Controversial Sewage Information Plan OKd : S.D. City Council Pares $303,000 from the $1.18-Million Cost of Program

A deeply divided San Diego City Council on Monday pared $303,000 from a controversial program to inform the public about improvements to the regional sewage treatment system, and then gave a team of consultants approval to move ahead with the plan.

The 5-4 council vote will set in motion a series of neighborhood meetings, surveys, mailings and contacts with other governmental agencies required by federal law as the city plans a projected $1.5-billion upgrade of the sewer system.

The narrow vote marked the end of a nearly three-month campaign by Councilman Bruce Henderson to scrap the detailed “public participation program” in favor of a simpler and less costly method of informing sewer users about the upgrading, through bill inserts, advertisements and a telephone hot line--a plan Henderson said would cost just $96,000.

$1.18-Million Price Tag

The plan backed Monday by Mayor Maureen O’Connor and council members Ron Roberts, Gloria McColl, Wes Pratt and Judy McCarty will cost $1.18 million, only $98,000 of which will come from city coffers. Federal and state grants will pay for most of the effort, with other Metropolitan Sewerage System users picking up the balance.

The three consultants involved--James M. Montgomery engineers, Katz & Associates and TCS Governmental Consulting--will share in the cutbacks among their city contracts.

The new contract is $303,000 less than the $1.48-million plan approved by the council July 25. In the face of a barrage of criticism from constituents and media editorials that followed Henderson’s denunciation of that vote, the council voted 9 to 0 on Aug. 2 to reconsider the action.

Supporters of the contract defeated a suggestion by Councilman Bob Filner that the entire project be put out for new bids from other consultants, a process that Assistant City Manager Jack McGrory said would take at least 90 days.

“If we delay this for 90 days, that’s going to send a clear message to the Justice Department that this is business as usual, that we don’t intend to go forward,” O’Connor said.

The U.S. Department of Justice and the Environmental Protection Agency have sued the city in an attempt to force it to upgrade its sewage treatment to “secondary” levels, as required by the Clean Water Act. The city faces millions of dollars in fines for missing a July 1 compliance deadline and for 1,814 sewage spills into the ocean during the past five years.

The city has affirmed its intent to upgrade the treatment system, but is seeking a 39-month delay of the court case while it lobbies for funding and while engineering consultants review the city’s options.

Backers of the public participation plan noted that the city is legally required to conduct the effort and that Henderson’s proposal would not come close to satisfying EPA regulations describing its scope.

Filner, however, said he had “lost confidence” in the estimates of the number of meetings needed to get information to the public and gauge public opinion, as well as the price tags attached to components of the plan.

“There’s no rationale for any number as far as I can tell,” Filner said. “We’re just cutting to cut numbers. I don’t have confidence in any of these numbers.”

For example, he said that $120,000 of the total contract would pay for the time the consultants spent meeting with the city’s own volunteer Metropolitan Sewer Task Force. “We are hiring people to liaison with our own public advisory board,” Filner said.

The cuts became possible when city staff members narrowed the number of options for sewage treatment improvement projects from 21 to six, giving the consultants less information to disseminate. That allowed, for example, a reduction in public meetings from 18 to 12, a savings of $146,000.

Other cuts included reducing the number of newsletters from eight to two, a savings of $16,000; elimination of a monthly summary of activities, which saved $42,890; and a smaller-scale media program, which saved $31,620.

At the urging of McCarty, however, the consultants still will conduct 125 “outreach” meetings with community groups.