Sewer Hookups Banned in Cardiff Area; Treatment Plant Cited

Leaders of this newly incorporated city, grappling with yet another byproduct of the area’s development boom, have banned the issuance of sewer permits in south Encinitas because its waste water treatment system is critically over capacity.

The moratorium was approved unanimously Monday night by the City Council, sitting as the Cardiff Sanitation District board of directors. It prohibits any new sewer connections until July, when the board must either renew or lift the ban. The district serves neighborhoods in Cardiff and Olivenhain.

Both the sewer ban and a companion building moratorium approved earlier this month have been vigorously opposed by developers eager to break ground on projects throughout the rapidly growing area. The builders, out in force at Monday’s marathon meeting, claim that limits on construction and similar measures to curb the pace of development are unfair and unnecessary.

But council members insist that the sewer moratorium is imperative because Cardiff already uses more than its allowable capacity at the San Elijo Water Pollution Control Facility, the treatment plant it shares with Solana Beach and Rancho Santa Fe.

Cardiff exceeds its share of the system’s capacity by about 127,000 gallons of sewage daily, Councilman Gerald Steel said, adding that if builders with projects in the pipeline were allowed to connect to the system, the district would be 432,000 gallons over capacity.

According to Steel, the county “placed us in this bind” by issuing sewer connection permits for capacity that was not available.

The plant, which is targeted for an expansion expected to take at least three years, has a capacity of 3.7 million gallons a day. The Cardiff district has rights to 1.9 million gallons of that amount; Solana Beach and Rancho Santa Fe share the balance.

“It’s not right that we’re over our allowable capacity because that means we’re infringing on Solana Beach’s rights to the system,” Councilwoman Anne Omsted said. “We can’t just keep letting people hook up when the capacity isn’t there.”

To do so, council members warned, might overburden the system to the point where treatment quality would be in jeopardy and spills might occur, posing a health risk to residents and beachgoers.

Although the sewer moratorium is in effect until next summer, city officials are hunting for ways to increase capacity temporarily and allow some builders to hook up before then.

Negotiations are under way to lease 200,000 gallons per day of capacity from Solana Beach, which has 426,000 gallons of daily capacity that it does not yet need. Also Monday, the council agreed to contact three other neighboring sanitation districts in an effort to work out similar arrangements.

Those districts appear to have some capacity available, but pumping sewage from Cardiff into the distant systems could pose tricky engineering problems, Steel said.

Such leasing arrangements also would prove costly. Solana Beach is expected to charge as much as $182,000 annually over the next three years. Those expenditures would make the task of expanding the sewage plant and the related goal of upgrading treatment standards from advanced primary to secondary more difficult, council members said.

“Although a permanent solution to this problem--namely, expansion of the plant--is years away, we hope to be able to find some temporary capacity somewhere and enable some connections within the next six months,” Steel said. “I appreciate this is an extreme hardship on people in Cardiff who want to build buildings, but they’ll just have to wait.”

Also on Monday, the council heard developers argue against renewing a building moratorium imposed Oct. 1, the day the communities of Encinitas, Leucadia, Cardiff and Olivenhain merged and became the City of Encinitas.

Despite the developers’ pleas, the council is expected to extend the moratorium, intended to allow the city to develop a design review process, at its next meeting.