Building Ban OKd if Sewage Plant Fails Again : Developers Win Delay From Immediate Action on Breakdown-Riddled Station

An automatic moratorium will be imposed on building permits for northern areas of San Diego if a problem-plagued sewage pumping station in Sorrento Valley backs up again or if the Water Utilities Department misses a deadline to repair the plant.

But the San Diego City Council was unable to muster enough votes Tuesday to put the ban into effect immediately, prompting an angry response from state water quality authorities and escalating ill will over problems at Pump Station 64, which has spilled millions of gallons of raw sewage into Los Penasquitos Lagoon since 1979.

Tuesday’s action at City Hall was yet another bizarre twist in the saga of Station 64, which has occasionally pitted the city against the local building industry and the state’s Regional Water Quality Control Board.

By the end of the day, the council had decided to reconsider an immediate ban, and a building industry lobbyist had apologized publicly for his statements to council members during earlier testimony.

The water quality board, worried that the city isn’t doing enough to prevent the spills, had been considering a its own ban on sewer connections leading to the station from the burgeoning area that includes Scripps Ranch, Sorrento Valley, North City West, Mira Mesa, Sabre Springs and Rancho Penasquitos, as well as the cities of Del Mar and Poway.

City officials, however, were able to deflect that action by convincing the board that they are serious about correcting Station 64’s defects.

City water authorities promised to install a back-up power source by September, a 350,000-gallon overflow basin in December, and bigger pumps by next May. Council members underscored their political commitment by imposing an emergency two-week moratorium on building and sewer connection permits in the northern neighborhoods.

On Monday, those actions helped persuade pollution officials to drop their own plans for a building moratorium. Instead, the water quality panel imposed only a token fine of $11,900--drastically smaller than the $646,800 recommended by its staff.

The board was swayed, in part, by assurances from San Diego that it is prepared to enact another measure that would allow the city manager to impose an automatic building permit moratorium if improvements at Station 64 were not made as scheduled or the station spilled sewage again.

The ordinance passed Tuesday requires any automatic moratorium to be discussed by council members at their next regularly scheduled meeting after any breakdown. The council could either uphold or rescind the ban at that meeting.

The new ordinance replaces the previous moratorium, which expired Tuesday morning.

Councilwoman Abbe Wolfsheimer, who braved severe stomach pains to attend Tuesday’s meeting, urged her colleagues to pass the automatic moratorium immediately, despite warnings from the construction industry that any halt in building permits would have a dire economic impact.

Lashing out at the industry’s predictions as “scare tactics,” Wolfsheimer said, “It’s time to take our brains out of our pocketbooks and put them back in our heads.”

Mayor Maureen O’Connor said the council should immediately enact the automatic moratorium, which would expire in June, because she “gave her word” to the water quality board that it would be done.

But Kim Kilkenny, a lobbyist for the Construction Industry Federation, contradicted O’Connor when he testified that he water quality board didn’t necessarily expect the council to pass the moratorium.

Council members voted 5-2 to approve the automatic moratorium as an ordinary ordinance, which goes into effect in 45 days. Council members Ed Struiksma and Judy McCarty were on vacation.

Yet by the same 5-2 vote they failed to adopt the moratorium as an emergency measure, which would take effect immediately. An emergency ordinance requires at least six “yes” votes. Councilmen Bill Cleator and William Jones voted no both times.

O’Connor said she was disappointed by the outcome.

“It is half a loaf,” O’Connor said after the council dismissed for lunch. “There’s no protection in the 45 days if there is a major spill or we don’t meet the schedule.”

O’Connor said she will call an emergency meeting of the council within 24 hours of any spill within the unprotected 45-day period to consider an immediate moratorium.

O’Connor blamed pressure from the building industry for “some of my colleagues changing their minds” and not voting for the immediate enactment of the automatic ban, as they indicated in previous council discussions.

“You had a different audience,” she said, alluding to the land-use attorneys and developers that sat in council chambers Tuesday morning to observe the vote.

Within hours, however, O’Connor was to receive at least a degree of satisfaction.

When member of the water quality panel, meeting a few blocks away, were informed that the council failed to enact the automatic moratorium immediately, they took steps to revive their own moratorium if Station 64 suffered a sewage spill within 45 days.

The message was not lost on council members when they met again Tuesday afternoon.

Spurred by the angry reaction from the state, the council--on a motion by Cleator--voted to reconsider its decision not to enact the automatic moratorium as an emergency measure.

Ironically, the council was unable to follow through on its intentions because Jones and Wolfsheimer--the latter a sure vote for the emergency measure--were excused from the afternoon session because of illness, leaving the council one vote short of the six it needed. The vote on reconsideration is scheduled for Monday.

The board’s angry reaction also prompted Kilkenny to make a rare public apology for his earlier comments that state pollution officials weren’t concerned about the emergency ordinance.

“Based on my observation of the reaction of the regional board, . . . I cannot help but conclude that my prior observation was in error,” Kilkenny said. “To the extent that I have contributed to a problem here, I regret that and I apologize. Furthermore, to the extent that any council members relied on that portion of my testimony, you may want to rethink your position.

“Facts have borne out that I was wrong and the mayor’s opinion was more accurate. So I therefore apologize to the council.” he said.

After the meeting, Kilkenny said he apologized to bolster his personal credibility and to ease the “precarious” relationship between the city and state water quality board.

“If I contributed to a deterioration of that relationship, then that’s got to be remedied,” he said. “That’s more important than me eating crow.”