City Staff Report on Sewage Downplays Criticism by EPA

The San Diego city manager’s report to the City Council and public on the Point Loma sewage treatment plant fails to describe the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s principal argument indicating that city sewage may be harming marine life.

The manager’s report is the main document being given to the council as backup for a public hearing to be held Tuesday. The hearing concerns whether the city should continue its fight to avoid spending $1 billion to upgrade the quality of the sewage it dumps in the ocean.

On Tuesday, Assistant City Manager John Fowler, the report’s author, acknowledged that he had given one paragraph to a point that the EPA “put great emphasis on.” He said he and other city officials believe the point is “not that major of a concern, in our perspective.”

Yet the EPA has the last word on how the city handles its sewage.

Fowler’s report is presented as a discussion of the city’s options and a summary of the controversy over improving the giant plant. That summary includes the EPA’s “tentative denial” in September of the city’s request for a waiver from federal standards.

But the manager’s report barely touches on one of the main reasons the EPA gave for its denial.

In a 50-page report to the Water Utilities Department in September, the EPA said the city failed to meet a crucial criterion for a waiver because its waste “interferes with the protection and propagation of a balanced indigenous population” of marine life.

As examples, the EPA stated:

- One pollution-sensitive species, the brittle star, considered the most abundant invertebrate on the mainland shelf in Southern California, “is absent or greatly reduced in numbers” at monitoring stations near where the city pipes its sewage.

- “Other pollution-sensitive organisms . . . also appear at the control station but are rare or absent from the outfall stations. There is also information that shows that (a) pollution-tolerant clam species . . . has increased in abundance” near the pipe.

- Using a standard measure of the quality of communities of bottom-dwelling life, tests indicated that the areas around five monitoring stations ranked 60 or below on a scale of one to 100, in which 60 or below is considered “degraded.”

The EPA stated that those and other measures of the quality of marine life “indicate that the communities have undergone changes that raise significant concerns about the negative effects” of the sewage on bottom-dwelling species.

It said the apparent damage is not confined to the immediate area around the pipe, where pollution standards are lower. It said species had been affected up to one mile away from the 2 1/2-mile-long outfall.

“These findings raise serious concerns regarding the health of the benthic (bottom-dwelling) community,” said the EPA, which devoted numerous pages to supporting its finding. “ . . . Benthic conditions, which have already been changed, would not be expected to improve” with the changes the city proposed.

The manager’s report, released this week, reached a different conclusion.

“Extensive studies indicate that advanced primary treatment is not harming the environment,” the report concluded simply, referring to the level of sewage treatment. Under federal law, the city must upgrade to “secondary treatment” or get a waiver from the EPA.

As for EPA’s observations, the six-page report summed them up in one paragraph:

“EPA noted that the natural habitat of bottom-dwelling ocean organisms is slightly different in the two-mile area surrounding the ocean outfall than it would be in an area without an outfall.”

In response, Fowler wrote: “Although a different group of animals than one would normally encounter exists in a two-square-mile area near the outfall, none of the bottom-dwelling animals has become extinct, endangered or in any way jeopardized by the effluent discharge.”

He concluded: “The ocean, itself, does what a conventional secondary sewage treatment plant would do at much lesser cost to . . . ratepayers and at no threat to the environment.”

An attached 30-page analysis by the Water Utilities Department reported that the EPA found interference with marine life, then stated simply:

“EPA noted that a species of clam is found in greater abundance near the outfall discharge than away from the outfall, and a species of starfish, a brittle star, is less common near the outfall discharge point than away from the outfall.”

Asked Tuesday why they did not detail the EPA’s findings for the council and the public, officials in the city manager’s office and the Water Utilities Department said they considered the biological argument “not a significant issue” and that they were summarizing a lot of complex information.

“Our scientists suggest that it’s not that major a concern, in our perspective,” Fowler said. “ . . . You’re seeing two views. They stated their view and put great emphasis on it.”

Fowler acknowledged that the EPA will have the final say on whether the city must convert the plant. But he said the city hopes to submit new information that will persuade the EPA that the waste is having no adverse environmental impact.

“We’ve got a significant amount of scientific data that’s been collected over the years,” Fowler said. “We make one interpretation from it, and the EPA people make a different conclusion.”

Meanwhile, Yvonne Rehg, the Water Utilities Department official who wrote the longer city report, said her report was not intended to “get that detailed and that technical.” She said the city biologist in charge of Point Loma’s monitoring program will explain biological issues Tuesday.

“That was taken as a one-paragraph synopsis,” she said of the brief summary in her report. “To be perfectly honest, I didn’t understand most of the biological details. So I took the engineers’ report that told briefly what EPA said. I couldn’t understand EPA’s document. I put that in as simple and clear language as I could.”

Armand Campillo, head of the department, said: “We don’t believe that the so-called imbalance is significant. We’re trying to talk to the main issues. This report could have been 100 pages long.”

Asked whether he had forwarded the EPA’s analysis to the City Council, Campillo said: “It’s very technical. We sent it to our consultant and they reviewed it. It’s not something that we would send to the council.”

The council must decide by March 30 whether to re-apply to the EPA for a waiver from federal sewage-treatment standards. Under federal regulations, the EPA may grant a waiver if it concludes that the waste meets state standards and will not harm, among other things, marine life or recreational uses.

In his report to the council, Fowler recommended that the city re-apply for a waiver and make an additional offer to the EPA. He suggested the city extend by 1 1/2 miles the pipe that carries the sewage.

That way, Fowler contends, the city would answer the EPA’s other objection--that city sewage violates state bacteria standards for kelp beds, where divers swim. Bacteria levels are too high on the outer rims of the Point Loma kelp bed, which lies one mile in from the pipe’s diffuser.

If the diffuser is moved 1 1/2 miles farther out, Fowler says, the sewage will no longer violate the state’s new bacteria standards. The extension would cost the metropolitan sewage district an estimated $100 million, instead of the $1 billion Fowler says it would cost to upgrade the plant.

“To us, the extension of the outfall is the principal issue, not necessarily the nature of the critters, if you will,” Fowler said Tuesday.

Other differences in emphasis between the EPA’s and the city reports include:

- While Fowler noted that the outfall “does not contaminate area beaches,” the EPA said “recreational activities have not been restricted by public agencies within the kelp bed even though water quality limits for total and fecal coliform are routinely exceeded.”

- Fowler found that the outfall disperses the sewage “so that the ocean is not stressed by its presence.” The EPA concluded that the “receiving waters are stressed.”

Finally, the EPA observed that the city’s waste “does not consistently meet state water quality standards for grease and oil, suspended and settleable solids, turbidity, dissolved oxygen and coliform bacteria.”