Burbank cemetery to make the switch to recycled water
Alberto Fausto, with Valley Crest Landscape Maintenance, tests newly installed sprinklers that use reclaimed water at Valhalla Memorial Park on Friday, Feb. 26, 2016.
The best opportunity for converting large customers from fresh to recycled water outlined by Burbank Water and Power officials last spring was at Pierce Brothers Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery, where the switch could save an estimated 130 million gallons of groundwater annually.
But there were unique economic challenges that kept Valhalla from using the treated waste water, which is fit for irrigation but not human consumption.
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This week, city officials completed a plan to wean the cemetery off pumped groundwater in the San Fernando Valley basin, which can be used for drinking water, and onto recycled water, thanks to some financial incentives that officials said will be “cost neutral” for the city and the cemetery.
In return, the city will reap several benefits, including a boost of more than $350,000 in annual revenue in recycled water sales.
For most utility customers, recycled water is cheaper to use, but under a 1979 court judgment, Valhalla is entitled to pump much of its water from the aquifer, which is about $75,000 a year cheaper than buying recycled water. This places the cemetery in a “singular position” among Burbank customers, according to a city staff report.
While recycled water has been available at the Valhalla boundary since 2012, the economic factor meant only a small expansion of the cemetery that used more expensive potable, or drinking, water had been converted to use recycled water since then.
“Valhalla is cognizant of the many general benefits of conversion ... such as drought-proofing, less reliance on imported water, overall reduction of energy for moving water [and] utilizing a resource that will otherwise be discharged to the ocean,” the report stated. “The long-term significant increase in cost remains a sticking point.”
However, this week, Matt Elsner, principal civil engineer with the city’s utility, told City Council members a solution had been found. To offset the cost, Valhalla will receive a $75,000 annual subsidy from the Burbank utility, under an 18-year agreement.
The payment is a “pass-through” of funds from a Metropolitan Water District program that seeks to encourage water recycling to replace existing demand of drinking water, and would not be paid to the local utility otherwise. MWD is also directly funding about $300,000 of Valhalla’s costs to retrofit its irrigation system.
Elsner said other businesses in Burbank that have benefited from similar assistance when converting their irrigation or water-cooling towers.
The city will benefit, in addition to added recycled water sales revenue, because of the way water rights were structured under the 1979 court ruling. Burbank earns import credits for each gallon of recycled water used, which it didn’t earn for water the cemetery pumped from the basin.
“This is a big deal,” said Councilman David Gordon.
The council approved the agreement unanimously.
Sergio Reynosa, a market manager for the cemetery, said the cemetery signed the agreement with the city Thursday and was still in the process of converting and testing its irrigation system Friday afternoon.
The switch won’t help the city meet its state-mandated water-savings goal, since the pumped water wasn’t counted, but it is “better for the basin,” Elsner said in an interview Friday.
Water Valhalla no longer pumps can in theory be treated for use as drinking water, and recycled water that would otherwise have been dumped into the Los Angeles River will now begin trickling into the aquifer.
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Chad Garland, chad.garland@latimes.com
Twitter: @chadgarland
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