Despite short-term gains, ‘future is still uncertain’ for Big Basin Water
The court-appointed manager of an embattled utility provider in the Santa Cruz Mountains reported that circumstances aren’t as dire as they were six months ago, but the system and its hundreds of customers aren’t out of the woods. “We’re still standing,” is the simplest way Nicolas Jaber, an attorney with Serviam by Wright LLP, could put it during a Wednesday town hall meeting in Boulder Creek for customers of Big Basin Water Co. Jaber is also a project manager with the Irvine-based law firm assigned by a Santa Cruz County Superior Court judge last fall to assume operational control of the water system after it spent years on the brink of collapse. Only a couple of months later, a judge assigned even more responsibility to Serviam by Wright by having it take over Big Basin’s wastewater treatment plant — serving a subset of customers in the Fallen Leaf neighborhood — after raw waste was spotted spilling onto open earth at the facility.