San Diego’s SEWAGE CRISIS: The Cost of Complacency.

Scenes from America’s Finest City:

Mission Bay, the aquatic centerpiece and prime tourist magnet of San Diego, is repeatedly closed to bathers because of sewage pollution.

A problem-plagued Sorrento Valley pump station spews raw sewage into a pristine lagoon, an environmental insult that continues undetected by top city officials for years.

Old concrete sewer pipes, known for 30 years to be easily corroded by gases, become clogged or break, flooding homes and business with sewage.

Mountains of sludge--the gooey, black byproduct of sewage--pile up on Fiesta Island for more than six years despite warnings from regulators that it shouldn’t be stored in an aquatic park.

City officials scramble to plan for a $1.5-billion advanced sewage treatment plant. The chance to win federal funds for the project passes while San Diego leaders try for years to avoid building the facility--a gamble that backfires.

The evidence is everywhere: San Diego’s civic leaders have failed for more than a decade to avert an ugly crisis that has been brewing in the city’s sewer system.

While officials have fretted for years over the river of sewage pouring across the border from Mexico, San Diego’s own sewage crisis has incubated. Many observers describe San Diego’s failure to tend to its own sewage problems as an outgrowth of neglect, mismanagement and civic complacency.

Lee Olsen calls the governmental drift “Theory O.”

“That’s O for ostrich,” said Olsen, president of the San Diego Council of Divers who has lobbied vigorously for higher standards of sewage treatment. “It’s basically the art of sticking your head in the sand and only listening to those who tell you that everything is just fine.”

Indeed, officials with San Diego’s top tourism bureau--who might be expected to scream the loudest about despoliation of beaches by sewage--have adopted a decidedly low-key approach to the matter rather than lobbying aggressively for a solution to the problem.

“We don’t want to give it any more publicity than it is already getting, quite frankly,” said Al Reese, vice president of public affairs for ConVis. “We are hopeful that we can confine the news to at least the confines of the Southern California market, if not San Diego County.”

Meanwhile, many politicians and leaders of the powerful development industry are still wrapped up in an old debate, arguing that the city should fight federal requirements to

increase its sewage treatment standards.

The bottom-line consequence of the city’s sewage mismanagement will be significantly higher bills for the typical San Diegan. Eventually, city officials predict an average resident’s sewer bill will increase from the current $8 a month to $36.80--a jump of more than 350%.

There remains the thorny political issue of where to build a new sewage treatment plant. While cities like Oceanside and Escondido have been at secondary treatment for years, San Diego, which treats sewage generated by 16 agencies and 1.5 million people from the South Bay to East County, still must construct a $1.5-billion secondary treatment plant.

County Supervisor Brian Bilbray predicts that finding a site for the plant will stir neighborhood passions for years. City officials will have “bodies lying in front of them” if they try to build a plant in the South Bay, he said.

Many civic leaders, meanwhile, believe San Diego’s reputation as a great place to vacation and live is being tainted by sewage.

“You can just drive around town now, roll down your windows and just smell it,” said Mayor Maureen O’Connor, who describes solving San Diego’s sewage crisis as one of her administration’s top two priorities.

Pump Station 64

No place smells worse than Pump Station 64, a key link in the municipal system that is symptomatic of the city’s inability to stay on top of its sewage problems.

Completed in 1972, the station serves the burgeoning neighborhoods in North City, Del Mar and Poway and has one simple task--to daily pump up to 20.5 million gallons of sewage over a steep hill in the Sorrento Valley area and on to the city’s treatment plant atop the cliffs in Point Loma.

But the facility was built without a backup power system or pumps large enough to handle the job. Not surprisingly, the station began failing, pouring raw sewage into nearby Los Penasquitos Lagoon. In all, it has spilled 60 times in the last eight years.

It was not until last year that the mayor, her council colleagues and top administrators say they became aware of the problems.

“I had no idea, nor did other people in the administration have any idea, that we were having as many spills as we were having,” said City Manager John Lockwood, whose administrative responsibility for years has included the Water Utilities Department.

Councilman Mike Gotch finds that hard to believe.

“Certainly the city staff must have known about the impending disaster at Pump Station 64, but we never got any warning about the kind of troubles we were in for,” Gotch said. “Now we are spending millions of dollars . . . to correct a problem that should have been anticipated and taken care of years ago.”

