A Gamble on Sewage Treatment That Went Sour : L.A. Facing a $2-Billion Plumbing Bill

Los Angeles residents and businesses will soon be asked to help pay the $2 billion needed to solve a plumbing problem that has earned Los Angeles a reputation among environmentalists as a major ocean polluter.

The City Council, after a decade of municipal foot-dragging and court challenges, has been forced to comply with far-reaching federal Clean Water Act laws aimed at cleaning up the sewage dumped into the nation’s waterways.

City officials are now on the hot seat, trying to explain how a city that 10 years ago prided itself as a world leader in sewage treatment has become one of a handful of coastal communities being considered for federal Superfund dollars to repair offshore damage.

Mayor Tom Bradley and City Council members say they were unaware--and are still not entirely convinced--that city sewage dumping practices were seriously harming Santa Monica Bay. They say they were not told by city bureaucrats that the vast sewage system, built around the once ultramodern Hyperion Treatment Plant at Playa del Rey, was showing alarming signs of deterioration.

In turn, Los Angeles officials say the City Council and the mayor turned a deaf ear to their warnings, shirking the politically unpleasant task of raising sewage fees to address growing problems in the sewers. They also blame many of their troubles on obstacles thrown up by federal regulators.

Whoever is to blame, the Hyperion plant, the heart of the sewage system, is showing its age.

Salty air has so decayed the plant’s wiring that pumps that force sewage deep into the bay failed several times last year, allowing treated sewage to pour into an emergency line just a mile offshore. And, in the last year, a sewer main leading to Hyperion was strained beyond capacity more than a dozen times, illegally spewing raw sewage into Ballona Creek and the bay.

Most important, say officials of the Environmental Protection Agency and state Regional Water Quality Control Board, the city’s treatment system has remained essentially the same for the last decade while sewage flows have increased. As a result, dirtier and dirtier waste water is being piped into the bay in violation of pollution laws.

The state of the city’s sewers has become an issue in the gubernatorial campaign. Gov. George Deukmejian, speaking at a recent fund-raiser, said Los Angeles, under Bradley, has become “one of the largest polluters in the state of California.”

The mayor has responded that he will “come out smelling like a rose” in any comparison between himself and Deukmejian on environmental issues. He said he is proud of the job he has done maneuvering the city through an issue that was complicated by clashes within the city hierarchy.

Nevertheless, problems in the Santa Monica Bay drive home a point that Bradley and city officials are reluctant to concede:

While other urban areas--most notably the city’s massive neighbor, the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts--have spent millions to improve sewage treatment facilities in response to the 1972 Clean Water Act, Los Angeles has been in a backslide.

Former and current city, state and federal officials tell the story of a municipal gamble that went sour.

For years, many city leaders believed they could save the taxpayers millions of dollars by fighting for an exemption from two key provisions of the Clean Water Act--a requirement for costly secondary treatment of sewage and a ban on ocean dumping of concentrated sewage sludge.

Ultimately both battles were lost:

- The city argued that Los Angeles, which has a deep basin off Santa Monica, was not polluting its waters like New York City, where sewage is dumped into relatively shallow water and disperses slowly. Los Angeles asked to be excused from 100% secondary treatment of waste water, a costly process that removes toxic chemicals and fecal matter from sewage. “The solution to pollution is dilution” became a popular Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce slogan. Last month, the state Regional Water Quality Control Board ordered the city to build secondary treatment facilities at a cost of more than $500 million.

- Similarly, a ban on dumping sludge--minimally treated, concentrated sewage--was resisted. Relying upon a city-financed research agency, officials contended that sewage was “good food for fish” and that there had been no damage to the underwater canyon where sludge is pumped. The Environmental Protection Agency sued the city in 1977. Three years later, the council agreed to halt sludge dumping in order to persuade the EPA to release grants it had held up for the city’s long-sought Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in the San Fernando Valley. Although the city still dumps sludge into Santa Monica Bay, engineers expect to complete a $200-million system next year to burn the waste.

During the governmental tug of war, major renovations of the sewer system were put on hold. City officials hoped to get federal and state grants to pay nearly 90% of the costs. But, because of competition with other cities and because the EPA was angered by the city’s inaction on pollution laws, many grants did not come through. Others grants were delayed for years.

“We were waiting for the free (federal) money that never came,” said William Garber, retired assistant director of the Bureau of Sanitation. “That was a very bad decision, but I don’t know that anyone can be blamed. It was all over the country, people writing to the EPA and fighting the new laws.”

