ROUGH UNDERCURRENTS.

Byline: Bob Keefer The Register-Guard

For most of the two decades she's lived on idyllic Leaburg Lake, a placid wide spot behind a small dam on the McKenzie River about 25 miles east of Eugene, Judy Olson considered the Eugene Water & Electric Board her friend.

The municipal utility, which generates electricity from a small hydroelectric turbine below the dam, wasn't just a faceless corporation. EWEB was the late Lloyd Knox, the cordial Leaburg Dam caretaker whose wife made cookies for lakeside residents. EWEB, after all, created the 68-acre lake in 1930 and even built a public park on its shores, where families could picnic and fish.

But in recent years, Olson and some of her neighbors have found EWEB less cordial. They say the utility - on whose board they have no representation - has put money ahead of community and has put bureaucracy ahead of trust.

The focus of their complaint is this: EWEB may raise the level of Leaburg Lake by 18 inches, inundating some lakefront property, killing large trees and, homeowners fear, threatening to undermine some homes.

But that's just the most vexing among a host of issues that have been brought into focus by an unlikely event, the federal relicensing of Leaburg Dam.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission gives 50-year licenses to hydro plants. This particular license application, which was begun in 1991, fills three 4-inch-thick binders at EWEB's headquarters in Eugene.

Among the pages and pages of requirements are these: FERC requires dam operators not to harm migrating salmon. At the same time, it requires them to generate as much electricity as possible. EWEB's salmon protection needed improvement; that required diverting some water from its Leaburg power canal; and diverting water means it can't generate as much electricity.

The result, says EWEB, is that the utility needs to raise the Leaburg Lake water level by as much as 18 inches so it can still generate the same amount of power at the dam. That prospect, compounded by public relations stumbles on EWEB's part, has increasingly united residents against the utility.

"The lack of honesty and lack of clear communication has really undermined any sort of relationship with EWEB," Olson said.

"They have let it get out of hand," said her neighbor, Jim Palmer. "They don't have the right engineers. And they don't have the right public relations."

For its part, EWEB admits to poor public relations with the lakeside community. Marty Douglass, chief EWEB spokesman, says that happened, in part, because past relations had been so good that too much was taken for granted.

"We have all been living together in quiet harmony up there for so many years," he said. "We went for 40-plus years without having to do any major work on these projects up there." The FERC relicensing, though, changed all that. "That put us in a whole new ballgame," Douglass said.

Smaller issues have erupted to cloud the bigger ones. As part of the relicensing, EWEB discovered that, because their roots might weaken its banks, trees shouldn't be allowed to grow along the power canal, which shunts water from the dam through the hydro-electric turbines. As a result, the utility clear-cut the entire canal bank and pulled out the stumps, leaving a bare patch of scarred earth in plain view right next to Highway 126.

"We could have done a better job of communicating about the work ahead of time," Douglass says, adding that EWEB, after consultation with a citizens group, is now planting thousands of bulbs on the canal banks to brighten the view.

Work on Leaburg Dam to allow raising the lake level has proved doubly irritating to residents who live on the south side of the lake, where the only access to homes is across a narrow road on top of the dam. Last summer EWEB specified that a contractor working on the dam could close the road for no more than 10 minutes at a time, Douglass said, but that proved impractical and the utility stopped enforcing the requirement. This summer, Douglass said, work will continue - but residents will be given better notice of lengthy closures.

As trust eroded, the issue of representation on the EWEB board has emerged. EWEB has nearly 3,000 electricity customers along the McKenzie River who have no say in how the urban utility is operated. "We feel it's absolutely essential that residents of this river valley have representation on the EWEB board," Olson says.

That's not likely to happen if it's up to EWEB. "Our board has so far said, no, we're not going to go along with that," Douglass says. "That would require a change in the Eugene city charter."

EWEB says it's still studying how much it might need to raise the water level at Leaburg Lake. "Raising the level of the lake is going to result in some inundation and some loss of property for a few property owners," Douglass says. "In each of those cases we will work with the property owners to rebuild the bank. We'll bring in fill." In any case, he said, property owners will be compensated for any losses.

But downstream at Walterville, EWEB and an unhappy homeowner are tangling in a situation that can't be reassuring for Leaburg Lake residents. James Hayden lives on property his grandfather, Charly Hayden, bought 90 years ago near the intersection of the Walterville power canal tailrace and the McKenzie River.

As part of the relicensing process last year, EWEB installed a new fish barrier on the canal near Hayden's property to keep spawning salmon from swimming up the canal from the river. The barrier, which replaces a screen that required frequent cleaning, speeds and aerates the water that flows over it, making it impassable for salmon.

But the new barrier also acts as a low dam, backing up water on the canal behind it. Despite EWEB's assurances that the barrier wouldn't affect his family, Hayden says, the water has backed up so far that it's flooded an acre of his land right next to occupied homes.

Alder trees, first deprived of water when the canal was emptied for the barrier's construction and now inundated because of the flooding, are dying near his house by the score.

An electric fence to keep the family's goats contained is now largely under water, and plastic flags marking the water's edge regularly disappear along with the eroding shoreline.

"I was blindsided by this," says Hayden, who's hired a lawyer to negotiate with EWEB. "Our soil is being taken away from us a little bit at a time. They said the gabions (rock barriers installed along the canal edge downstream from his property) were going to take care of any rise in the water. But they're way downstream." EWEB construction crews that had been friendly and helpful in the beginning became distant as the situation deteriorated, Hayden said. Now, he says, it's in the hands of lawyers.

Douglass admits EWEB didn't foresee the problems caused for Hayden by the new fish barrier.

"I don't think we anticipated quite the degree of flooding that occurred," he said. "That is pretty natural. You don't really know what the impact of a big structure in the river is going to be until you get there."

And that, river residents say, is exactly the problem.

EWEB treats each project on the river in isolation, Hayden says, when in fact everything that happens along a river is related. The river, he says, is a living thing. "You can lie in bed at night and hear the river growling," he said. "That's the sound of river rock moving. The sound of the river."

CAPTION(S):

A photo shows the Hayden family's bridge before EWEB work on the river. The water now comes within a foot of the base of the bridge. Lorraine and Jim Hayden look over papers relating to their legal case with EWEB.