Norco Near Accord on Sewer Pact : City Has Curtailed Development for More Than 8 Years

The City of Norco and a regional water-projects agency are close to agreement on a plan that could effectively reopen the community to development by early spring, after 8 1/2 years of self-imposed limits because Norco had run out of capacity to dispose of sewage.

By allowing up to 1.5 million gallons of Norco’s sewage to be piped through Orange County each day for the next 10 years, the plan would buy the city time to devise, finance and implement a permanent solution to sewage-treatment needs, said Andrew Schlange, manager of the Santa Ana Watershed Project Authority.

The agreement also would allow the city to lift its moratorium on residential sewer-system hookups that has kept home building in Norco at a virtual standstill since Sept. 23, 1976.

Although lifting the moratorium may not stimulate a flood of housing starts, it may boost Norco’s economic development, according to Deputy City Manager Ronald E. Cano.

Commercial developers, he said, have been reluctant to build in the northwestern Riverside County community because its reputation has been that of “a city with a sewage problem.”

Lower Growth Rate

The total assessed value of property in Norco has grown between 4% and 6% in each of the last few years, Cano said--about one-third the rate of surrounding areas.

That slow growth during, and despite, the sewer crisis has come in the form of buildings equipped with an expensive combination of “dry” sewer lines for future use and septic tanks to handle current waste needs.

“We haven’t been able to develop industry, either, because we haven’t had the (sewer) capacity,” agreed Cheryl McGauvran, manager of the Norco Chamber of Commerce. “. . . We’ve been forced to twiddle our thumbs.”

Norco has about 21,000 residents. About 10% of its commercial and industrial land is developed, occupied mostly by small shopping centers and light industry, said Bud Plender, director of community development.

“The sewer has been the big issue, the stricture we’ve had to deal with” in promoting economic growth, McGauvran said.

The city owns a million-gallon daily capacity in neighboring Corona’s sewage treatment plant, Cano explained, and that is short of even the city’s current needs for domestic waste disposal.

Although half of Norco’s homes are served by septic tanks, the capacity of the area’s soil to percolate waste is declining rapidly, Cano said. Planners believe all buildings in the community should be connected to the sewer system within 10 years.

“If we were to hook up every (existing) piece of property, be it residential, commercial or industrial, we would need (capacity for) 1.6 million gallons a day,” Cano said.

And in 10 years’ time, he added, the growing community will produce 2.5 million gallons of sewage daily, projections show.

In the last two years, Norco has issued more than 250 notices, ordering homeowners to either upgrade their septic systems or connect to sewer lines, Cano said. A substantial number of illegal connections to the already-overburdened sewer system have compounded the excess sewage problem.

Threats to smoke out illegal users have cut daily sewer flow by about 150,000 gallons this month, said Jim Ashcraft, Norco’s director of public works.

And checks of 51 homes, made last week by dropping smoke bombs in the sewer system beneath houses that were supposed to be using septic tanks, found only one possible violator, he added.

No Orange County Threat

The new agreement would route Norco’s excess sewage into the Santa Ana Regional Interceptor, a 3-year-old sewer line running roughly parallel to the Santa Ana River and designed to prevent poor-quality, highly saline water from entering the public water supply.

The sewage would pose no danger to Orange County residents, Schlange said. “It’s typical domestic waste that comes from households, similar to domestic waste in Orange County.”

The Norco sewage would be treated, along with other waste in the line, at a plant in Fountain Valley before it is released into the Pacific Ocean.

The Santa Ana Watershed Project Authority sells its sewer capacity to commercial and agricultural wastewater producers in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, Schlange said. But much of the authority’s share in the pipeline will not be needed, and will not be sold, for many years.

“We have the excess capacity available now that has not been sold,” he said. “That gives us the ability to help solve a wastewater discharge problem in the upper (Santa Ana River) basin.”

So the authority will lease excess capacity to Norco for the next 10 years at an annual cost of $350,000 per million gallons of daily capacity, Cano said. And a connection to the sewer line, which runs just past Norco, in northern Corona, could be completed in “a couple of weeks” at a cost of $70,000.

Urges Goals for Plant

But the authority also will demand that the city reach certain goals in its long-term plan to build a regional sewage-treatment plant, Schlange said.

Before it can put its first 500,000 gallons per day into the sewer line, Norco will have to begin raising money for its future sewage system, he said. “That gets them up to the capacity they need now,” Schlange said.

The requirement will be met once the agreement is nailed down, Cano said, by enacting an ordinance establishing sewer use and hookup fees.

When Norco needs its second increment of 500,000 gallons daily capacity, it must also have completed a regional sewage master plan, Schlange said. The community must have a regional sewage management organization in place to get its third and final 500,000-gallon increment.

Neither the city nor the authority has developed a specific timetable for meeting those goals.

The temporary plan will require approval from the State Water Resources Control Board and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Schlange said, because the authority has already sold 7 million gallons of its approved capacity of 7 1/2 million gallons of domestic waste daily. The sewer line has a total capacity of 30 million gallons daily.

Action by March

If the state board sanctions the plan at its February meeting, Norco could tie into the sewer line by “about the first of March,” Schlange said.

Some Norco residents and business people believe that the end of the sewage problem will contribute to growth, but only if city officials begin to push growth more vigorously.

“Is it going to help as far as a lot of new buildings going in? I just don’t know,” said Barbara Ingels, manager of Don Olson Realty in Norco.

“Norco hasn’t really encouraged a lot of commercial development,” she said, but added that the city could benefit from carefully controlled economic growth. “I’d like to see a better tax base, a broader tax base.”