“We held up projects at Hyperion,” retired City Engineer Don Tillman said. “We thought it was worth the risk because we could get so much more in federal funds” and not spend much city money.

But Bradley and other officials, including former Deputy Mayor Ray Remy, say they were unaware that the city was gambling that it would get federal funds despite its decision to fight some provisions of federal pollution laws.

“No one, not Don Tillman or anyone else, ever made the argument to me that we were gambling,” Bradley said.

“We relied on our professional engineers in this field to give us advice and assist us in making policy decisions,” Bradley said. “I don’t know how an elected official who is not a technician is going to be able to do more than guess” about the correct way to proceed.

Despite that argument, state and federal officials place the blame squarely on city elected officials.

“We had a failure of city leadership,” said James Grossman, chairman of the Regional Water Quality Control Board. “They didn’t go to Boston or New York and drive along the streets and see how a city gets old, how things have to be done before that happens.”

Now facing the $500-million cost of secondary treatment and hundreds of millions more in modernization and operating costs over the next decade, the city is seeking outside funds to bail it out.

The timing could not be worse. Federal and state grants, which once paid nearly 90% of the costs of sewer construction, are rapidly dwindling.

The 3.2 million residents served by the city face a “worst-case” tripling of sewage bills over the next six years--from $65 a year to $170 a year--if the city cannot find outside help.

“They’ve screwed up,” said Paul Helliker, an EPA grants specialist. “The (federal government’s) construction grants program is being phased out, and the city is still going to need to meet the federal standards.”

But now, Helliker said, “it’s going to be more at their own expense.”

Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, who for years opposed secondary treatment requirements and the ban on ocean sludge disposal, said he is still not convinced that federal laws will significantly improve the environment. However, he said, it is “inexcusable” that the sewers have not been modernized during the fight.

“It serves no useful purpose for the city to try to cover up what happened,” he said. “It’s the fault of the mayor and the 15 members of the City Council. . . . The area where we have fallen down is in the maintenance of our system. We are talking about two big billion dollars. That’s where I am personally outraged.”

The city’s situation is in stark contrast to that of the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts, an agency serving the remaining 3.9 million county residents who are not served by city sewers. The autonomous body, made up of 26 districts, is run by a board of directors composed of mayors and other community leaders.

While the city was entangled in controversies over the Clean Water Act, the districts applied for and received federal grants to build a secondary treatment facility and upgrade their main plant in Carson.

From 1970 to 1980, when the city spent only $13 million in grants to improve Hyperion, the sanitation districts spent $180 million upgrading their Joint Water Pollution Control Plant, which pumps sewage off the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

The financing enabled the districts to improve a system that was, at one time, in worse shape than the city’s.

The city’s Hyperion plant had for years been a model of progressive sewage treatment. Forward-thinking city officials in 1950 voluntarily built a secondary treatment facility, which for 25 years has cleaned 100 million gallons of sewage daily, now giving minimal primary treatment to the remaining 300 million gallons. By contrast, until the mid-1970s, sewage piped from the sanitation districts’ Carson plant to its Palos Verdes ocean outfall was given only primary treatment and was filled with industrial contaminants.

While the quality of the treated sewage dumped by the city has declined in recent years, the sanitation districts’ treatment has dramatically improved.

The districts’ Carson plant treats 360 million gallons a day, giving secondary treatment to 200 million gallons and so-called “advanced” primary treatment to the rest. In addition, a series of upstream water reclamation plants in Whittier, Pomona, Long Beach, Cerritos and Whittier Narrows remove and cleanse huge quantities of sewage for reuse by industry.

Although the Carson plant’s discharge still occasionally exceeds pollution levels, scientists for the sanitation districts boast of major improvements to marine life on the Palos Verdes shelf near their sewage outfalls.

Slow Ocean Recovery

Where giant kelp beds had turned black and disappeared, they are making a slow recovery. Where poisonous mud flats once drove out fish and crustaceans, animals are beginning to return.

“We don’t worry about being compared to the city,” said the districts’ chief engineer, Chuck Carry. “We worry about not being compared to the city.”

The districts are awaiting a decision on their application for an exemption from the federal requirement for 100% secondary treatment.

But even if the districts are ordered to begin full secondary treatment, the cost will be a third of what the city is faced with spending, because the districts already have significantly upgraded their plant.

