When the San Francisco Public Utility Commission began to plan for a Sunol Water Temple welcome center, President Barack Obama had just taken his oath of office and the cost of gas was just over $2. More than 17 years and millions of dollars later, the project remains incomplete.
“If we had a schedule, we would share it,” Tim Ramirez, division manager of natural resources and lands management at SFPUC, said of the proposed Alameda Creek Watershed Center. “The plan has gone through different iterations over the years, but I definitely think there’s the gusto. … The fact we’ve invested so many resources shows our gusto.”
Built in 1910, the Sunol Water Temple is a Beaux Arts-style pergola inspired by the Temple of Vesta in Tivoli, Italy, serving as a memorial to the confluence of the Bay Area’s major watersheds.
Underneath the temple’s Corinthian columns, three subterranean pipelines from Arroyo de la Laguna, Alameda Creek and Pleasanton supplied half of San Francisco’s water supply during the early 20th century.
When the Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct began delivering water to San Francisco in 1934, however, it replaced the Sunol Water Temple as the primary water source for San Francisco. In 1976, the American Society of Civil Engineers declared the temple as a California Historical Engineering Landmark.
Some Sunol residents may find themselves completely unfamiliar with the temple’s place in Bay Area history because it has been largely inaccessible to the public for about a decade, said Connie DeGrange, a 45-year resident.
“People haven’t been there in 10 years. There are people who are in Sunol who have never experienced it,” DeGrange said. “There are kids who have never learned the importance of it. It’s a magnificent structure to represent a pivotal project to California, bringing water to San Francisco and the Bay Area.”
SFPUC initially proposed a $3-4 million educational center east of the Sunol Water Temple in 2009 amid public criticism that the agency had provided little public access to the site’s 36,000 acres, according to a 2012 Mercury News article. SFPUC said that any estimates from 2012 predate current leadership.
At the time, Ramirez said that he had hoped the watershed center would become a “hub for the community.” For many, including DeGrange, the watershed center is important to revitalizing the bucolic town, which has witnessed the closures of a restaurant and cafe that were previously nerve centers for the community.
But Ramirez pushed back against that characterization in a recent interview with this news organization. The center, he said, was deliberately for the SFPUC’s mission to educate the public on water, ecology and the history of the Muwekma Ohlone people.
“It’s not a community center. This is not a building for people to have weddings or events. This is an educational facility,” Ramirez said. “It’s not going to be available for people to use for other purposes that are not related to our operations.”
Several aspects of the center’s development – excavation, bidding, and construction – took multiple years or faced unexpected delays that expanded the view of the originally proposed project, according to SFPUC.
During an excavation of the site, as mandated by the California Environment Quality Act, SFPUC hired a documentary team to capture the findings of Muwekma Ohlone artifacts over two years. The effort resulted in the discovery of about 13,000 artifacts, according to SFPUC.
Initial planning documents for the facility were rejected by the San Francisco Arts Commission and sent back to the drawing board. Even awarding contracts to construct the center took multiple rounds of bids, according to the SFPUC.
“In the beginning, it was going to be just about the tribe and its history, right?” Ramirez said. “But we changed the actual exhibits themselves, and the tribe allowed us to make reproductions of some of the artifacts to include as part of that new exhibit.”
When the project was released for bid in 2016, the proposal received only two bids – one that was later withdrawn and the other rejected, according to SFPUC. The water agency then separated the proposal into separate bids between the watershed center and an infrastructure improvement project at the Sunol Yard.
With limited prospects, the watershed center was “put on hold due to funding” in 2017.
A groundbreaking was set to take place in 2020, with an opening date set for 2023. But no sooner did construction begin than it was almost immediately halted due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
When construction resumed that fall, SFPUC boasted about the $27 million, 10,000-square-foot education hub to the local press. That celebration would be short-lived.
The project encountered further delays when “historic winter rainstorms damaged the property,” including damage to utility hook ups for the center that required repair, SFPUC wrote. Leaks were discovered in the archaeology pit, windows, walls and an 8,000-gallon freshwater aquarium.
“When I walked through there during the fall, there was a rainstorm and the windows all leaked,” DeGrange said. “We keep on thinking that the center will open soon and we just keep waiting. It’s really affecting us on two levels: history and the revitalization of Sunol.”
The Alameda Creek Watershed center now has a contract in the amount of $32,860,000, but is still left without an opening date. Ramirez said the project is “over 95% complete,” with only small adjustments left for the exhibits and final safety checks.
The wait cannot be over soon enough for the people of Sunol.
“Right now, we are trying to revitalize the downtown area. A restaurant and a cafe have stopped operating. Those were the social centers of the town,” DeGrange said. “We keep on thinking that the center will open soon and we’ve kept on waiting for 10 years now.”
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