Council Adopts Sewage Plan That Stresses Reuse for Irrigation

More than a year after missing the deadline for compliance with federal clean-water standards, the San Diego City Council chose a plan Tuesday for a multibillion-dollar sewage-system upgrading that would maximize the reuse of sewage for irrigation.

With little more than a month before the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s lawsuit against the city for flouting the federal Clean Water Act goes to trial Dec. 5, the council authorized city planners and consulting engineers to design a system that would cost $2.6 billion to $2.86 billion if completed as planned.

“If we go into court with a blank piece of paper, the judge can fashion any kind of a decree he wants,” said E. Miles Harvey, chairman of the council’s advisory Metropolitan Sewer Task Force. “If this council does not act before Dec. 5, the court can do anything it wants.”

A private attorney representing the city contended later, however, that it is still unclear whether U.S. District Judge Rudi Brewster has the authority to actually fashion a compliance plan for the city.

The council did not adopt the sewer task force’s recommendation that conversion of its Point Loma treatment plant to so-called “secondary” treatment standards--as required by the Clean Water Act--be delayed until 2015. The EPA has stated that such a timetable, which would put the treatment upgrading 27 years after the deadline, is unacceptable.

Instead, the council adopted Deputy City Manager Roger Frauenfelder’s recommendation that the conversion of the Point Loma plant occur last, after construction of four satellite water-reclamation plants and a large water-reclamation plant in North City and a sewage-treatment facility in the Tijuana River Valley.

The construction timetable will be decided in court or in settlement negotiations that have been continuing since early 1988, well before the city missed the July 1, 1988, deadline for compliance with the Clean Water Act. At best, Frauenfelder said, ground could be broken on the smaller water-reclamation plants in Santee or Poway as early as 1992.

Though settlement negotiations are continuing, they have been hampered by earthquake damage to the EPA regional office in San Francisco, which is still closed, said Jim Dragna, a private attorney aiding the city in the sewer lawsuit. In recent weeks, both sides have been preparing for a trial before Brewster by taking depositions. The EPA is represented by attorneys from the U.S. Department of Justice.

Technically, Tuesday’s 6-3 vote authorized city staffers only to continue planning the mammoth sewage-treatment upgrade, which will be the largest public-works project in city history. The construction project would be financed by sewer user fees, now $17.11 per month but expected to increase.

The vote also narrowed the alternatives for the project’s configuration from six to one, formalizing a plan favored by city planners and a majority of the 15 cities and water districts in the Metropolitan Sewerage System.

It commits the city to reclaiming as much as 135 million gallons of sewage each day by 2050, cleansing the effluent at the four satellite plants and the University City treatment facility for irrigation of parks, golf courses and crops. City officials have called the water reclamation component the country’s most ambitious effort.

The South Bay plant and an expanded Point Loma facility would treat sewage to secondary standards, which removes 85% to 90% of solids from effluent, before dumping it into the ocean. The city’s current “advanced primary” treatment system removes 75% to 80% of solids from the sewage.

A nearby plant being designed by the International Boundary and Water Commission would treat the estimated 25 million gallons of Mexican sewage that pours into the Tijuana River each day and flows into the ocean through the same outfall handling the 55 million daily gallons of South Bay sewage.

In all, the system would be sized to dispose of 341 million gallons of sewage generated each day by the estimated 2.9 million people who will live within the sewage district, which stretches from the Mexican border to Del Mar and east to Santee, by 2050.

Councilmen Bruce Henderson and Bob Filner, longstanding critics of the federal secondary sewage treatment requirements, voted against the plan along with 5th District Councilman Ed Struiksma.

Henderson and Filner believe that scientific evidence shows that the city’s sewage is not harming the ocean. They recently returned from a lobbying trip in Washington to explore chances for an amendment to the Clean Water Act that would allow sewage treated to advanced primary standards to be dumped in the deep waters of the Pacific Ocean.

The pair also hope that the scale of the city’s water-reclamation effort will convince federal regulators to allow the Point Loma plant to remain at advanced primary treatment standards.

“With settlement negotiations going on and trial set, why don’t we wait until we get some resolution of those issues before we decide something like this?” Henderson asked.

Filner maintained that, with a drastically stepped-up water conservation effort, the Point Loma plant can handle all the city’s secondary sewage needs. The planned South Bay plant would not have to be built or could be used solely for water reclamation, precluding the need for an outfall that Filner contends will cause serious environmental damage.

The city plan “does not have a vigorous conservation element, which would significantly reduce the capacity even further,” Filner said. “And, if that capacity were reduced, you wouldn’t need, for example, a secondary-treatment plan in the South Bay.”

But Councilman Ron Roberts noted that the South Bay outfall will be needed anyway to transport Tijuana sewage into the ocean, eliminating an environmental hazard far greater than the damage caused by building the pipe.

And Mayor Maureen O’Connor thought little of the city’s chances of amending the Clean Water Act. “I got told the exact opposite: The law is the law, and they’re not changing the law,” O’Connor said of congressional leaders. “If anything, they’re going to get tougher.”

Frauenfelder urged the council to act, if only because the Point Loma plant, which now treats 190 million gallons of sewage daily, is nearing its capacity of 240 million gallons, a figure that could be reached by 2005, he said.

With time-consuming planning, land acquisition and construction ahead, the council must implement a system soon, he said.

“The court case notwithstanding, we must get on with the program,” he said. “We have no slack time.”