San Lorenzo Valley Watchdogs Forced to Make Own Recordings of Water Board Meetings

Community members involved with the group San Lorenzo Valley Watchdogs have been recording their water board's meetings and posting them to their website because the district's recordings are of such low quality.

Audio of San Lorenzo Valley Water District meetings going back to September are available on the Watchdogs' website on the 'Recordings' page, along with this statement:

"After Watchdog Dana Weigand ruefully discovered the District's elaborate looking 1980's era audio recording equipment, complete with microphones and mixer, was defective and apparently has never in recent years resulted in a useable audio cassette tape (she asked for her $10 "tape duplication fee" back for the 8.15.2013 BOD high drama meeting), the Watchdog's decided to make their own recordings. One of our members has professional audio experience and set us up with a professional portable 4-channel directional 5-microphone digital device configured to record at 44kHz / 16 bit resolution. Each recording is then down-sampled to 8kHz / 8 bit resolution with about +15dB of compression to augment average volume and decrease the resulting stereo WAV format output file size. These files are made available as a courtesy to our fellow rate-payers and the public."

The San Lorenzo Valley Watchdogs say they were "shocked" into first creating their website when the water district's staff personnel told one of their members that they "could not stop them" when they complained about the district drilling holes in their roads and newly paved driveways without asking permission or warning them of their intent.

In the Autumn of 2013, the Watchdogs mounted a major petition campaign against the water district to prevent construction of the new water district campus that could wind up costing over $9 million and will trigger a major water rate increase, but they were unsuccessful.

The San Lorenzo Valley Water District (SLVWD) was established in 1941 and serves more than 7300 metered connections. The District supplies water to the communities of Boulder Creek, Brookdale, Ben Lomond, Zayante, Scotts Valley, Manana Woods and Felton.