Medford

MEDFORD, OREGON and private businesses to offset their impacts on rivers and streams, evaluate habitat and water qual- ity conditions, and optimize conservation invest- ments.“They came up with a programwhere they restore riparian areas (a riparian area is the interface between land and a river or stream) by establishing tree canopies,”Crebbin continues.“They compute howmuch cooling you get out of trees when they’re grown. So, they do a 20-year conservation ease- ment with the landowners and pay them for it.And the contract price is about $8 million to do all the temperature mitigation that we need done.The other advantages are by restoring that riparian area, not only do you cool the river, but you also create habitat connections, stabilize stream banks, and you get some filtering of agricultural runoff before it hits the stream. So, there are lots of benefits.” Crebbin maintains that the lowest life-cycle cost approach results in extremely low utility fees for Medford’s residents.“Because we have no debt, all of the money is going into operations and projects. And, for a typical household,we have a public safety fee, a parks utility fee, a street fee, a stormwater fee, a sewer fee, and a water bill. If you add all those up, it comes out to about $60 a month for a single family house.When you do comparisons, anywhere, even in Oregon, the sewer bill alone is more than $60 a month.” Other items on Medford’s agenda, according to Crebbin, include an alternative fuel study for the city’s fleet.“It’s predominantly gas and diesel, now, with a couple of compressed natural gas test units cerned the city’s wastewater treatment plant. “About six years ago,we came under the temperature standard,”he recounts.“The Rogue River is a salmon stream, and there was about a month during the year where the Department of Environmental Quality said that our temperatures were too high- our discharge would raise the temperature of the river by .18 degrees Celsius, according to the DEQ’s analysis.One alternative was to put in chillers; we didn’t like that idea because the cost was in the neighborhood of $16 million, and we’d only use them for a month, the things use a lot of energy so there’d be a pretty large carbon footprint, and if they break down,we’re in violation of our discharge permit.We looked at chillers, cooling towers, lagoons to store the water for later agricultural re-use- all of themwere over $15 million.” What Medford did, instead,was work with the DEQ and a non-profit company out of Portland called The Freshwater Trust that works with municipalities, utilities, agencies,