Muddle Now, Pay Later

“Muddling through” is a time-worn technique of governmental decision making, best exemplified by the way the City of San Diego handled its sewage problem over the past 15 years. The essence of “muddling through” is that if you wait long enough to make a decision, the good options will be gone; but when crisis finally forces some choice to be made, at least the alternatives have been narrowed to just a few.

The recent historical perspective given the city’s sewage problems by Times staff writers Ralph Frammolino and Jenifer Warren illustrates several examples of muddling and its cost.

Perhaps the most visible example is Mission Bay, where quarantine signs have been posted 27% of the days since 1980. Since the 1950s, the city has known that concrete pipes of the type used as sewer lines in neighborhoods around the bay were susceptible to corroding gases. But no decision was ever made to systematically replace them before they caused trouble. Now half the city’s capital improvement budget for sewers goes to replacing pipes that predictably have crumbled, threatening calamity for one of the area’s most important recreational and tourist treasures.

In 1981, the Water Utilities Department was first warned of design flaws in Pump Station 64. But despite the burgeoning growth of the North City and Poway areas it serves, no one sounded the alarm that the pump station was being overtaxed. Caltrans began to complain about sewage seeping onto roads and highways in 1985, but it took a series of major spills and $341,000 in fines from state regulators to provoke action late last year. The city now is spending $22 million to upgrade the facility.

Most expensive of the non-decisions is the way the city has dealt with the requirements of the federal Clean Water Act of 1972, which required that sewage being discharged into waterways receive secondary treatment, a costly process that removes 90% of solid material. From the time the act was passed, there has been debate about whether secondary treatment is really necessary for protection of the ocean. Along with other coastal governments, San Diego successfully lobbied to have the law amended to allow exemptions, and like other cities and counties it then applied for such an exemption.

But unlike San Francisco and the County of Los Angeles, San Diego did not seriously prepare for the possibility that it would fail to win an exemption. Even after the Environmental Protection Agency told Seattle, which like San Diego had been given a tentative waiver, to go to secondary treatment, San Diego still banked on getting its permanent exemption. Earlier this year, Mayor Maureen O’Connor convinced the City Council that the exemption would not be forthcoming, and action finally was taken on a secondary treatment plan and upgrading the existing facility at Point Loma. The eventual cost is expected to reach at least $1.5 billion.

The resolve of city officials is likely to be tested many times before San Diego gains control of its sewage problems. To begin with, ratepayers will be asked to pay significantly higher bills, with monthly payments rising from $8 to $36.80 or more over the next decade.

A difficult decision will have to be made about whether to build a large secondary sewage plant or several smaller plants. Then the issue will become where to locate them. A bond issue for the protection of Mission Bay will have to be sold enthusiastically to the public.

The years of muddling may have narrowed some of the city’s options for handling its sewage. But the cost of not making the necessary tough decisions is now only too clear.