Escondido Mayoral Hopeful Leads Water Crusade : Environment: Slow-Growth Councilman Jerry Harmon wants to recycle sewage, convert it to dollars and revive nearby agriculture at the same time.

Jerry Harmon looks like a typical middle-management type in his proper blue suits, white shirts and conservative ties. But, beneath that button-down exterior, he’s a revolutionary who is about to turn Escondido around and march it back to its youth.

The Escondido city councilman has a plan to convert the city’s sewage into a cash crop that will give Escondido $1 million to $2 million a year to spend on acquiring land on the city’s fringes and elsewhere, land where orchards and citrus groves again can thrive as they did a century ago. Only this time on reclaimed water.

Harmon concedes that it may appear that his plan is too good to be true. His critics say it is.

His plan is to convert waste into dollars by purifying the city’s sewage water and treating it to a point that it can be used for everything but drinking. This commodity, which Escondido now discharges down a pipeline and into the ocean off Cardiff, could bring in millions of dollars if sold to farmers at cut-rate prices, Harmon contends.

Those dollars would be used to acquire more land--both inside and outside the city--to create a greenbelt similar to those around European cities. But, more important, it could halt the urban development which is slowly spreading from the valley floor up into the foothills that surround the inland North County community.

“I looked at a satellite photograph of the Los Angeles basin and saw ‘suburbia.’ If you could see that map, you would know what suburbia means,” Harmon said. “From 450 miles up, there is not a speck of green. It is completely urbanized. You can’t tell where one city ends and the next begins. Even the Los Angeles River is a concrete ditch.”

San Diego County, on the other hand, still has undeveloped land, especially inland. Harmon has set out to save what’s left from the developer’s earthmovers because Harmon is an environmentalist and a slow-growth advocate.

“If we use the income stream from sale of reclaimed water to buy up as much vacant land as we possibly can, we keep it out of the free marketplace and prevent developers from speculating on it,” he explained. Otherwise, without public land acquisition, water reclamation would be growth-inducing by providing additional supplies of that finite commodity, he said.

For every gallon of reclaimed water produced for irrigation or flushing toilets, a gallon of potable water is saved, he explained. “I looked at this carefully and concluded that it would hurt me (by providing water for additional development), unless we follow through and take a vital commodity for development--land--out of the marketplace,” he said.

“We’re not trying to plow new ground here,” Harmon said. “We are trying to catch up with what has started elsewhere.”

Monterey has been reclaiming sewage water for years, as have other Northern California communities, Harmon said. A series of water reclamation plants at Whittier, Pomona, Long Beach, Cerritos and Whitter Narrows cleanses huge quantities of sewage water for use by industry, he points out.

For 14 years, Harmon sat on the five-member Escondido City Council as the lone vote against annexations and development while the city doubled in population. Then, two years ago, two like-minded council members were elected and, as Harmon put it, “now I’m leading the parade.” And he is leading it back to a slower-paced, environmentally sensitive lifestyle.

Now he is convinced he has found a way to make his environmentalist ideas pay.

“This plan not only makes good environmental sense, it makes good business sense, too,” Harmon explained. “The Chamber of Commerce (not one of Harmon’s backers) is always saying that government should be run in a more businesslike way. And, that is what I am proposing: to preserve a precious commodity--water--and make money in the process.”

Harmon has a report from an independent engineering firm that found that Escondido can use all of its reclaimed water within the city boundaries. The Engineering Sciences report also found that the cost of creating new reservoirs and miles of dual piping to distribute the reclaimed water is economically feasible.

“Business people, including my loyal opposition all these years, Jim Rady, are going to see the good sense of this plan,” Harmon said. “But when Rady first hears of this, he is going to hit the ceiling. If, in two, three, four years down the road, he has a plurality elected to the council like I did, he will have a tough time overturning what I am going to put in place for him to enjoy.”

To Rady, the former Escondido mayor who did not run for reelection in the 1988 when Harmon’s star rose, the plan to turn the city’s sewage into an income stream is “anything but realistic.” If it were such a good deal, Rady said, “then everyone would have done it by now.”

Rady views Harmon’s plan as a ruse to prevent the much-needed expansion of the city’s ocean outfall off Cardiff, a needed expansion to handle increased sewage flow expected from Escondido.

“If he can convince people that he is going to reduce the city’s sewage flow down to the outfall to a trickle so that the expansion isn’t needed, he will have an effective weapon to stop growth and development in this city,” Rady said. “I think that’s his primary goal.”

Former City Councilman Doug Best, who is running against Harmon in the first direct election for mayor in June, also questions Harmon’s motives. He contends that Harmon is advancing the water reclamation plan to curry favor with “the coastal voters” in preparation for a bid for a state Assembly seat.

Rady concedes that reclamation is a good idea. When he ran the city before the slow-growth troika headed by Harmon took over, the council was looking at a deal to sell millions of gallons of its sewage water to a neighboring sewage district, which would treat it and use it on golf courses and landscaping.

It was that deal and the immediate need to expand the ocean outfall that got Harmon moving on his water reclamation plan.

