Las Virgenes Water District, EPA in $6-Million Fight Over Sludge Farm

In hindsight, the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District wishes it had flushed out all the bricks it urged its customers to put in their toilets to conserve water during a 1975 drought.

The bathroom bricks may be partly to blame for a $6-million dispute between the water district and federal officials that threatens an innovative sewage treatment program.

The fight is over sludge, the gooey, chocolate milkshake-colored solid waste that is left when common household sewage is treated.

The Calabasas-based water district uses special plows to inject the oozing waste into the ground at a 91-acre “sludge farm” built on grazing land four miles south of the Ventura Freeway.

The $12-million disposal facility was opened five years ago after being built primarily with federal anti-pollution grants issued by the Environmental Protection Agency.

EPA Administrators Pleased

EPA administrators say they are pleased with the way the farm, the only one of its type in California, cleanly disposes of about 80,000 gallons of sludge daily from the nearby Tapia Sewage Treatment Plant.

But the EPA says it is highly displeased with the amount of sludge being treated because the farm was designed and built to handle twice that volume.

Along with the sludge flows, the amount of interest paid for the land and attorney fees for the acquisition have also come under EPA’s scrutiny.

So the agency has taken the unusual step of demanding that the Las Virgenes district return about $5.9 million of the grant money.

The rebate request is sending shivers through Las Virgenes officials. They say that the grant money is long gone, spent mostly to cover the court-negotiated price that the water district paid for 267 acres bought from entertainer Bob Hope after they initiated condemnation proceedings for the land.

Las Virgenes officials and their minority-share partners in the sludge farm venture, Ventura County’s Triunfo County Sanitation District, would likely have to stall further expansion plans, sell off part of their sludge farm or raise sewer connection fees for new homes to cover the repayment.

If the repayment request is causing worries, so is the sludge-prediction goof.

Water district officials say they are at a loss to explain why their sludge estimates were so far off when the farm was being planned in the mid-1970s.

“Why is the amount of solids in fact 40% less than it should be? If I could answer that question, we wouldn’t be in the situation we’re in,” James E. Colbaugh, Las Virgenes’ director of operations, said Tuesday.

“We know that we were in the middle of a drought in 1975 and ’76 when we were under design and collecting data.

“Maybe people had bricks in their toilets to conserve water then and that caused higher-strength sewage. Maybe our sample technique then was lousy. Maybe the population sample was different and there were more kids per house then,” Colbaugh said.

“Maybe there are more working couples and commuters now. Maybe they’re making their solid contributions elsewhere.”

Donald Anderson, an EPA construction grants administrator in San Francisco who is reviewing the Las Virgenes case, said Tuesday he has his own explanation, however.

“It appears they counted some of the same stuff twice,” Anderson said. “The point they measured when they were calculating their sludge included some recycled flows.

“It’s very unusual we’d have a situation where they over-design beyond a specified reserve capacity. In this case, they went way beyond that.”

Anderson said he is convinced it was an accidental miscalculation. But it is one that nonetheless must be corrected under terms of established audit-monitored EPA rules, he said.

According to Anderson, the EPA’s experience with the sludge farm will prompt the agency to carefully watch approaching audits for $30 million worth of other federally financed projects at Las Virgenes’ Tapia Sewage Plant.

Mindful of the potential for more rebate orders, Las Virgenes officials have hired a lobbyist and are rallying support from groups such as the California Assn. of Sanitation Agencies to fight the EPA and to seek congressional constraints on audits.

Lobbyist ‘Mildly Optimistic’

Lobbyist Larry Walker of Davis said Tuesday he is “mildly optimistic” that the EPA will change its mind about the sludge farm repayment.

“We want to send a message to the EPA that Congress doesn’t intend the audit process to lead to second-guessing on projects,” Walker said. “Auditors should focus on waste, fraud and abuse.”

Colbaugh said the dispute is a needless one because the Las Virgenes area is a fast-growing one that eventually will need all of the sludge-farm disposal space. He said landfills no longer accept such wastes.

“The EPA made a commitment and now they’re reneging and it’s lousy,” Colbaugh said.