Warning in 1981

A review of Regional Water Quality Control Board files shows that as early as 1981, a Water Utilities Department employee sent an internal memo warning that Pump Station 64 was ill-designed and could not handle the heavy load of sewage generated in its service area each day.

But it wasn’t until September, 1985, when Caltrans officials complained about sewage seepages onto roads their highway crews had to maintain, that state water quality officials began to take a look at the facility.

Ultimately, it took what Gotch, O’Connor and nearly everyone else in city government concede was a crisis--a series of major spills, $341,000 in fines from state regulators and a sewer connection ban--to get something done.

Now, the city is spending $22 million to upgrade the pump station, a sum that is staggering considering that $35 million was spent on all sewer repairs citywide just two years ago.

Meanwhile, a virtual state of emergency has been declared at Mission Bay, all or parts of which have been quarantined because of sewage pollution 27% of the time since 1980. Half of the city’s capital improvement budget for sewers is now spent in communities surrounding the bay, where decades of sewage flows have corroded pipes and manholes.

Although the city has known for three decades that concrete pipes are susceptible to corroding gases, it has acted only when a heavy pattern of breaks occurs, rather than replacing pipes before they break.

While Pump Station 64 and Mission Bay are dramatic, familiar examples of San Diego’s sewage woes, perhaps the city’s most glaring and expensive gaffe has to do with how it responded to a federal law requiring it to clean its sewage better before dumping it at sea.

Clean Water Act

Approved during the heyday of the environmental movement, the Clean Water Act of 1972 required municipalities discharging sewage into the nation’s waterways to perform secondary treatment--a level that removes 90% of solid material from sewage.

It was a costly mandate, demanding that cities expand their plants and do more than just primary treatment, which removes 60% of the solid waste. To help pay for it, the federal government established a grant program.

From the beginning, San Diego fought the changes ushered in by the Clean Water Act, as did other coastal cities.

Swayed by testimony from scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography--who argued that sewage was actually good for some marine creatures--city officials believed that the secondary treatment standard was an excessive requirement for municipalities dumping effluent into the ocean. In the sea, these scientists argued, there was more than enough water to disperse the sewage and oxygen to break it down.

“Our primary motive was, ‘Why do something that would not have any public benefit and pay terribly through the nose for that purpose?’ ” said Sen. Pete Wilson, (R-Calif.), the city’s mayor from 1971-82.

Finally, the primary sewage treatment plant at Point Loma--which ended decades of pollution in San Diego Bay and earned the city an award from federal environmental officials--was scarcely a decade old and doing a fine job of protecting the ocean environment, officials reasoned.

So, along with their counterparts throughout Southern California, San Diego officials went to Washington to change the law.

City an ‘Obstructionist’

“San Diego was an obstructionist,” Lockwood said. “We were an obstructionist intentionally because we thought the way they were going was madness.”

The legislators were convinced, and in 1977 the Clean Water Act was amended to allow coastal cities to apply for an exemption from the requirement.

From the first, city officials were confident they would win an exemption. Nonetheless, the law required San Diego and other waiver applicants to make a good-faith effort to plan for secondary treatment just in case their requests were denied.

For a while, San Diego did just that, hiring a bevy of consultants and spending more than $2.5 million on the preliminary design of a secondary treatment plant in the South Bay. The City Council also appointed a citizens’ task force to sort out the conflicting views on the issue.

But through it all, administrators and elected officials say they never seriously believed San Diego would be forced to comply.

“There was very strong resistance to going to secondary here, you bet,” said Assemblyman Larry Stirling (R-San Diego), a city councilman from 1977-80. “Secondary treatment was viewed as a fundamental waste of resources and we knew we were going to get the waiver. Plus, we don’t like intimidation from the feds.”

Added Dick King, director of the Water Utilities Department from 1972 until his retirement in 1984: “We felt we were going to get the waiver. There was no point in pursuing secondary treatment. We fell into a kind of limbo.”

Warnings in 1978

As early as 1978, that limbo became evident to regulators and sewage planning professionals. Indeed, pointed warnings that the city should not ignore its obligation to plan for secondary sewage treatment were expressed, a review of a decade’s worth of water department memos and correspondence shows.

