Septic Tank Dump Site Is Not Such a Bad Idea : Residents, environmentalists are up in arms about the Sepulveda Basin facility. But state-of-the-art monitoring station would halt disposal of toxic chemicals--and generate revenues.

Diane Keaton said it best in “Baby Boom.” She wanted to turn on the faucet and not have to think about where the water comes from.

Similarly, most people don’t want to know what happens when the toilet gets flushed.

But when a septic tank dumping station springs up in the Sepulveda Basin, the question has to be faced: Why?

After seeing news coverage of the controversy, I looked into the subject by calling city officials and opponents. Despite my initial wariness, I now believe that it’s not such a bad idea.

I realize this puts me at odds with several neighborhood and environmental organizations. When they learned the city had built the facility and was about to build a road in the basin on which trucks from throughout Los Angeles County would bring septic tank waste, they raised a cry at City Council meetings.

They hope to block the road by demanding an environmental impact report, thereby keeping the facility from ever being used.

However, the facts are these:

* The city of Los Angeles currently maintains seven manholes, four of which are in the Valley, to service those residents who do not have sewer connections. Truck operators pump the sewage into the manholes, and it’s carried to a treatment plant.

* Four of these manholes can be used 24 hours a day by waste haulers and anyone else who knows where they are.

* What is dumped into these manholes is sampled by city inspectors only 4% of the time. This means that the city has no idea who dumped what into these unmanned inlets and into our sewer system a staggering 96% of the time.

It doesn’t take a genius to realize how illegally dumped toxic chemicals get into Santa Monica Bay. No other city or county in Southern California allows this kind of unmonitored dumping into its system.

* The new disposal station that would replace the manholes, adjacent to the Tillman Reclamation Plant, is a state-of-the-art monitoring facility and has already cost the taxpayers $2.3 million.

* Other cities and counties not only closely monitor what goes into their systems, they also charge more for the privilege of dumping. Our beneficent city charges haulers only $1,704 per year to dump unlimited amounts of waste.

We Los Angeles residents are inadvertently subsidizing the outlying areas of Malibu, La Canada Flintridge and others that don’t have sewer systems, because it is their waste that our system processes.

Regardless of what the waste haulers charge their customers, the only money coming into city coffers is the $1,704-per-truck per year. This is a bargain basement rate.

Haulers are already coming into the Valley to take advantage of this. The new facility will charge haulers by the gallon for what they are “contributing” to our system. We residents with sewer connections have always paid per gallon for our “contributions.”

One concern of critics is that the traffic from the trucks into the area would degrade the environment of the Sepulveda Basin. The access road to the facility is all that remains to be completed.

Concerned groups such as the Audubon Society should focus their efforts on lobbying for a route which would minimize traffic on Woodley Avenue. One possibility is a route off of Victory Boulevard to the rear of the facility, via the federal land currently being used by the National Guard.

A great deal of the anger over this facility comes not from the reasons it was built but from the lack of communication between the city and affected residents.

We now must find the best way to operate this facility in order to stop illegal dumping, generate revenue and bring Los Angeles into line with the rest of Southern California in monitoring its wastes.