundwater plans in their general plans by 2005. The report also recommended that the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors relinquish its membership on the water agency’s board and create a new, independent board of directors accountable to the electorate. However, the recommendations are not legally binding, and no sitting supervisor has voiced support for disbanding the agency’s current framework.

Watered down, once again.

Legal action and environmental regulation now seriously jeopardizing the diversion of water from the Eel River and the SCWA’s requested 35 percent increase in Russian River surface water have added a sense of urgency to the groundwater issue in Sonoma County. Without the Eel River diversion, Sonoma County is an island, with no other outside sources of water available. According to SCWA deputy engineer Jay Jaspers, the agency is currently working with the U.S. Geological Survey on a comprehensive study of the region’s groundwater. Jaspers says the survey won’t be completed for three or four years.

That’s not soon enough for Sebastopol mayor Linda Kelley.

“The city of Sebastopol cannot wait five years to create its own groundwater management plan,” she said at a Sebastopol water forum. “If we don’t get this thing right, there will be no Sebastopol.”

“She once sat right where you’re sitting and watched the same presentation,” King says back in the kitchen of his family home in Penngrove. He pulls out two framed aerial photographs of the ranch, one in black and white taken in 1947, the other in color, taken in 1993 from the same angle, back before the ranch’s well went dry. “This should be considered a big success,” he says, asking if any difference can be seen in the two photos. There isn’t any difference, and that’s his point.

With the exception of the removal of livestock, the King family ranch’s wide-open 132 acres, now planted in oat hay, have remained the same. Valerie Brown may be correct. Sonoma County isn’t going to become the next San Francisco, but unless someone gets a handle on the water supply, it’s not going to be the same Sonoma County that five generations of King’s family have known, either.

King is not going to sit around idly and let that happen. The phone rings constantly, someone with a groundwater question, a colleague asking about an upcoming meeting. In fact, a new group is meeting in Santa Rosa on the night we speak, something called Coalition for Unincorporated Sonoma County. As King points out, landowners in unincorporated areas continue to pay for 1984’s construction of Warm Springs Dam as part of their property taxes, but the water agency isn’t under any obligation to provide them with water from Lake Sonoma, and the water cannot be used for agriculture. The new group seeks to give a voice to the more than 100,000 people who live in the unincorporated areas of the county and want to see their rural lifestyle protected.

Just another facet in Sonoma County’s water war.

King holds up a recent photograph of his mom and dad, silver-haired, fourth-generation farmers, standing against a backdrop of chest-high oat hay, a modern American Gothic.

“This is a success story,” he says. “This is good news.”

No doubt in the days ahead it won’t be the last word heard from John King on the subject.

From the September 8-14, 2004 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.