Council to Vote on Limitations to Ease Burden on L.A. Sewers

Sometime today, after six months of stewing and talking, Los Angeles could abruptly shed its reputation for runaway growth and turn into one of the most restrictive large cities for developers in California.

The new slow-growth look would not be due to any rising clamor over traffic or smog, but to the sewage crisis caused by squeezing more than 3.1 million people onto an infrastructure built for far fewer people.

Last week the city ordered mandatory water conservation to relieve the sewers, and today the City Council is scheduled to vote on a plan--first requested by Mayor Tom Bradley in December--that will strictly, if temporarily, ration the number of building permits available in Los Angeles.

Expected to Pass

If the measure passes as expected, the permits needed to hook into the city sewers would be allotted each month based on how much capacity is left in the Hyperion sewage treatment plant near El Segundo. The Hyperion plant, the source of one embarrassing problem after another for Bradley and other city officials in recent years, is on top of everything else running out of room to process raw sewage.

Despite more than a dozen City Council amendments, often to exempt favored projects, the measure to be considered today does not veer drastically from what the mayor wanted.

“The overall basic concept that the mayor passed to the council, with minor changes, is still intact,” Bradley aide John Stodder said.

There have been more significant growth controls imposed in recent years. Zoning of property all over the city has been rolled back to comply with state law, a move that has reduced the growth potential of the city from 10 million population to 4 million. In 1986 Los Angeles voters also passed Proposition U, a measure that clamped new controls on high-rise construction plans.

Capacity of Plants

But this is different in that it is self-imposed by city officials, and it carries an implicit admission, both by Bradley and the City Council, that they goofed. They were forced to make a painful public acknowledgement that they had ignored the sewer system while approving new developments all across the city.

There is room for the Hyperion treatment plant and two sister plants to safely process about 480 million gallons a day of raw sewage. The solid portion of the sewage is pulled out and, in the form of thick black sludge, loaded into trucks and driven across the freeways to mountain landfills. Most of the sewage is waste water that is treated and released into Santa Monica Bay five miles from Playa del Rey beaches.

In order to ensure that the waste water discharged into the ocean is adequately treated, city sanitation officials say they want to keep sewage flow in the city to 460 million gallons a day on average. But the average daily flow is now over 440 million gallons and rising by 10 million gallons a year, which would cause capacity to be reached in 1990.

Bradley’s plan tries to check the rising flow by slowing the pace of new construction in the city and, in a measure approved by the City Council and signed by Bradley last week, by requiring all property owners and residents to install water-saving devices.

Construction would be allowed to add only 5 million gallons to the average daily sewage flow in a single year. Officials expect another 1 million gallons a day of new flow each year from people moving into existing houses in Los Angeles, and another 1 million gallons to be added by new sewage from nearby cities that use the Los Angeles sewers.

For the Los Angeles portion, city officials would attempt to keep tabs by calculating the sewage that any given building project is expected to create, then cut off new permits when the 5-million-gallon limit is reached.

Bradley originally tried to give the power to ration permits to the Board of Public Works, a paid citizens commission that he appoints. The board oversees the bureaus of Sanitation and Engineering and would be in a position to closely monitor the sewage flow.

However, the City Council insisted on keeping that power for themselves, a move that is not surprising given the historic cozy relationship between council members and developers. Most council members rely on the building industry for a major share of their campaign contributions, and they now will have the power to decide who gets priority in the issuance of permits.

“We have our concerns, but we plan to watch them very closely,” said Cliff Gladstein, an aide to state Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), who joined Bradley in announcing the plan in December. “We’re still on board.”

The council has also voted to exempt several large development projects from the rationing process, including high-rise downtown office towers sought by the city Community Redevelopment Agency and four projects that the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors is planning to build.

Other amendments give priority in the issuance of building permits to developers who agree to include low-income housing in their projects. Developers who avoid adding to the sewage flow by retrofitting existing buildings in Los Angeles are exempt altogether, Bradley aides said. Builders of a single house, as opposed to a tract or some commercial building, also receive priority.

City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky added a provision that ensures that 65% of the remaining sewage capacity will be used for housing, and only 35% for commercial developments. But Yaroslavsky said he is skeptical that the measure will relieve the sewers at all given the exemptions, and he also disagreed with Bradley aides who predict that the controls will be needed only for three years.

Sanitation officials said the sewage capacity problem will go away when the city finishes expansion of the Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in Van Nuys. Completion is now scheduled for mid-1991. But Yaroslavsky said the engineers predicting a 1991 completion are the same ones who have been late on other sewage projects.

“Everything the Public Works Department is doing is behind schedule and above budget,” Yaroslavsky said. “I think you have to look at the history of our ability to get things done on time.”