Valley Interview : Officials Discuss Need for Controversial Septic Waste Dump Site

The city of Los Angeles aroused furious opposition last year when neighbors learned that hundreds of sewage-bearing trucks would be emptying their loads into a newly built dumping site for septic tank waste in the Sepulveda Basin, home of the San Fernando Valley’s largest park.

In response, city officials delayed the opening of the nearly completed $2.3-million facility, which had been built without the intense public scrutiny that would have accompanied a full environmental report.

Planners are now putting together a comprehensive environmental report, including the impact of opening the Sepulveda Basin facility, as well as a study of alternative sites for the project.

Harry Sizemore, assistant director of the city Bureau of Sanitation, was interviewed by Times staff writer Tracey Kaplan regarding the technical side of the project. J. P. Ellman, vice president of the Board of Public Works and the only Valley resident on the five-member panel, answered policy questions about the facility.

*

Question: What is the purpose of the facility?

Answer: (Sizemore) There are two reasons--to better monitor what goes into our sewage system, which we have to do under the federal Clean Water Act, and to get people on septic tanks to pay their fair share for the upkeep of the system.

Q: What happens to the septic tank sewage now?

A: (Sizemore) Right now, trucks collect sewage from septic tanks in places like Malibu and La Crescenta and put it down seven manholes throughout the city that feed into our sewer system.

There isn’t any problem with what’s discharged from the residences, with household waste. But there have been some pretty celebrated cases of illegal dumping of industrial waste and chemicals down the manholes. It’s stuff that companies pay something like $500 per 42-barrel drum to be hauled to a hazardous-waste site. The problem is that anyone can come in the middle of the night and dump it down the manholes. We feel it happens. (Ellman) The non-sexist term is maintenance hole, not manhole.

Q: OK, so where are these maintenance holes located?

A: (Sizemore) There’s one Downtown, one on the Westside near LAX, one in Hollywood and four in the San Fernando Valley--in North Hollywood, Sun Valley, next to Van Nuys Airport and on San Fernando Road. Four of the seven are unmonitored at night.

Q: What sort of chemicals get dumped down the maintenance holes?

A: (Sizemore) Things like cyanide, which is used in the jewelry business; chrome; cadmium; and copper, which you find in plating. Most businesses don’t put anything in except what residences do. But take industrial metal finishers. Let’s say they put bumpers for an automobile in a chemical bath. After they’re done, the industry has to concentrate the chemicals to the point where they can be hauled off site to be reused or taken to a hazardous-waste landfill.

Q: Has the county exceeded the federal limits for any of those chemicals?

A: (Sizemore) No, it’s not such a problem that we’re in violation of the law. Let’s put this in perspective. Septic tank sewage only accounts for one-tenth of 1% of the entire system flow. Another way to put it is that only 25,000 people in L.A. are on septic tanks, compared to 660,000 sewer connections. But this is the largest uncontrolled flow we have in our system now and we want to monitor it.

Q: Are you under pressure from the Environmental Protection Agency to do it?

A: (Sizemore) No, but under the Clean Water Act, we’re required to know what comes into our system, and this is a big question mark.

Q: What will happen to the sewage at the facility, wherever it is ultimately located?

A: (Sizemore) There will be six stalls for the trucks to discharge into. The sewage will go into a 60-inch pipe and bypass the Tillman treatment plant there at the basin, because it’s already solid and Tillman separates water from solids. We’ll take random samples from special taps as the stuff is discharged, then take it to a lab to be tested. We presume no one in their right mind would dump hazardous waste there when they could face very stiff penalties, including being put out of business, if we catch them.

Q: What would the hours be? And how many trucks would you have a day?

A: (Sizemore) The hours have not been set, but it is presumed we’ll have extended hours, from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. and on Saturday morning. We can do 36 trucks an hour, or about 150 to 200 trucks a day.

Q: Why make all the trucks travel to the Valley? Isn’t L.A . polluted enough?

A: (Sizemore) They are already traveling. It’s my understanding that most of the waste haulers are already located in the Valley.

Q: You mentioned making septic-tank users pay their fair share. How will you do that?

A: (Sizemore) Right now, we only charge the haulers $1,700 a year for a permit to operate each truck, and we’ve issued only about 100 permits. That’s only $170,000 a year. With the new system, we’ll charge the haulers by the gallon, about 2.6 cents, or $2.5 million annually. We expect they’ll pass that on to the homeowners.

Q: Will bills go down as a result for residents and businesses hooked up to city sewers?

A: (Sizemore) There will be a need for $2.5 million less. Let’s see, if you divided $2.5 million by 660,000 customers, that would be $3.60 per year per customer.

Q: So, bills will go down by $3.60 per year?

A: (Sizemore) Well, we haven’t had a sewer connection increase for the last two years, although the fee has gone up from $8 or $9 in the mid-’80s to about $20 today. Maybe the fee won’t go down, since there hasn’t been an increase in awhile, but it won’t go up as fast.

Q: Why was Sepulveda Basin chosen as the site of what some local residents call a “truck toilet”?

A: (Ellman) For several reasons. The department controls a considerable amount of land at the basin because of the Tillman sewage treatment plant. The land was free, it’s already used for sewage processing and there are department personnel there. And I guess we felt it was fairly central, right off Interstate 405.

Q: What about the possibility of sewage spills because of earthquakes or flooding?

A: (Ellman) First of all, we had an earthquake in January and the Sylmar quake in 1971, and we didn’t have any problems. The spills we’ve had from our sewage collection system, for example our wet weather outflows into Ballona Creek, have come exclusively from small pipes, about eight inches in diameter. We’ve never had a large sewer block up.

Q: What if the basin is closed because of flooding, as in 1992?

A: (Sizemore) We could reopen the maintenance holes.

Q: Why wasn’t there a full EIR done in the first place?

A: (Ellman) Originally, there should have been a full EIR. Like Councilwoman Laura Chick, who raised the issue during her campaign, I think a lot of questions now being raised would have been answered. They are very valid questions.

I wasn’t on the board then, but my understanding is that the Department of Public Works went through its environmental review and determined there wasn’t a need for it because it wasn’t a new use of the property, since Tillman was there already. There was notice given by the Planning Department that this was about to happen. There were two public hearings, at least one of which was in the community. I guess just not enough people were aware of what was going on. They went through the usual notice procedure and let everyone know within 500 feet.

Q: But hardly anyone lives within 500 feet of the site because the site is east of Woodley Avenue, south of Victory, inside the park, right?

A: (Ellman) Yes, that was part of it.

Q: Do you think that the fact that there was no one on the board at the time who lived in the Valley played a role in the choice of site or lack of an EIR?

A: (Ellman) It could have been a factor. I may be more aware of the concerns because I use the park than someone who doesn’t.

Q: What are some of the issues being explored in the EIR?

A: (Ellman) Before, there was nothing to prevent the trucks from driving down Burbank Boulevard or any route they chose. The EIR is looking at different designated routes, and there’s a possibility that we could put in another access road closer to the 405 and get the trucks off Victory Boulevard faster. We’re also looking at more than 20 alternative sites for the disposal center.

Q: Is there really any chance that the facility will not open in the basin now that it’s already been built?

A: (Ellman) I think we need to leave our options open. There’s always a no-project alternative but, whatever we do, we need to have one controlled and monitored facility. There’s also the issue of should we have more than one facility, so it all wouldn’t come to the Valley.