Escondido Is Seeing Green

Avocado farmers are cutting down their water-starved trees and children play at schoolyards and parks of matted brown grass, but Escondido has plans to turn things green again.

As the drought drags on, officials are pushing ahead with a $60-million upgrade of the city’s water treatment plant, hoping to create San Diego County’s largest water reclamation project.

By 1995, the facility would provide about 3 million gallons a day of reclaimed water to irrigate parks, golf courses, freeway landscaping and agricultural fields, thus saving fresh water for other uses.

At the decade’s end, reclaimed water may total 18 million gallons a day.

Cynthia Ferguson-Salvati, Escondido’s water reclamation and conservation manager, described the project as one of the most ambitious in the state.

Recently, after adjustments were made to minimize the project’s effects on wildlife, an environmental impact report was certified for the first phase, which includes about 24 miles of pipeline, an underground pressure-reducing station and two underground reservoirs.

Last month, city officials applied for a $20-million low-interest loan from the state’s $100-million waste water treatment program, funded by the federal government and a state bond fund.

City officials say they expect funding approval by year’s end and to begin the two-year construction next summer.

The state’s current budget crisis does not affect the bond fund, but there are other obstacles.

“There is money available, but there’s also a lot of competition,” said Lynn Johnson, who heads the Office of Water Recycling for the state Water Resources Control Board.

Escondido already has a small model of the project at its Hale Avenue treatment plant. In it, 30,000 gallons of water a week are treated by removing suspended solids and disinfecting the water with chlorine.

The water is then trucked to a 2-acre eastern Escondido avocado grove, where its use on four plots is being monitored by researchers from UC Riverside.

The study, funded by Escondido and the County Water Authority, uses different concentrations of fresh and reclaimed water, the latter of which is saltier, on the salt-sensitive avocados.

Ferguson-Salvati said the two-year study, begun in December, will help the city design its second phase of the reclamation facility, which is expected to serve mostly agricultural users east of Escondido.

While 35 other water reclamation plants already provide irrigation water in San Diego County, officials say Escondido’s will be the biggest, serving as many as 60 private and government customers.

Johnson said the two largest plants working in California are run by the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District in northwest Los Angeles County and the Irvine Ranch district. Each serves more than 100 customers.

A 1987 survey indicated there are 200 water treatment projects statewide, although some are just for pollution control, Johnson said. He said the state has also received agricultural reclamation plans from Carlsbad and Ramona.

“It’s starting to kind of pick up steam as people start to realize that the water they’d like from Northern California might not always be available,” Johnson said.

In San Diego County, existing reclamation projects include the 20 acre-feet produced and used annually at the San Diego Wild Animal Park, 200 acre-feet per year sent from Fallbrook to two nurseries and Camp Pendleton’s golf course, and the Padre Dam plant’s replenishing of Santee’s seven recreational lakes.

An acre-foot equals 325,800 gallons of water, or enough to meet the water needs of two families of four for one year. Many golf courses, such as La Costa and Rancho Bernardo, also use reclaimed water provided by various local water districts.

The city of San Diego has an aquaculture project using water hyacinths to cleanse water that provides about 9 acre-feet per year to the California Department of Transportation for Interstate 15 landscaping, said Chris Reilly, water resource associate for the County Water Authority.

The authority and the huge Metropolitan Water District of Southern California provide rebate incentives for using reclaimed water.

Originally, the city of San Diego had planned its own multimillion-dollar, large-scale water reclamation system, but has scaled back from seven plants to one or two because of financing constraints, Reilly said.

As initially planned, San Diego’s system would have provided 40,000 to 70,000 acre-feet per year of reclaimed water.

With that plan scrapped, “Escondido is going to be the largest in our service area,” Reilly said. “Escondido’s really charging right ahead.”

San Diego is now one of the prime potential customers for Escondido’s reclaimed water, planning to buy up to 5 million gallons a day, Ferguson-Salvati said.

Other anticipated customers include the city of Poway, the Rincon Del Diablo and Olivehain municipal water districts, Escondido’s own parks department and school districts, the Escondido Country Club and an 18-acre avocado grove.

More agricultural users would be served in the second phase of the project, which would extend eastward from the main north-south trunk.

The system is to be paid for by the state loan, conventional loans, grants from the MWD and the County Water Authority, water sales and connection fees.

Existing homes in Escondido would not be hooked up to the system and those homeowners would not have to pay for the plant. But under a financing plan yet to be approved by the City Council, owners of new homes and commercial developments would help pay for the system because the whole city benefits from potable water savings, Ferguson-Salvati said.

City officials estimate the plant will be profitable by the end of the decade.

Last fiscal year, Reilly said, 7,829 acre-feet of reclaimed water were used in the county. Only part of that represents savings of potable water, however, because much of the reclaimed water goes to recharge ground water basins or is a substitute for agricultural well water.

Whether it saves potable or well water, reclaimed water will continue to be a growing need, Reilly predicted.

“We are basing our designs of future pipelines on the use of reclaimed water,” Reilly said. “We had hoped reclaimed water would provide about 10% of our total need by 2010.”