That, combined with the fact that the districts’ system is younger and in better shape than the city’s, means that residents outside Los Angeles will pay far less than city dwellers for future sewer services. Sewage fees outside Los Angeles city limits--which are already $10 to $20 a year lower--probably will not rise much beyond inflation, district officials say.

However, city engineers and sanitation officials say they have done the best they can to improve the sewage system in the face of outside forces that held the city back.

They point out, for example, that in the mid-1970s Los Angeles became a battleground in an EPA strategy for controlling urban growth by limiting expansion of city sewage systems. The EPA threatened to withhold sewage grants unless Los Angeles put a yearly cap on expansion of its sewer system.

After months of controversy, the city compromised, agreeing to monitor air quality for new signs of trouble but not to limit sewer expansion.

Another problem developed in 1977 when the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation was joined by then-Councilmen Louis Nowell and Art Snyder and Councilmen John Ferraro and Yaroslavsky in a suit that challenged the EPA on the sludge issue.

Backed by city engineers and sanitation officials, they argued that land disposal of sludge was at least as damaging as dumping it in the ocean. The court ordered the EPA to issue an environmental impact report if it intended to release grants for sludge disposal. The report, issued three years later, said land disposal was far safer.

Meanwhile, voters had rejected a key sewer bond issue, leaving the city without funds to proceed on major modernization of the sewers, including secondary treatment. Bradley and one of his appointees, Board of Public Works Director Maureen Kindel, say that if the voters had approved that 1976 measure, the city would have most of the funds needed to solve its sewer problems.

The mayor signed a ballot argument in favor of the proposition, but the issue never gained much public attention. At the same time, Councilmen Ernani Bernardi and Marvin Braude issued a statement against the measure, calling the costly requirements for secondary treatment “morally reprehensible” and of little value to the environment.

Later, nominal sewage fees instituted by the city in 1978 were increased significantly in 1980 but were used on other needed projects. Fees helped pay for the EPA-ordered Hyperion Energy Recovery System to burn sludge and the just-completed Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in the San Fernando Valley, which officials had hoped to have built before the 1984 Olympics.

Tillman, the former city engineer, said he was caught between excessively stringent federal laws and a City Council that never gave the sewage system a high priority and consequently did not increase sewage fees enough.

“It’s like painting your house,” Tillman said. “There aren’t any big cracks, so you wait, and then it will cost you a lot more to fix. . . . You keep it patched together because you have limited funds.”

State officials say the city kept postponing the day of reckoning.

“If you’re going to buy a new car and your tires are getting bald, you say, ‘I’m not going to buy tires because next month I’m going to trade (the car) in,’ ” said Jim Nicholas, a state Department of Water Resources’ grant manager.

“That’s what the city has been doing,” Nicholas said. “It puts everyone in a tough position, since their sewage discharge is not in compliance with the law.”

Garber, the retired assistant director of sanitation, said the city’s gamble affected more than just Hyperion. Even projects like repairing the overflow valve at Ballona Creek, which Garber said “was for years a No. 1 priority project,” were put on hold while the city waited for federal funds that never came.

Only after recently being fined $180,000 by the state for spilling raw sewage into the creek did the city approve funds to build holding tanks to catch sewage overflows before they reach the creek and ocean.

It was headlines over the sewage spills this summer that Bradley and council members say made them aware that the sewers were near capacity.

‘Some Answering to Do’

Yaroslavsky said the Department of Public Works “has some answering to do” for failing to keep the City Council informed.

“Why hasn’t this problem been more forcefully conveyed?” Yaroslavsky asked. “Why have I never heard from you, Mr. Engineer and Mr. Sanitation Director?”

However, Tillman, the former city engineer, said the council was well aware of growing capacity problems in the system.

During periods of heavy rain from the mid-1970s to 1980, Tillman said, “raw sewage burst like geysers” from manholes in North Hollywood and the Hollywood Hills, where a sewage main diverts waste from the San Fernando Valley to Hyperion. The council approved a stopgap measure to take care of sewage spilling onto the streets, building a relief sewer nearby to take off pressure.

But, Tillman said, “you could tell it was reaching capacity. . . . Council people were warned in my reports that the sewer system was being pushed to capacity, but the council just thought it was the engineers crying wolf. None of the elected officials really saw it with wisdom as they should have.”

Current city staff members maintain that sewage problems have been exaggerated because of the Ballona Creek spills and that the system, though old, is in relatively good shape.

Harry Sizemore, assistant director of the Bureau of Sanitation, pointed out that major repairs of deteriorating treatment tanks at Hyperion were begun in 1983 and 1984 with the help of federal grants. Repairs will be completed in a few years, significantly improving current treatment abilities, he said.

