Congressional Hearing Is Set on San Diego Sewage Plant Issue

A congressional committee will hold a hearing in San Diego next month on the requirement for the city to build a federally mandated multibillion-dollar improvement to its sewage treatment system, it was announced Wednesday.

The news of the hearing was enthusiastically received by the plan’s opponents.

Among them are Councilmen Bob Filner and Bruce Henderson, who maintain that there is no scientific evidence the improvements required by the Clean Water Act are environmentally necessary and that spending the estimated $2.6 billion to $2.8 billion to upgrade the system to secondary treatment is a boondoggle.

Filner and Henderson asked Rep. Jim Bates (D-San Diego) for the hearing, and Bates notified them Wednesday in a letter that the House subcommittee on Water Resources will hold a hearing in San Diego on Feb. 13, most likely at the council chambers.

“It is my hope that this hearing will lead to environmentally sound and fiscally rational decisions with respect to San Diego’s requirements under the Clean Water Act,” Bates said in his letter. “As one of San Diego’s representatives in Congress, I am very concerned that $2.8 billion is not spent to upgrade the city’s sewage treatment system if it is not necessary. . . .

“I am . . . pleased that this examination is about to occur and that the necessity of undertaking the largest public-works project in the city’s history will be explored, with all parties involved able to offer their insight.”

Bates is not a member of the subcommittee, whose chairman is New York Democrat Henry J. Nowak. But Bates said he will be working with Nowak to form a list of possible witnesses.

Filner hailed the upcoming hearing as “the first step in an attempt” to derail the project, which would require Congress to approve an exemption for San Diego, a prospect city leaders have consistently held is unrealistic.

The hearing comes at a time when representatives of the city, state, federal Environmental Protection Agency and the Sierra Club are nearing settlement on both the features and timetable of a new secondary-treatment system.