Saratoga News

Council plans another look at Williamson creek report

By Sarah Lombardo

A little more than eight months after Rhea Williamson's report to the City Council on the condition of the Saratoga Creek and the coliform levels in its water, the council is planning on revisiting the issue in November--this time, to determine if the report was accurate.

Such a discussion was called for shortly after Williamson, an associate professor in San Jose State University's Department of Civil Engineering and Applied Mechanics, made the Feb. 5 presentation of her report to the City Council. Saratoga residents Don Whetstone and Jeff Schwartz, both involved in litigation against the city over the condition of the Saratoga Creek, charged at a council meeting following the presentation that the report, for which Williamson was paid more than $10,000, contained inaccuracies and was an attempt by the council to publicly bolster its case in the creek lawsuit. It was also not fair, Schwartz said, that city officials who introduced Williamson at the televised meeting never mentioned her role in the lawsuit, specifically that she had made a declaration in support of the city on March 19, 1996.

City officials deny that Williamson was retained as an expert witness for the city in the suit, and say that she was hired to do the report as an independent contractor.

Interim City Manager Larry Perlin said he hoped to schedule the discussion for Nov. 5 but still needed to confirm that date. Planned topics, he said, will include Whetstone and Schwartz's charges of inaccuracies; a report from City Attorney Mike Riback on Williamson's role as an independent consultant for the city and her connection to the lawsuit; the Urban Creek Assessment Project Oversight Committee and what that body does with regard to the creek; and the possibility of new signage along the Saratoga Creek about the water quality.

Perlin said he hopes that the discussion will put to rest several of the issues surrounding the report, if even to agree to disagree about the report's quality.

"I would hope that in the end of all this, we could at least agree that Dr. Williamson did what she was contracted to do," he said. "Some people may not agree with her conclusions, but you don't have to agree with the report to see that she did what she was hired to do."

Schwartz said he, too, hopes some questions are answered, but said that he still had questions about why city staff would choose to introduce Williamson to the public without talking about her declaration in the lawsuit, a move that he called clear-cut deception. And that deception, he said, puts the report's objectiveness in question.

"No one mentioned that," Schwartz said. "The bias comes forward throughout that report. It's not a document the city should have paid $5 for."

Williamson is on sabbatical and could not be reached. However, her attorney, Judy Alexander of Capitola, recalled that at the time the city asked her client to make the declaration in support of the city's opposition to a partial summary judgment, "Rhea remembers asking about compromising her neutrality as an analyst. She was assured that would not be the case."

The Saratoga Creek lawsuit against the city by the San Francisco BayKeeper and the Friends of Santa Clara County Creeks is currently in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals after having been dismissed by San Jose Federal Magistrate Edward Infante. At issue in the suit, filed more than two years ago, were fecal coliform levels in the Saratoga Creek, particularly in the area surrounding storm drains under Saratgoa-Sunnyvale Road and Big Basin Way. The groups charged that the city was responsible for extremely high levels of fecal coliform in the creek.

Infante ruled, however, that the city was not responsible for outflows from the drains, which are underneath portions of road actually owned by Caltrans.

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