Deadline Set for Ruling on Sewage Treatment : Environment: Bill gives the EPA until Nov. 30 to decide whether to hold Carson plant to tighter standards in treating waste pumped into the ocean.

Congress has set a Nov. 30 deadline for a federal decision on whether to require more intensive treatment of the sewage that is being pumped into the ocean off the Palos Verdes Peninsula at a rate of 380 million gallons per day.

At issue is the timing of an Environmental Protection Agency ruling on a waiver request by the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts. The sewage agency wants to be exempted from tighter treatment standards affecting the effluent it sends into the ocean from its giant Carson sewage plant.

The Nov. 30 deadline for the EPA ruling, contained in an appropriations bill signed Monday by President Bush, was enacted at the request of U.S. Rep. Mel Levine (D-Santa Monica).

Levine says the measure will end more than a decade of delays--instigated, in his view, by the sanitation districts--in removing one of the most serious environmental threats to Los Angeles County’s coastal waters.

“They keep coming up with more reasons for delays,” he said Friday, “and delays mean more pollution.”

But sewage officials say the deadline will hamper the EPA’s ability to weigh their argument that tighter standards are unnecessary, costly and counterproductive. Said sanitation districts spokesman Joe Haworth: “It reduces our chances for fair consideration.”

An EPA official declined to say whether the federal agency would be able to issue a ruling by Nov. 30. “We’re not saying we can or can’t meet the deadline at this point. We’re just saying we’re working on it as expeditiously as we can,” spokeswoman Lois Grunwald said.

For more than a decade, sanitation officials have argued for a waiver on grounds that treatment is adequate at the Carson plant, which serves a vast network of sewer districts from Pomona to the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

In recent years they have also asserted that intensifying the treatment--which they say would cost ratepayers $350 million--would backfire environmentally.

Particles in the effluent pumped through the Carson plant’s outfalls off White Point, they say, help cap a layer of bay sediment that is contaminated with hundreds of tons of the highly toxic pesticide DDT. Stepped-up sewage treatment would screen out much of those solids, they say, and allow erosion to expose the DDT, which was pumped through the 1 1/2-mile-long outfalls in the 1950s, ‘60s and early ‘70s.

“If there are stresses out there it is because of this DDT,” said Bob Horvath of the sanitation districts. “. . . If we continue this reduction of solids (the sediment) will erode where the bulk of the DDT is.”

Last January, the EPA rejected these arguments in a tentative ruling against the waiver request. The agency said it had determined that effluent from the Carson plant is not needed to cap the DDT. It also said many native species of marine life that are sensitive to pollution cannot tolerate the plant’s discharge.

Since then, the agency has been preparing to make its final decision, holding hearings and studying a three-foot-thick stack of new information submitted by the sanitation districts on July 10.

Levine said it was the submission of this new material that prompted him to have the Nov. 30 deadline inserted in a bill covering 1990-91 appropriations for the EPA and several other federal agencies.

“It strains credibility to believe that there is more to add after all these years,” Levine said. “To just keep dropping additional suitcases of information on the EPA is to continue to have a de facto waiver.”

Levine says sanitation officials are stirring fear about DDT releases to obscure the fact that effluent from the White Point outfalls carries tons of oil, grease, toxic metals and other contaminants. Such pollution, Levine and other waiver opponents say, would diminish significantly if the sanitation districts were forced to meet federal clean water standards that require full secondary treatment of sewage.

Already, slightly more than half of the Carson plant’s effluent receives secondary treatment, a system that makes use of biological processes to remove a minimum 85% of solids from waste water. The rest receives primary treatment, a less intensive method of removing solids that involves settling, screening and the use of chemicals.

“The sanitation districts are only telling half the story,” said Betsy Ford, one of Levine’s legislative assistants. “They’re not telling that the cap they’re forming is itself highly toxic.”

Sanitation officials insist that the new information they have submitted to the EPA includes fresh evidence that solids discharged through the outfalls are helping to keep the DDT buried.

They say it also shows that marine life in the vicinity of the White Point outfalls has been returning to normal in recent years as a result of steady improvements in sewage treatment.

“We think the EPA’s (tentative) decision was based on old information. In the documentation they used, sometimes they went back several years,” Horvath said. “We submitted information showing that things are improving as we said it would.”

Sanitation officials argue that the Nov. 30 deadline makes it unlikely such information will be taken into account in the final federal waiver decision.

“We think we’ve got a strong technical case,” Horvath said. “But technical issues have not been running the process.”