While San Diego was preparing its waiver application to the EPA, CH2M Hill--one of the firms hired by the city to wrestle with the sewage question--cautioned administrators that letting up on preliminary planning for a secondary treatment plant would mean violating an EPA deadline.

Despite that warning, the city balked at following through on perhaps the most crucial step--reserving property for the treatment plant.

After years of study, a team of consultants recommended buying a 100-acre swath of land running along Interstate 5 from 27th Street to Dairy Mart Road. The idea was to take primary treated sewage from Point Loma, pump it down to South Bay for secondary treatment, and then through an underwater pipe into the ocean.

City officials sent out appraisers and made unsuccessful bids for different parcels on the proposed site, the memos show. At the same time, the City Council was approving plans for hundreds of houses on the very same land--a move that would preclude its use for a treatment plant.

The city’s apparent duplicity was not lost on state and federal regulators, who complained to Wilson and Lockwood, then an assistant city manager in charge of the water department.

“After 5 1/2 years of planning effort and accompanying federal and state grant expenditures of over $2 million, we still may not have a viable site for a secondary treatment plant,” Carla M. Bard, former chairwoman of the state’s Water Resources Control Board, wrote to Wilson in September, 1980. “At the very least, it seems that these recent actions will substantially increase the land cost at the 27th and Sunset Streets site. This situation is very disconcerting to my staff and me.”

Told Waiver Not Certain

EPA officials in the San Francisco regional office, meanwhile, warned San Diego administrators not to count on a waiver, which is good for only five years and must be renewed. They urged the city to get serious about picking a site, especially since the EPA was required to conduct a lengthy environmental impact study of the proposed secondary sewage treatment plant.

City officials dragged their feet, hoping their 1979 application for a waiver would be approved, allowing them to get out of building the expensive plant altogether.

In September, 1981, the EPA answered San Diego’s prayers--or seemed to--by issuing the city a tentative waiver approval.

“I think that the city staff told the council that they really believed we were going to get an indefinite waiver, and that was particularly true with the coming in of the Reagan Administration and its less stringent environmental requirements,” said Municipal Court Judge Dick Murphy, a councilman between 1980-85.

O’Connor said that in hindsight, such a confidence was misguided.

“We were granted the tentative approval, and then everybody just walked away from it, assuming that it would be no problem from there on in and relying on the fact that we had this waiver in hand,” the mayor said in a recent interview.

“There were a couple of city councils and a couple of city managers after that and nobody did anything about it . . . You can fault some of them or all of them for not asking, ‘What is our backup plan?’ I think that’s the key.”

Did Not Pursue Grants

The city’s waiting game cost it dearly in another way.

While other agencies were fighting for waivers, they also hedged their bets by applying for federal grants to help pay for the mandated secondary sewage treatment plants. San Diego, however, did not.

City officials and consultants say they didn’t pursue such grants because the state Water Resources Control Board, the agency that parcels out federal Clean Water Act money, limited grants to small secondary treatment plants not workable in San Diego.

EPA officials and critics of the city’s sewage planning disagree.

“The grants program would basically have paid for the site acquisition, the pipes that went there, the primary treatment and enough secondary to blend with the primary treatment,” said David Jones, chief of the EPA’s California branch.

Critics now say that San Diego leaders failed to recognize and respond to key shifts in regulatory and environmental attitudes that would ultimately lead to denial of a waiver. The changes included:

- In 1983, the state’s standards for allowable sewage discharge into the ocean were tightened, and San Diego was instantly in violation. The changes forced the city to either pay $150 million to extend the outfall pipe or go to full secondary treatment. Instead, it applied for an exemption to the state standards and even asked to be permitted to reduce the treatment level still further.

“Perhaps if they had extended the outfall they would have been ahead of the curve and would have been perceived differently (by regulators),” the EPA’s Jones said. “But instead they did another thing, which borders on arrogance . . . Not only did they want a (federal) waiver, they also asked to do less” than the state treatment standard.

- A year later, the City of Seattle--which, like San Diego, had obtained a tentative waiver from EPA--saw its approval withdrawn.