On the question of secondary treatment, Sizemore said, “Obviously the city could have proceeded with its own funds.” But, he said, “When you’re expecting to get a waiver from that requirement, you have no reason to proceed. And up until a few months ago, we had no reason to believe the waiver would be denied.”

Problems With EPA

A final factor behind the city’s foot-dragging was its eroding relationship with the EPA.

Problems began after Bradley and then-Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. announced at a 1975 press conference that the city would end its dumping of sludge off the coast.

The city quickly realized it had no place to dispose of the sludge, and technology for burning it was still experimental. The council explored many possibilities, with one meeting erupting into laughter over a suggestion to shovel it into a blimp and send it airborne.

Two years later, the city had made little progress on its “sludge-out” plan. By then, several vocal council members and the Chamber of Commerce had vowed to fight the ban on sludge, and the council had requested scientific studies to prove that sludge did not hurt the ocean.

Exasperated, the EPA filed suit. In reaction, the city attorney’s office told the council to stop all work on its sludge-out plan.

Faced with a stalemate, the EPA struck back.

Paul DeFalco, regional administrator for the EPA in San Francisco, refused to release the long-delayed federal grant for the city’s Tillman Water Reclamation plant in the Valley.

“They weren’t acting responsibly, and we weren’t going to complicate it by putting more money into a community that was not complying with the law,” said Frank Covington, the EPA’s director of water management for Western states.

Officials on all sides agree that if the reclamation plant had been constructed in time to relieve capacity problems the raw sewage spills into Santa Monica Bay probably never would have occurred.

EPA Blamed

City officials blame the problems on the EPA.

“They literally held our reclamation project hostage to force the council to take the sludge out,” City Engineer Bob Horii said. “That slowed us down more than anything else.”

“Our argument was that . . . the federal government ought not hold up one project for the other,” said Remy, former deputy mayor.

The mayor stepped into the fray, meeting with EPA and state water board officials. Those discussions eventually led to a 1980 agreement. The city promised to end sludge dumping and pay a fine, and the EPA released grants for the Tillman Reclamation Plant and the Hyperion sludge burning facility.

After that, the city began to make progress. Construction on the sludge incinerator and the Tillman Plant got under way. In 1983, a long-delayed environmental impact statement for the sewage system was approved, and renovation of deteriorating treatment tanks at Hyperion got under way.

Meanwhile, Horii said, serious discussion about building a full secondary treatment system at Hyperion ceased. City officials were confident that they would be granted a waiver allowing them to build a scaled-down secondary treatment facility because EPA had given tentative approval to the city’s plan.

Then came a public outcry this year after reports that fish in Santa Monica Bay were contaminated. Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica) picked up on the issue, demanding that the city build full secondary treatment facilities.

EPA Admits ‘Mistake’

Now, EPA officials are saying that their tentative approval of the city’s scaled-down plan was “a mistake” based upon the city’s inaccurate claims that treated sewage outflows had not seriously damaged the bay.

Bradley and other elected officials contend that they were unaware--and are still not sure-- that the city’s sewage has harmed Santa Monica Bay.

“I haven’t even tried to make that kind of call,” Bradley said.

The city, he said, has “paid a lot of money to depend upon professional advice” from the Southern California Coastal Research Pro- ject, a scientific research group that studies the effects of treated sewage on the bay.

City officials say they never independently reviewed the Southern California Coastal Research Project studies, but relied for years upon claims by its director, Willard Bascom, that no significant environmental damage was occurring.

Bascom left the Southern California Coastal Research Project this summer after scientists who worked under him challenged his interpretations of their findings. They are now speaking out about sewage contamination along the Southern California coast.

Although city leaders say they were not told about major pollution problems, city records show that as early as 1975 the state officially warned the city about effects of dumping sludge in the bay.

Ray Hertel, former director of the state Regional Water Quality Control Board, informed the city in a letter that scientific studies showed growing contamination of bottom sediments in a huge area around the sludge line. “Not only don’t we know where it goes, it is not recoverable,” Hertel cautioned.

But Carla Bard, a former member of the water board, said her agency did little after that to raise warning flags about local coastal pollution.

‘Supported the Dumpers’

The board’s former staff, which she described as “old-school thinkers who supported the dumpers,” kept the most alarming scientific data to themselves and let the city’s practices continue, Bard said.

