O’Connor Vows to Fight Staggering New Costs : Sewage Bills May Quadruple in Few Years

As the July 1 deadline for compliance with federal sewage treatment draws near, Mayor Maureen O’Connor pledged Tuesday to “go to jail” before allowing the full $1.5-billion cost of a new secondary sewage treatment system to fall on metropolitan sewer users.

In a two-hour session devoted to the staggering costs and limited options of the sewage treatment effort mandated by the federal Environmental Protection Agency, the San Diego City Council was told that it will also face hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines for past sewage spills in Mission Bay and in Sorrento Valley.

The fines will be part of a “consent decree” now being negotiated between attorneys for the city, the Justice Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, which enforces the Clean Water Act. The act mandates that U.S. cities install secondary sewage treatment systems, which remove 85% to 90% of effluent from sewage, by July 1.

San Diego cannot hope to meet that deadline and is negotiating the decree, which will establish timetables for city efforts to build the secondary system.

Lawyers for both sides have agreed not to discuss the fines. But Assistant City Atty. Curtis Fitzpatrick said in an interview that the assessments are in the “hundreds of thousands of dollars” for spills into Mission Bay and spills at the notorious Pump Station 64, which poured millions of gallons of raw sewage into Los Penasquitos lagoon before the city repaired it in January.

But that sum--which could be spent on a water quality improvement project--is just a tiny fraction of the estimated $1.5 billion to $2.4 billion that the city must spend to build a secondary sewage treatment system. That cost is expected to increase San Diegans’ monthly sewer bills from the current $10.40 per month to nearly $40 per month in the next three to five years.

The crisis has developed because the city abandoned plans for a secondary system in early 1981, when it wrongly concluded that the EPA would give it a permanent exemption from the federal sewage standards. In 1986, the EPA tentatively denied the exemption, and in 1987, the city gave up fighting for one.

Limited Funding

Meanwhile, federal funds to help cities build such projects have run out, leaving San Diego with only the prospect of receiving a limited amount of low-interest loans or special federal funding to construct its new treatment system.

O’Connor has pinned her hopes on help from San Diego’s congressional delegation. “I am going to jail (for not signing the consent decree) if that’s what it takes to show people that we want to be treated like” other cities that have received federal funding, she told Harry Seraydarian, director of the EPA’s water management division.

“We don’t have to sign the consent decree,” she added. “We can all go down to jail and then we’ll get Washington to come down and talk to us in jail.”

Seraydarian said in an interview that the EPA would be forced to take the city to federal court if it refused to sign the agreement, which itself needs the approval of a federal judge.

District 2 Councilman Ron Roberts, dismayed by the cost of the proposed system and current uncertainty about what shape it will take, told Seraydarian that “come July, we are going to consent to something we don’t know the cost of . . . and further, we’re going to agree to build something and we won’t have the foggiest notion of what it is.”

According to the city manager’s office, a consultant now reviewing 21 alternatives for establishing the treatment system will need 39 months before he can outline the best treatment system, a process that will take the city far beyond the July deadline.

City Manager John Lockwood said that all 21 options involve some combination of six basic components:

- Water reclamation technology.

- Converting the city’s Point Loma treatment plant to secondary treatment.

- A new Sorrento Valley plant.

- A new South Bay plant.

- Treatment of the estimated 10 million gallons of sewage flowing into San Diego from Tijuana every day.

- Exporting sewage to the Imperial Valley for treatment and water reclamation.