SEPULVEDA BASIN : Panel Weighs Study of Septic Waste Plan

In a breakthrough for foes of a plan to allow septic tank waste to be brought to a collection facility in the Sepulveda Basin, a key Los Angeles city panel will consider ordering an environmental impact report on the idea.

Newly appointed Board of Public Works Commissioner J.P. Ellman pledged that she would put the question of whether an environmental report should be done on the board’s agenda in mid-October. However, she said she has not yet made up her own mind about whether one is necessary.

“My husband and I ride our bikes around the basin and I have a concern for the park,” said Ellman, the only San Fernando Valley resident on the board. “But I also have a concern that we meet our obligations to better control our sewage and require all residents to pay their fair share of sewage treatment costs.”

A hearing before the Board of Public Works will give opponents of the septic tank facility their best shot yet at stopping a project they claim would degrade the basin’s recreational and environmental quality, said Los Angeles City Councilwoman Laura Chick.

“This is a significant turnaround,” said Chick, who campaigned against the septic tank plan.

“I am really encouraged by this,” said environmental activist Jill Swift, a critic of the septic tank project.

Cindy Miscikowski, chief deputy to Councilman Marvin Braude, in whose district the facility is located, said her boss “would support reopening the issue and having an EIR done.”

Ellman’s offer to take a look at the project came after a nearly two-hour public meeting Thursday in which nearby homeowners, environmental activists and private waste haulers criticized the city’s plan to receive between 90 and 200 truckloads daily of septic tank waste at its Tillman Water Treatment Plant in the Sepulveda Basin.

City sanitation officials say the plan would give them more control over what is dumped into city sewers and enable them to charge septic tank customers for the real costs of treating their effluent.

But critics argue that the project, which was approved without an EIR in 1989, will generate enough noise, odors and traffic pollution to require that a full environmental impact report be done.