“Our staff had the knowledge, the data that showed the damage--fins rotting off fish and the disappearing species,” Bard said. “It is unbelievable that we were not told.”

Recently, the City Council approved construction of a full secondary treatment facility. The state’s regional water board says it intends to closely monitor the job, which is expected to take nearly a decade of planning and construction.

“They don’t have much credibility in my eyes,” said board chairman James Grossman. “The city’s terrible track record has made us very aware that we are going to have to baby-sit them. We intend to see that it gets done.”

TREATING SEWAGE: CITY OF L.A. VS. COUNTY SANITATION DISTRICTS

PRIMARY (1-4)

1 BAR SCREENS Sewage flows over bars that catch large items.

2 GRIT CHAMBERS Air bubbles knock grit, like sand, to bottom.

3 SETTLING TANKS Heaviest sewage solids fall and are removed. Grease floats and is skimmed.

4 PRIMARY DISCHARGE TO OCEAN

City: About 60% of original solids have been removed. Waste still includes illegally high levels of contaminants. Dumped five miles offshore.

County Districts: About 80% of original solids removed. Waste occasionally exceeds legal limits for pollutants. Dumped two miles offshore.

SECONDARY TREATMENT (A1-A3)

A1 AERATION TANKS

Oxygen mixed with sewage grow “working bacteria” to eat solids.

A2 CLARIFYING TANKS

Fine sewage particles settle and are scraped from the bottom.

SECONDARY DISCHARGE TO OCEAN

City: 90% to 95% of original solids removed, with contaminants usually within allowable limits. Dumped five miles offshore.

County Districts: Provide secondary treatment to twice as much sewage as city plant. Dumped two miles offshore

SLUDGE TREATMENT (S1-S4)

S1 SLUDGE LINE Sludge (sewage solids) is scraped from bottom of tanks.

S2 DIGESTION TANKS “Working bacteria” consume many human and industrial wastes.

S3 METHANE Methane gas produced as a by-product is used to help run the plant.

S4 CITY SLUDGE DISCHARGE TO OCEAN

Sludge--thinned with wastewater--is pumped seven miles offshore, where it falls into an undersea canyon. These wastes are solids removed during primary treatment and contain the highest levels of contaminants.

COUNTY DISTRICTS’ ADDED STEPS (C1-C4) C1 POLYMERS Gooey substance added to help drag more sewage solids to the bottom of settling tanks.

C2 FINE SCREENS Finer floating wastes are caught before reaching ocean.

C3 CENTRIFUGES County sludge goes to centrifuges, which remove water.

C4 COUNTY SANITATION DISTRICTS’ SLUDGE DISCHARGE Sludge filled with ocean contaminants is dried. One-third is composted for several weeks, then sold for fertilizer. Two-thirds is hauled to a landfill.

WHAT THE CITY MUST DO

(1) New East Valley Interceptor Sewer. Expected cost: $20 million. Will allow transfer o sewage from eastern San Fernando Valley to Tillman Water Reclamation Plant for treatment and reuse by industry. That sewage now goes to Hyperion through the North Outfall Sewer and into the ocean. Because the city did not build the East Valley Interceptor Sewer at the time it built Tillman, Tillman operates at about half its 40-million-gallons-a-day-capacity.

(2) Expansion of Tillman plant. Expected cost: $65 million. Within 10 years, capacity should double to 80 millions per day.

(3) Replacement of North Outfall Sewer. Expected Cost: $75-125 million. Portions of the 60-year-old cement pipe that carries San Fernando Valley sewage to Hyperion have been rotted by sulfuric acid formed by gases. To handle sewage while North Outfall is under repair, the city will build a line south of Culver City, requiring a massive tunneling project from La Cienega Boulvard to El Segundo. It will continue in use after repairs are complete.

(4) New secondary-treatment facilities at Hyperion. Expected cost: 455 million. Only a fourth of sewage flowing into Hyperion now receives required secondary treatment. The city must overhaul facilities, add aeration and settling tanks, and build facilities to handle additional sewage solids, or sludge, removed from wastewater during secondary treatment.

(5) Modernization of Hyperion Expected Cost: $70 million Needed are new primary treatment tanks and improvements to aging treatment buildings, equipment and electrical systems.

(6) Extended sewer outfall, Terminal Island. Expected cost $40 million. The one-mile outfall line must be extended beyond the Los Angeles Harbor breakwater, possibly to three miles.

(7) Improvements at Terminal Island. Expected cost: $17 million.