Escondido Pushes Ahead With Water Reclamation

Avocado farmers here are cutting down their water-starved trees and children play on matted brown grass, but this city has plans to turn things green again.

As the drought drags on, local 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 of reclaimed water a day 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.

After adjustments were made to minimize the project’s effects on wildlife, an environmental impact report recently 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.

Yet even though the state’s budget crisis does not affect the bond fund, 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 two-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 San Diego 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 the second phase of the reclamation facility, which is expected to serve mostly agricultural users east of Escondido.

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

The two largest plants working in California are run by the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District--which covers much of the southwestern San Fernando Valley--and the Irvine Ranch district, which serves more than 100 customers.

A 1987 survey listed 200 water treatment projects statewide, some just for pollution control.

“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, reclamation projects produce the 20 acre-feet 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.

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. of