Crusader Gets Day in Court in Bid to Halt Sewer System

It’s a good night when Craig Johnson isn’t jarred from sleep at 2 or 3 a.m by a ringing telephone at his home, followed by a threat of death or destruction. The anonymous calls come with such frequency that the shock they are meant to produce has been dulled by repetition.

Johnson, 43, who lives in the rural North County hamlet of Valley Center, up the hill from Escondido, has taken a year out of his life to mount an effort to keep Valley Center from becoming a suburban satellite of its fast-growing neighbor.

He believes those calls he gets in the wee hours of the morning are from other Valley Center citizens who think his efforts to halt growth in the inland village are stifling the community’s future.

Won’t Stop Johnson

They may be right. But they won’t stop Johnson in his one-man war against urban sprawl.

Johnson’s goal is to keep the peaceful valley in which he has lived for a decade as bucolic as it is today. To do so, he has sued the federal Environmental Protection Agency, the state Water Resources Control Board, the county Board of Supervisors and the Valley Center Municipal Water District.

His aim: to rescind a federal grant that would bring a $13.5-million sewer system to the valley, which would accommodate a 300% increase in population density.

He gets his first chance to argue the case today in a hearing before U.S. District Judge Rudy M. Brewster.

It’s easy to write off Johnson as a litigious nut who is jousting at windmills in his efforts to halt progress and prosperity in Valley Center. But Johnson has put his money and his mind to proving that the whole scheme to urbanize the community is built on what he says is this falsehood: that widespread septic tank failures are threatening groundwater supplies and are causing a health hazard.

At Johnson’s side in the fight is attorney John Murdock, who also represents a flock of Malibu residents battling a similar effort to introduce sewers into their exclusive costal community.

Murdock, in his arguments, said that several California communities are facing similar situations in which local agencies are seeking to “force” sewers--and urbanization--on rural areas, such as Valley Center or Malibu, by imposing a “health hazard” on the area, which results in a building moratorium.

Together, the two men have combed through 3,000 pages of documents and come up with what Johnson calls “a web of conspiracy” aimed at urbanizing Valley Center and, in the process, reaping tidy profits for landowners and developers.

In his federal lawsuit against the four levels of government, Johnson contends that the effort to put sewers in Valley Center is built on a lie. By exposing that alleged lie, Johnson believes, the whole plan to build the sewer system “would fall like a house of cards.”

Repeated calls to Valley Center Municipal Water District and county officials over the past two weeks have elicited no responses to Johnson’s lawsuit. But responses filed in federal court by the defendant agencies deny any wrongdoing and state that proper procedures and legal precedents were followed in obtaining a building moratorium and seeking federal grant funds.

Building Moratorium

About 4,800 acres of land in the heart of Valley Center have been under a building moratorium since 1980, a restraint that prevents landowners from putting up much more than a fence around their land and restricts any new construction or expansion of present buildings.

After seven years with virtually no growth, the Valley Center Municipal Water District is on the verge of launching seven years of growth by building a sewer system. But last July, Johnson filed his suit, challenging the basis on which the moratorium was imposed and upon which the water district received a multimillion dollar grant from the EPA for sewer construction.

As with any agreement which involves four levels of government, the complications and paper work are enormous. For the past year, Johnson has waded through the bureaucratic maze and come up with what he believes is the answer--that no in-depth study has ever been done that would warrant a sewer moratorium or a $10.5-million federal grant to build the sewers.

Without the sewer system and the moratorium, Valley Center would continue as a rural community where new homes would be allowed only on two-acre lots.

In 1978, when Johnson was new in town, George Armstrong, then chairman of the Valley Center Planning Group, was quoted in a local newspaper saying, “We can’t afford to build a sewer system if it has to be financed privately . . . the only way we can get (federal assistance) is to convince the state there is a health hazard here.”

Health Hazard Cited

By mid-1980, Valley Center had made an official request for a building moratorium to the county Board of Supervisors. James Forde, then director of the county Department of Public Health Services, had recommended the action “to protect the public health in the Valley Center area from the potential health hazards caused by sewage effluent” from defective septic tank systems. On June 3, 1980, the county board imposed the moratorium.

That board action, Johnson and Murdoch contend, was the first link forged in a conspiracy to force sewers and urbanize Valley Center, because a review of “each and every document relied upon by the Board of Supervisors” in imposing the moratorium showed no evidence to support the contention of a health hazard or groundwater contamination in the area.

Johnson’s suit against officials and agencies also alleges that, based on the moratorium, Regional Water Quality Control Board officials asked state Water Resources Board members to waive the necessary “hydrogeologic work” normally required to gain state and federal funds for a sewer system and to place the Valley Center project in the top priority for grant funds.

By 1984, the state and EPA had given the water district assurance that it would receive its sewer grant and the Valley Center Planning Group had voted to increase zoning density on 2,350 acres in the “town center” by a unanimous vote because, in county staff words, “the plan and zoning changes are necessary to design a sewer system that could lift the sewer moratorium and provide for reasonable future growth.”

A sheepish Johnson admits that he was a member of the planning group and that he voted for the density increase, firmly believing that it was needed to resolve “health hazards” that threatened Valley Center by assuring adequate financing for the sewer.

Now, Johnson said after reviewing the piles of government documents, he’s convinced that there was no health hazard, that the “crisis” was manufactured in order to obtain a building moratorium.

The moratorium set the stage for federal grant applications and increased building densities to support a sewer system “that is more suited to a city like Escondido than a rural community like Valley Center,” Johnson said.

“If there were no real ‘health hazard,’ the entire set of presumptions would fall like a house of cards,” the suit claims.

“In short, everything hangs on the validity of the . . . moratorium,” Johnson’s suit claims.

In the Valley Center area, 14 to 17 septic tank system failures were recorded between 1971 and 1983, according to county records. But by comparison, in the posh estate community of Rancho Santa Fe, county records show 1,165 septic system failures were recorded from 1975 through 1981. Yet there, and in other severely impacted communities around the county, no moratoriums on sewer systems were ever imposed.

Wants Grant Halted

Johnson is asking the court to halt the award of the EPA sewer grant to the Valley Center Municipal Water District and to award money damages to him and other Valley Center residents caught in the seven-year building moratorium, who are now facing assessments to pay for $1 million the district already has spent on the sewer system.

Who is the real “bad guy” in this scheme to urbanize Valley Center? Johnson can’t point out the culprit. But, he said, “it was the intent of everybody involved to push this through without consulting the people of Valley Center” that got his dander up.