- In 1985, a brouhaha erupted in Los Angeles after reports that fish in Santa Monica Bay were contaminated. The EPA withdrew its tentative approval of the city’s waiver, saying it was based on the inaccurate claim that its sewage was not harming the marine environment. The Los Angeles City Council ultimately voted to build a full secondary treatment plant.

- Closer to home, communities in North County--Oceanside, the new City of Encinitas, Escondido--in 1986 abandoned fights for waivers in the face of mounting public opposition. Residents alarmed by the specter of sewage washing up on local beaches packed meeting halls and convinced elected officials that secondary treatment is worth the price.

San Diego ‘Out of Touch’

“San Diego stands out because it had this complacency about it,” said Jones of the EPA. “They just got passed by, they were out of touch. Maybe it was because of the waiver . . . but they clearly ignored some very strong signals.”

Finally, last fall, the word came down: The EPA had changed its mind. San Diego would have to go to secondary.

The EPA hinged its denial on two factors: The city had failed to comply with the new state ocean dumping standards, and its sewage had disturbed populations of several tiny, bottom-dwelling marine organisms.

Still, some voices in and out of city government continue to urge that the fight for a waiver be carried on. Dennis O’Leary, the city’s leading consultant during its waiver application, argues today that San Diego did not go astray “one iota” during the decade-long waiver application process and deserves to win the exemption.

“What I think is the fascinating question that few people are addressing is whether or not, in San Diego, California, in 1987, secondary treatment makes any sense,” said Kim Kilkenny, lobbyist for the Construction Industry Federation. “We’re talking about a billion and a half dollar price tag to possibly protect--and the emphasis is on the possibly, because we don’t know--three microbes and a star fish.”

Deciding to Go Forward

But gradually, it became clear to elected officials that an appeal would only forestall the inevitable.

“They’re not going to give us the waiver, and I’m not going to waste another 10 years,” O’Connor said, summing up her talks with EPA officials in Washington earlier this year. “Whether secondary is necessary today or not, it undoubtedly will be somewhere down the road. I don’t want to happen on my watch what happened on the last watch.”

Now the city is proposing to spend $10 million to rehire their consultants, who will recommend where to put the secondary treatment plant. Another citizens’ task force has been convened, and a lengthy and acrimonious environmental review process lies ahead.

Just why did San Diego fail to react to cues that a sewage crisis was looming?

Lockwood and O’Connor say the city was misled through the years by “mixed signals” from EPA. San Diego’s hopes for a waiver were buoyed with the EPA’s tentative approval in 1981, and city officials say they never suspected the endorsement would be withdrawn, despite numerous meetings with EPA administrators.

“I had no idea it would take seven years to make the (final) decision,” said Lockwood, summing up the city’s frustration with the time it took EPA to announce its verdict on the waiver. “It just kept getting continued, continued, continued, continued.”

But Jones and other regulators speculate that San Diego leaders were blinded to the inevitable by a sunny optimism that things were bound to go their way.

“I think somehow there’s a sense that because everything’s so nice down there, that the bay seems clean and nice and doesn’t smell, and there are birds around, that there isn’t a problem,” Jones said. “They didn’t do the basic, forward planning that was necessary. ‘Somehow, some way, everything is going to work out’--that was the attitude.”

Turnover on the City Council also played a role.

“When Wilson left, it created a big political vacuum, and that was followed by an awful lot of changes of command over the past five or six years,” recalled Stirling. “There’s a tremendous start-up time with the new members who have to figure out all these things. The council loses its way, becomes rudderless.”

Gotch concedes that turnover is a chronic problem. But he maintains it was incumbent on the city manager’s office to apprise the council of the tangled sewage problem and recommend a strategy to help San Diego avert a crisis.

“To say the city fell asleep at the switch would be entirely accurate because it wasn’t perceived as a priority by the staff or by the elected officials,” Gotch said. “We deal with so many different issues here, from planning to noise abatement and social service funding, that unless we take it on as a pet project, few of us get involved in the intricacies of sewage. So we rely heavily on the staff for information. But if they’re misguided or not focused, then we’re in a bad spot.”

O’Connor agrees.

“I think what happened over the years was people have just avoided making tough decisions. . . . Frankly, there wasn’t a time-of-the-essence mentality when it came to sewers,” the mayor said. “It was the idea that it would take care of itself.

“Well it’s not going to take care of itself.”