The mission of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) is to serve San Francisco and its Bay Area customers with reliable, high quality, and affordable water and wastewater treatment while maximizing benefits from power operations and responsibly managing the resources—human, physical, and natural—entrusted to its care. The 36,000 acre Alameda Watershed (Watershed) encompasses two reservoirs that store water from the Sierra Nevada mountains and local runoff and includes water transmission facilities that are part of a system that delivers water to about 2.4 million customers in the Bay Area. The Watershed is managed to primarily protect the quality of this water and existing land uses on the Watershed include grazing, recreation, mining, utilities, and landscape nurseries. The SFPUC has developed a mission statement to guide management of the Watershed. This mission statement includes the following:

• to provide the best environment for the production, collection, and storage of the highest quality water for the City and County of San Francisco and suburban customers;
• to develop, implement, and monitor a resource management program which addresses all Watershed activities; and
• to apply best management practices for the protection of water and natural resources and their conservation, enhancement, restoration, and maintenance while balancing financial costs and benefits.

In response to this mission statement, and because existing SFPUC policies do not address the management of Watershed lands in a comprehensive or integrated manner, the Alameda Watershed Management Plan (Management Plan) has been prepared.

The purpose of the Management Plan is to provide a policy framework for the SFPUC to make consistent decisions about the activities, practices, and procedures that are appropriate on the Watershed lands. To aid the SFPUC in their decision-making, the Management Plan provides a comprehensive set of goals, policies, and management actions that address all Watershed activities and reflect the unique qualities of the Watershed.

In addition to serving as a long-term regulatory framework for decision-making by the SFPUC, the Management Plan is also intended to be used as a Watershed management implementation guide by the SFPUC’s Land and Resource Management Section (LRMS) staff. The Management Plan provides the LRMS manager and staff with management actions designed to implement the established goals and policies for water quality, water supply, ecological and cultural resource protection, fire safety management, Watershed activities, public awareness, and financial management. The Management Plan also enables LRMS staff to address and plan for future management issues such as fire management, erosion control, public access, security, development encroachment, construction and maintenance of utility facilities, and ecological resource management. Although the Management Plan has been developed with an effort to design realistic policies and actions, it may be that due to funding realities or changed circumstances, some actions may not be implemented or may be implemented at a later phase. In such cases the status quo would prevail.

The Alameda Watershed Management Plan is presented in six chapters. An Introduction (Chapter 1.0) is followed by a discussion of Existing Conditions and Resource Sensitivity (Chapter 2.0). Chapter 3.0 briefly describes the major Watershed Management Issues. Chapter 4.0 takes the major management issue areas (established in Chapter 3.0) and describes Watershed Management Goals and Policies for each of these management issue areas. Chapter 5.0 presents the actions and guidelines that form the basis of the Alameda Watershed Management Plan. Chapter 6.0 provides a discussion of Phasing and Implementation.

The Alameda Watershed Management Plan was designed to improve the SFPUC’s ability to protect its overall Watershed in general, and in particular the specific resources that make up that Watershed. Given the intention behind the Management Plan design, the overall environmental impacts of the Management Plan are beneficial. However, some actions also have the potential to have significant adverse physical impacts on the environment. These management actions are described in Chapter II, and the analysis of these actions forms the core of this Environmental Impact Report (EIR).

View the entire report in PDF format, below.