Now off the table is a once-proposed dam that would have flooded the Mokelumne River far upstream from the State Route 49 bridge.

East Bay Municipal Utility District directors Tuesday decided that work to install a long-term water plan would make do without a new, taller Pardee Dam of the kind that would have provided EBMUD maximum Mokelumne water but put maximum hardship on foothills residents - both humans and wild species.

The Mokelumne is EBMUD's primary water source. Without pressure from residents of population-skimpy Amador and Calaveras counties, the outcome for the foothills from a foothills perspective could have been worse, according to agency spokesman Charles Hardy. Still, the agency decision seemed to ignore a formal request from the Amador County Board of Supervisors that any dam proposal that would flood the Middle Bar Bridge downstream of Highway 49 be deleted from consideration. Proposals still on the table would flood the bridge.

"We saved 3,000 feet of the river," said Katherine Evatt, Foothill Conservancy co-president, disappointed with the outcome.

Still a possible candidate for selection, Evatt said, is a Pardee Dam project that would flood the Mokelumne to a point 1,000 feet upstream of Highway 49, a particularly scenic and popular public-access stretch.

Powerful EBMUD did not break but only bent slightly under public pressure.

"A great deal of opposition had surfaced since the initial Environmental Impact Report and plan were released earlier in the year and the board tried to address some of those concerns by eliminating a possible scenario for a new dam that would have had the greatest impact," Hardy said.

Evatt noted, however, that "the big message is that that board is clearly split on the Pardee Dam issue."

After one board member left in early evening Tuesday, later anti-dam motions split and failed 3-3, Evatt said.

Still among EBMUD options to increase its long-term water supply from the Mokelumne are some proposals for various new, taller versions of Pardee Dam. None would flood the Mokelumne Canyon as far upriver as the most extreme dam would have, and one would increase Pardee storage only below the location of the current dam.

In addition, remaining EBMUD proposals include banking of Sacramento River water in the Central Valley aquifer and desalinization of saltwater taken from San Francisco Bay.

Converging on the utility district's Oakland headquarters Tuesday was a coalition opposed to what was known as "Option 5," the most-extreme dam proposal.

According to organizers from the Foothill Conservancy, a coalition rally was scheduled to have included Jackson City Councilman Keith Sweet, Berkeley City Councilman Jesse Arreguin and tribal residents of Amador and Calaveras counties.