Council Approves $1-Billion Sewage Plant Upgrading

The San Diego City Council bit a billion-dollar bullet Tuesday when it abandoned its bid to avoid federal regulations requiring the city to upgrade its Point Loma sewage treatment plant.

Council members voted, 7-1, to drop their seven-year effort to win an exemption from the federal Clean Water Act and decided to get on with an expansion for advanced sewage treatment at the plant--an expansion that preliminary estimates indicate could cost $1 billion and ultimately increase the average residential sewer charge 400%.

“This is a very tough political decision to make because there are costs involved,” Mayor Maureen O’Connor said during the meeting. “Most of the time, when there are costs involved, politicians don’t like to bite the bullet.

“But in this case, by delaying it, it may cost this community a lot more money in the long run and may also deteriorate our waters, our beaches and our bays, which are probably one of our best resources and assets.”

Such environmental considerations, however, weighed less heavily on council members Tuesday than stark political reality. O’Connor said U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials have told her and other mayors that exemption requests from San Diego and other cities will be turned down flat.

“I’m just going to tell you that, politically, we’re not going to get that waiver so we should just stop beating our heads against the wall,” O’Connor said.

Councilman Bill Cleator was the only one to vote against dropping the exemption effort. Cleator, whose district includes the treatment plant, said the council was “caving in” to EPA demands without considering how to reclaim water.

“I will bet my saddle shoes again that we will hire a consultant, (and) we’re going to come back with a mechanical answer to the problem,” Cleator said. “It’s going to cost a billion dollars and we won’t save one gallon of water. I think San Diego can do better than that.”

Councilman William Jones was absent from the meeting.

Council members left open the question of how to pay for the expansion to the Point Loma plant, which now treats 170 million gallons of sewage daily before discharging the effluent through a pipe that carries it 2.5 miles out to sea.

O’Connor told her colleagues that she expects some of the money to come from EPA, which has funded as much as 55% of new secondary treatment plants for other cities. She said she has personally lobbied U.S. Sens. Alan Cranston and Pete Wilson, along with EPA officials, to make sure that San Diego receives its fair share.

“I don’t want everybody to run around and think that this council is being fiscally irresponsible and we are going to lay this at the doorstep of the local taxpayers,” O’Connor said. “We have paid our taxes at the state and federal level just for this kind of thing.”

In an interview after the Tuesday meeting, O’Connor also said she doubts that the new secondary treatment expansion at Point Loma will cost the $1 billion estimated by city water officials.

But those officials said Tuesday that it may be too late for San Diego to receive a significant amount of federal funds. While the city was busy fighting the stringent sewage requirements, other municipalities conceded the point and got in line for federal money, they said.

“We might get a pittance because we’re on the bottom of the list,” said Yvonne Rehg, spokeswoman for the city’s Water Utilities Department.

Based on that assumption, water officials predict that most of the cost will be shouldered by city residents, who can expect their monthly charges to jump 300% to 400%.

That means the current $8 monthly charge will climb to between $32 and $40 by the time the expansion is completed, said Dennis Kahlie, a city water rate analyst. The plant could take 10 years to design and build, city water officials estimated.

Other ideas for financing the project include issuing bonds or raising the $1,200 charge a developer pays for every new house, apartment, condominium or business that is added to the sewage system. Water officials will present their ideas to the City Council next month.

Increasing costs and controversy have dogged the city’s water and sewer system, which is straining to keep pace with growth in some places.

Last year, the City Council voted to increase the water rates by 26% over two years. The first step of the increase went into effect last summer, raising the average household’s bimonthly water bill from $11.56 to $13.08.

Meanwhile, the city has been plagued by sewage horror stories. Not only does untreated sewage come floating up the coast from Tijuana, prompting county health officials to close beaches in the southern part of the county, but aged sewer lines are breaking down in Mission Bay, spilling untreated sewage into the water there.

In Sorrento Valley, an errant sewage pump has backfired so many times, dumping sewage into Los Penasquitos Lagoon, that the Regional Water Quality Control Board recently fined the city a record $300,000.

That figure pales in comparison to the billion-dollar price tag at Point Loma, a cost the city has been trying to avoid since the Clean Water Act in 1972 mandated expensive secondary treatment of sewage. Born out of the environmental movement, the law sought to prevent cities from dumping sewage into the drinking water supplies of other cities.

Under primary treatment, sewage sits in large vats where 75% of the solids settle to the bottom and are removed. Advanced primary treatment uses chemicals to trap 90% of the solids from the waste water, said Rehg, adding that Point Loma recently went to advanced primary treatment.

Secondary treatment guarantees removal of 99% of those solids, she said, but it also requires building a second set of tanks for the waste water to be aerated. Pumping air into the sewage introduces microorganisms, which then consume the sewage particles, Rehg said.

San Diego officials found that the aeration process takes place naturally in the ocean, and they decided to apply for a waiver from secondary treatment in 1979. EPA granted preliminary approval of the waiver in 1983, but reversed itself in September when it found that sewage outfall from the Point Loma plant violates the state’s ocean plan by contributing higher-than-normal counts of coliform to kelp beds, about a mile off shore. EPA officials also found that the sewage affected three minute starfish species and clams near the outfall.

City water officials, however, proposed pressing on for the federal waiver. Their plan was to spend $100 million to add 1.5 miles to the Point Loma outfall pipe, thus reducing the coliform levels in the kelp beds.

The council, however, decided Tuesday to give up and build the secondary treatment plant, although several speakers urged them to fight on.

It also went along with Councilwoman Judy McCarty’s suggestion to appoint a blue-ribbon committee of experts to advise the council on how to grapple with the sewage problems. City Manager John Lockwood said the committee will be involved in picking the consultant to design the city’s new secondary treatment plant.

“One of the problems is we don’t even know what we don’t know yet,” McCarty said. “We’ve never done this before, and I’m concerned that we avoid as many mistakes as possible. We are spending a billion dollars.”

She also said the council’s decision may not mollify regional water officials, who insist that the city take some action by mid-1988 to lower the coliform counts in the kelp beds.

City water officials will meet with Regional Water Quality Control Board members March 1 to discuss the alternatives, and Rehg said there is a chance that they will require the city to build the $100-million outfall extension anyway, to take care of pollution until the $1-billion plant is in operation.