New Norco Fees Set Stage for Exporting Sewage

Having a few folks show up at City Hall to pay for new sewer connections might not be the most momentous occurrence, but this week in Norco it marked an important milestone in the city’s 8 1/2-year search for sewer capacity, prompting a long-awaited sigh of relief from city officials.

Norco’s new system of sewer fees went into effect last weekend, clearing the way for the city to begin piping up to 500,000 gallons of excess sewage to Orange County for treatment each day for the next 10 years.

That will allow the city the time it needs to devise, finance and implement a permanent solution to its sewage-treatment needs, according to Andrew Schlange, manager of the Santa Ana Watershed Project Authority.

The temporary sewer connection, which city officials hope to make in about 2 1/2 months, will allow Norco to reopen its doors to home building, which ground to a halt in 1976 because the city had run out of the capacity to dispose of sewage.

“It seems all I talk about is sewers,” Jim Ashcraft, Norco’s director of public works, lamented Thursday. But plans are already on the drawing board for the connection to the sewer line to Orange County, which may be built and opened by early July, he said.

The connection will allow Norco’s excess waste to flow into the Santa Ana Regional Interceptor, which carries waste water to a treatment plant in Fountain Valley before dumping it offshore.

The new, higher sewer fees in Norco will pay for the capacity Norco is leasing in the ocean-bound sewer line and will contribute toward the ultimate goal of building a regional sewage-treatment plant, Ashcraft said.

For homeowners, that means monthly sewer fees jumped this week from $13 to $17.50.

Most businesses are also paying more, but the amount varies, based on the quantity of water they use and the quality of the waste water they discharge, Ashcraft said.

Fifty businesses--including those that use a great deal of water, such as car washes and restaurants --face increases greater than the homeowners’ 35% hike, he said. The new rates have drawn only five complaints, most of them because of errors made by the city, Ashcraft noted.

All but one of the complaints was corrected by city officials who discovered that they had misclassified four businesses in their new rate schedule.

The most extreme example, Ashcraft said, was that of Norco’s only coin-operated laundry. It was hit with a sewer-fee increase of about 700% because city workers thought its primary business was dry cleaning, which produces more noxious waste. The city has since cut the laundry’s increase in half, he said.

Norco will be able to lease from the Santa Ana Watershed Project Authority another million gallons of daily capacity in its sewer line, when it passes additional milestones on its way to a local solution of sewer-capacity needs, Schlange said.

But Norco officials feel they have cleared the most important, if not the biggest, hurdle already. “I’m finally getting business taken care of,” Ashcraft said, “and getting out of sewers.”