Calistoga faces lawsuit over city reservoir

By JOHN WATERS JR.
For the Register

Dredging up the history of the city of Calistoga’s municipal reservoir, a Southern California man is suing the city in an effort to restore water to Kimball Creek.

The civil suit charges the city built Kimball Reservoir to hold more water than it is allowed to, and deceived state regulators by not reporting accurately its 1939 agreement with the family of Alfred Tubbs, among Calistoga’s earliest residents. San Diego resident Grant Reynolds filed the suit May 13 after purchasing the rights to collect any settlement based on the allegations from Tubbs’ survivor, Debbie O’Gorman.

The suit also says the city improperly took what was to be drinking water for residents and sold it to vineyard owners for agricultural use.

Calistoga officials have not commented on the lawsuit.

Aside from taking water the suit claims it wasn’t entitled to, Reynolds alleges the city built the Kimball dam higher to hold more water than was permitted by the 1939 agreement with the Tubbs family, which in turn destroyed upper Napa Valley fish habitat.

“When you speak to the real old-timers — and I’d like to hear from anyone with a story — you can hear all kinds of stories about the fish that used to be plentiful,” Reynolds said. “Today you’d be hard-pressed to find any fish at all.”

“Before all of this, the fingerlings would survive year-round in small pools of water along the upper parts of the Napa River and Kimball Creek,” he added. “When the winter rains came those fish would swim downstream and out to the ocean. All of that has been destroyed.”

Reynolds is asking the public for stories and photographs of fish caught in the upper tributaries of the Napa River.

To prove his point, Reynolds has included a photograph of sea-run steelhead trout he claims O’Gorman’s ancestors caught from Kimball Creek as an exhibit in his suit.

“I want the city to put the water back into the creek,” Reynolds said. “They’ve been saying all along that they’d allow water from the reservoir into the creek, but there’s none flowing into it.”

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