“If others were willing to pay us for something we are just throwing away down a pipeline to the ocean, then it only makes sense that we do the same thing here,” he explained.

Harmon said he has talked to environmental groups along the coast about his idea to reduce Escondido sewage flows off their ocean beaches rather than to enlarge the outfall and has found them very receptive.

“The point is to quit alienating the people on the coast. We can do that by reducing the amount of effluent we dump into the ocean,” Harmon said. “I am saying to them, ‘Don’t sue us,’ which I think they have the right to do, for one reason because we dump our waste without removing the viruses and bacteria. It’s bound to have an effect on tourism, which is their lifeblood on the coast.”

Escondido had planned to expand its ocean outfall capacity--a $7 million project--but coastal residents are demanding that the city extend its outfall to the edge of the Continental Shelf--a $24 million task--to prevent contamination of the recreational waters offshore and the beaches.

Environmental groups, although lauding Harmon’s water reclamation plan, believe it is too little and too late.

Escondido’s sewage flows are increasing dangerously to near capacity of its land pipeline and ocean outfall, said David Winkler of the San Elijo Lagoon Conservancy, producing sewage spills that have contaminated ocean shellfish and degraded the quality of the lagoon environment.

To continue to cause major environmental damage to the lagoon and ocean while implementing an untested water reclamation project is not an acceptable alternative to Winkler because it leaves the short-term possibility of land-line failures, which would pollute San Elijo Lagoon, and more ocean pollution from increased sewage flows through the ocean outfall.

Winkler and Richard McManus, an attorney and spokesman for People for a Clean Ocean, say the problem has not yet reached the lawsuit stage.

“Personally, I think he (Harmon) is a very earnest man, and I support his plan wholeheartedly,” McManus said. But he is not sure that the reclamation project will resolve the problems that Escondido sewage is causing the coast.

Even if Escondido city leaders are intent on reclaiming the city’s sewage instead of dumping it in the ocean, there are other levels of bureaucracy to be hurdled, including the Regional Water Quality Control Board, and other state and federal water and environmental watchdog groups, McManus noted.

Sam Blick, a friend of Harmon and attorney for a number of developers, acknowledges that the far-reaching reclamation plan is “a wonderful concept,” but echoes the reactions of others that it seems too good to be true.

“I don’t have enough information about it to determine if it will work or not, but it is a fantastic concept,” Blick said. “However, I have no evidence that it would be profitable.”

However, San Diego County is entitled legally to only a small portion of its current supply of imported water, Blick pointed out, and the guarantee of an uninterrupted water supply for land might boost the value of that land to a level that would make such an ambitious reclamation effort economically viable.

Roger Frauenfelder, deputy San Diego city manager who is handling that city’s plans to recycle at least half its sewage flows by the year 2010, has a problem with Harmon’s financial analysis.

Even with federal grants and other subsidies, purifying sewage water to federal standards is expensive, far more costly than importing water, Frauenfelder said. He estimated that treatment and distribution costs for recycled water would be about $630 an acre-foot. That contrasts with a $250 to $300 an acre-foot cost for imported potable water in the foreseeable future.

Frank Dudek, a principal in the engineering firm of Dudek & Associates, who specializes in water reclamation, raises an eyebrow at the prospect of profits from Escondido’s sewage recycling project, but wholeheartedly supports Harmon’s efforts to initiate it.

He has done water plans for Poway, Carlsbad and other North County communities and finds that “some look good and some look bad” in water-reclamation projects.

The trend is for increasing constraints on imported water, higher costs for importing water and more restrictive regulations by state and federal agencies on the quality of water discharges, Dudek explained.

He predicted a time, not too distant, when Escondido and other inland cities will be required to treat their sewage to tertiary levels--the levels Harmon is now proposing--before it can be dumped into the ocean, or anywhere else for that matter.

“If you are going to have to treat it to that extent anyway, then why pour it down the drain?,” Dudek asked. “Escondido is just a step ahead in the process and, because of its location and surrounding (undeveloped) lands, I think it has a better shot at water reclamation than some more urbanized areas.”

Harmon said he is looking for feedback, for criticism that might reveal any chinks in his plan. He is also confident that he can amend the reclamation program to meet any criticisms.

The first complaint he expected to hear was that he planned to acquire large tracts of property as public land, taking them off the tax rolls and causing budgetary crises in affected cities, school districts and other governmental agencies. Harmon has an answer for that one:

“We would lease out a certain amount of these public lands for agricultural or recreational uses. Then we would use a portion of the lease revenues to keep (property) tax revenues up to at least present levels.”

Leasing of the property he plans to acquire would have a double benefit by providing subsidies to replace lost tax revenues and by assuring customers for Escondido’s reclaimed water.

“We would require lessees to buy a certain amount of reclaimed water as a condition of their leases,” Harmon said. “And, in return, we would provide them with a guaranteed supply of water during the term of their long-term lease.

“In Southern California, where water is like ‘liquid gold,’ a guaranteed supply of water is a very valuable asset,” Harmon said.