San Marcos Remains Obstacle to Sewage Plan

Despite pleas from environmentalists fearful of ocean pollution, San Marcos water officials said Tuesday they remain unwilling to go along with a proposal to upgrade sewage treatment at a sprawling regional processing plant.

Of the six North County agencies that run the Encina sewage plant, the San Marcos County Water District has been the lone roadblock to an effort to improve the processing of effluent at the plant.

San Marcos water officials say they will not consider upgraded sewage treatment at Encina until headway is made on another ticklish problem facing the plant--where to dump the mounting volumes of sludge, the byproduct of sewage treatment.

Any upgrading of the plant’s treatment standards would only increase the sludge produced each day, officials say. Encina and other North County sewage authorities are studying the possibility of building a regional sludge-processing plant, but that project is still several years away.

A solution to the sludge problem, however, could arrive far sooner. A firm that markets soil supplement wants to begin hauling the Encina sludge to the Imperial Valley and Arizona in the coming weeks.

Once that begins, San Marcos water directors said, they will again consider the issue of upgrading treatment at Encina, which handles sewage from a large swath of North County including parts of San Marcos, Vista, Carlsbad, Encinitas and unincorporated areas.

Although five of the six agencies that pump sewage to the plant favored upgraded treatment in a key vote a year ago, San Marcos water officials were able to dash the proposal. Like the other agencies, San Marcos enjoys veto power on all decisions affecting the plant.

“I’m really disappointed the district has been given the reputation of not caring that there is clean water in the ocean,” said Director Mary Newport. “Our concern all along was the sludge problem. Until that problem is resolved, we shouldn’t look at changing things.”

Director Peggy Rutherford characterized the issue of upgraded sewage treatment at the Encina plant as “a political thing” and suggested that coastal residents want improvements “whether it’s a reasonable idea or not.”

San Marcos water officials said that, even if they had gone along with efforts to upgrade sewage treatment at Encina when the issue first came before them about a year ago, it would not have made a difference because the sludge problem had not been resolved.

Indeed, several of the agencies that approved the upgrading at Encina conditioned their support on the stipulation that a solution to the sludge problem be in hand.

Environmentalists were irked Tuesday by the board’s refusal to go along with the push for tighter sewage treatment standards at the plant, which pumps more than 17 million gallons of effluent each day into the ocean 1 1/2 miles off Carlsbad State Beach.

“It’s not as urgent a problem with them because they’re not on the coast,” said Richard MacManus, founder of People for a Clean Ocean, a watchdog group that has pushed for tighter sewage treatment standards in San Diego County. “I think individual board members care, but it’s not as urgent when it’s not in your back yard.”

MacManus and other environmentalists point to studies that suggest that upgraded treatment greatly increases the chances of capturing viruses and bacteria that are released in the ocean under less stringent processes.

According to some research, those germs can live in the ocean in a dormant state for weeks and then reactivate when ingested by sea life or humans, MacManus said.

“Bacteria and viruses are simply not dying when they hit the coastal water,” MacManus said.

His group is pushing for the plant to begin secondary treatment, which entails more extensive processing than now in use. Encina now provides advanced-primary treatment, which blends secondary-treated sewage with effluent that has been given primary treatment, a less intensive process that removes fewer solids.