Recycled water filling station draws NIMBY resistance in Pleasanton neighborhood

PLEASANTON — California’s ongoing drought has shifted the focus for many cities toward providing recycled water to residents.

Some residents in Pleasanton are saying “not so fast” to adding a recycled water filling station at the former Zone 7 Water Agency headquarters building on Hopyard Road at Parkside Drive.

According to residents, Parkside is a quiet neighborhood in Pleasanton that parallels Las Positas Boulevard for almost a mile.

“It would be just chaos if they opened the site,” said Laura Charteris, a longtime resident of the neighborhood who started an online petition urging the city council to select an alternative site.

She said the Parkside location is not the place for a recycled water distribution site serving residents of Pleasanton, Dublin, Livermore and parts of San Ramon.

“We’re worried about large trucks coming and going as kids are commuting to and from school and we’re worried about queuing traffic and idling vehicles and pollution. It’s not just the residents. It’s people that utilize the park,” Charteris said.

The proposed site at Parkside is directly across the street from Ken Mercer Sports Park with more than 100 acres of grass sports fields that are kept green with recycled water. That means much of the needed infrastructure is already in place to install 17 recycled water filling stations at the old Zone 7 Water Agency headquarters.

“We wouldn’t really have needed to add a lot of recycled water pipes to the site so it was a lower-cost project,” said Lea Blevins, spokesperson for the Dublin San Ramon Service District.

There is an alternate site that was considered at the corner of Gleason Drive and Arnold Road in Dublin. It’s a non-residential area not far from the jail but the cost to build that is estimated to be four times the amount needed to open the Parkside site — somewhere around $1.5 to $1.7 million.

“We are definitely open to exploring other options — especially if the drought continues into 2023,”  Blevins said.

The Pleasanton city council will be taking up the issue at their meeting next Tuesday night, Aug. 16.