Court to Hear Sierra Club’s Sewage Case : Environment: A federal judge will allow the group to present its objections to the settlement reached in San Diego’s long sewage-treatment battle.

A federal judge Tuesday granted the Sierra Club a “trial” on its objections to the city of San Diego’s planned sewage-treatment upgrading, a procedural victory for the environmental organization that will delay settlement of the high-stakes legal battle between the city and three government agencies.

The Sierra Club’s refusal to go along with the proposed settlement gives the organization the chance to prove to U.S. District Judge Rudi Brewster that the accord is not in the public interest. The four government agencies will also be forced to defend its worthiness. Brewster scheduled an evidentiary hearing for Feb. 21.

The Sierra Club contends that a portion of the 43-page settlement violates the federal Clean Water Act because it does not cap the amount of sewage that would be treated by the proposed $2.8-billion system, an action that the organization contends is economically and technically feasible by adoption of a massive water-conservation program, Sierra Club attorney Robert Simmons said.

“The lack of any pollution volume limits in this agreement . . . not only violates the Clean Water Act but is not in the public interest,” he said.

But Hugh Barroll, assistant regional counsel for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s San Francisco office, responded that the Sierra Club’s position is not supported by the federal law.

Weeks of negotiations intended to add the Sierra Club to the deal involving the city, the EPA, the U.S. Justice Department and the state Regional Water Quality Control Board ended unsuccessfully with Tuesday’s hearing before Brewster, a session devoted exclusively to procedure. The environmental group is an intervenor in the state and federal lawsuit against the city.

The four government agencies have agreed to a pact that would require the city to build the largest public works project in its history by Dec. 31, 2003, to comply with the Clean Water Act’s provision for so-called “secondary treatment” of sewage. The city’s Point Loma treatment plant now treats 190 million gallons of sewage generated each day by 1.7 million people, to “advanced primary” standards, which is about 10% less effective in removing suspended solids from waste water.

The city’s treatment system also would cleanse millions of gallons of waste water each day for reuse in irrigating parks, golf courses and freeway medians.

Released publicly for the first time Tuesday, the agreement also would commit the city to specific timetables for construction of sewage-treatment facilities around the region, require the city to establish an elaborate system to monitor its sewage system in order to prevent spills, require the city to beef up its enforcement of a program to prevent industrial users from dumping pollutants into the sewage system and mandate specific staffing levels and capital improvement projects.

The cost of those efforts has not been calculated, Deputy City Manager Roger Frauenfelder said.

One surprise in the pact is a requirement that the city reuse for irrigation just 45 million gallons of water daily by 2010, far less than half what it hopes to be reclaiming by then. Much of the excess cleansed water would simply be dumped in the ocean, primarily during the rainy season.

Separate negotiations on fines against the city for sewage spills into local waterways between 1983 and 1988 are continuing.

Although the Sierra Club concurs with most of the agreement, it contends that the current project is an oversized, overpriced sewage Taj Mahal whose price tag could be reduced by $1 billion if the city would take steps to reduce the sewage flowing into its system.

That could be done, the Sierra Club claims, by retrofitting all 500,000 homes in the Metropolitan Sewage District with 1.6-gallon toilets, faucet flow restrictors and shower head water restrictors. The organization has made various demands for volume reductions in recent months, but Tuesday, Simmons said he is seeking a 30-million gallon net daily reduction over the next eight years.

Simmons noted that 1.6-gallon toilets will be mandatory in all new homes in the state beginning in 1992 and said the state government is aggressively promoting similar conservation measures.

The proposed agreement would make that plan impossible because it would allow the city to increase its 210-million-gallon-a-day sewage cap as it adds capacity to the system.

But city, state and federal lawyers refuse to include the Sierra Club program in the settlement plan, claiming that the document deals with treatment, not conservation, issues and that the impact of the drastic conservation program on the facility has not been adequately studied.

The Sierra Club “wants guaranteed conservation levels, and the city simply can’t guarantee levels without a pilot program,” said Chief Deputy City Atty. Ted Bromfield.

“We just haven’t gotten the experience that water conservation can produce” the numbers they are suggesting, Barroll said.

The two sides will make their cases to Brewster in the hearing that begins Feb. 21, a proceeding that Brewster said will be tantamount to a trial. Lawyers will call expert witnesses and cross-examine opponents before Brewster rules.

If he agrees with the Sierra Club, the judge can force renegotiation of the agreement or a full trial on the entire lawsuit against the city. Conversely, he can set aside the Sierra Club’s objections and make the proposed accord available for public comment. After a 60-day period, Brewster would then consider the public response before signing the pact.

Tuesday’s hearing centered primarily on the government agencies’ request that the Sierra Club hearing come after the public-comment period. But Brewster tentatively ruled that the local environmental group should get its day in court first, delaying settlement by at least a month.