Common Sense and Opportunity : Judge gives San Diego a window on sewage-system revamp; the city should use it wisely.

Two words best describe U.S. District Judge Rudi M. Brewster’s recent decision to put the brakes on the city’s ever-expanding Clean Water Program: common sense.

This, after all, was a bureaucracy that, in just a few short years, grew not desk by desk or even room by room; it mushroomed floor by floor--and soaked up hundreds of millions of tax dollars to fund a dubious environmental effort that even many environmentalist don’t believe in any more.

Now, Judge Brewster has given the city a 19-month reprieve to reassess the program. It’s time the city should use wisely. The federal lawsuit and consent decree requiring the city to spend billions of dollars to upgrade the treatment of sewage discharged into the ocean off Point Loma remain in effect. When the reprieve ends in 1994, the city could still be on the hook for billions of dollars that Brewster’s order may otherwise have saved taxpayers.

First, the city should move forward with the projects the judge still wants completed. That means doubling the length of the Point Loma outfall and building a backup pipe so a rupture in the primary pipe won’t foul local beaches for months with partially treated sewage, as happened last spring.

The extension will give San Diego one of the longest, deepest ocean outfalls in the world. Numerous scientists from the respected Scripps Institution of Oceanography already have testified that the current outfall is doing little or no damage to the ocean. The extended pipe would ensure that the ocean is placed in even less environmental risk.

The city also should proceed with the water-reclamation plant the judge wants built in University City. Reclaiming water is essential to any comprehensive solution to the water problems of a city that imports 90% of its drinking water.

And why not take the advice of the council-appointed Citizen Water-Sewer Review Committee? The panel wants the city to establish a citizen watchdog office to oversee the Clean Water Program and report back to the public. If such a consumer panel had been in place from the beginning, many of the questions that are only now coming to light might have been raised earlier--and perhaps millions of tax dollars could have been saved.

Voters can do their part, too. Ultimately, an amendment of the federal Clean Water Act may be necessary. The law now makes no distinction in treatment requirements for municipalities that have deep-ocean outfalls--like San Diego--and those that discharge into landlocked waterways or rivers that provide drinking water downstream. San Diegans should insist that congressional candidates who want their vote in November support such an amendment in Congress--if the scientific evidence against the multibillion-dollar program continues to mount.

It won’t be easy to get Congress to act. But Judge Brewster’s common-sense ruling adds legitimacy to the cause. And a soon-to-be-released study by the National Academy of Sciences on the effects of sewage discharges into the ocean may provide additional ammunition.

Judge Brewster deserves credit for his extraordinary efforts to balance the legitimate needs of the environment with the budget realities of a community that may soon be forced to cut back police service and perhaps lay off employees. But so far, all the judge has been able to do is give the city a window of opportunity to solve the problem itself. It’s an opportunity San Diego can’t afford to squander.