Crying Foul : Critics Say City Shielded Plans to Expand Tillman Sewage Plant

Critics and defenders of the only sewage treatment plant in the San Fernando Valley agree on few things, but this much both factions concede: The demand for sewage processing, along with the population, will grow in time.

But whether the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant should also grow--and when--is a continuing friction point between the two sides, and the recent discovery of two errors in planning documents for the facility have heightened the misgivings of plant critics who say the city is trying to shield its expansion plans from the public.

At issue is a chapter of a long-term plan outlining the city’s future sewage treatment needs.

The chapter predicts that Tillman will need to expand its capacity by 50% by 2010. The section also appears to say that the facility can be expanded by as much as 250% during the next 100 years without a public environmental review.

Both of those points are wrong, Public Works officials now say.

The plant, which treats sewage from most of the San Fernando Valley, should remain the same size between now and 2010, said deputy city engineer Brad Smith. This key point is contained in a short-range plan for the facility. Moreover, any major expansion at the plant will indeed require an environmental review, he said.

Smith discovered the errors after The Times asked the department to explain inconsistencies between the long-term and short-range plans for its sewage facilities. The expansion prediction has already been corrected, and the need for an environmental review will be clarified when the long-range plan is updated.

But any talk of adding facilities at Tillman without public notification is like taking a match to a powder keg.

The department’s construction of a $2-million septic waste collection facility at Tillman in 1993 without an environmental study triggered massive protests in the community, which led the Board of Public Works to order a belated environmental study of that project.

The discovery of the little-known long-term plan, its references to the 2010 expansion, and the more than three months it took for the department to disavow those references, have worried community activists who fear the department will try to add facilities to Tillman again without properly notifying the public.

The activists oppose any enlargement of the plant, saying it will gobble up precious parkland, exacerbate already noxious odors, and promote unwanted growth.

The revisions will not rule out future expansion of the sewage treatment plant. They merely mean that to the best of city planners’ knowledge, Tillman will need to be expanded sometime after, not before, 2010.

Smith said he considered the faulty prediction to be “inconsequential” because it deals with an anticipated plant capacity for a date 16 years in the future, and because it does not appear to affect other recommendations contained in the long-range report.

Michael Stenstrom, an environmental engineering professor at UCLA, said the mistake was not significant because it was caught well in advance of 2010. Furthermore, he believes the error would have been caught before the department did any design work because projections would have clearly pointed to one figure rather than another figure.

Other people familiar with planning issues surrounding sewage treatment facilities agree that the mistakes were neither unusual nor serious.

“I’ve never read a perfect EIR (environmental impact report) and I don’t plan to read one,” said Mark Gold, executive director of Heal the Bay, an environmental group working to clean up Santa Monica Bay. “It’s amazing the number of glaring inconsistencies that you will see. Does that make it right? Of course not. That’s why we have the public review process.”

Edward Wagner, who directs New York City’s long-range planning for sewage treatment, said: “The only difficulty with this situation is that an error was made, which was found by the community before it was found by the agency, and that created concern and distress in the community. That’s always unfortunate, but it sounds like the agency has taken steps to rectify that error and that error had no significance and impact between the time it was made and the time it was caught.”

Community activists take a different view. They say the errors could have become the basis for faulty planning.

“That’s a very serious violation of the public’s confidence in the planning section of the Public Works Department,” said Jill Swift, co-founder of the Coalition to Save Sepulveda Basin. “I’ve lost some confidence in him (Smith) as an administrator if he didn’t correct it when it was first brought up to him.”

“I would hope this kind of fiasco demonstrates the need for leadership and allows the leadership to come forward and take charge,” said Peter Ireland, president of the coalition. “There’s going to be continuing conflict, controversy and incompatible coexistence between the recreational resources and users in the basin and what is now going to become the city’s second largest sewer plant.”

Tillman currently has the capacity to treat 80 million gallons of sewage per day. The incorrect sections of the long-term plan predicted that Tillman would have to expand to treat 120 million gallons per day by the year 2010.

The long-range plan also calls for the plant to be expanded to 160 million gallons a day by 2050 and 200 million gallons a day by 2090.

The long-range plan, called the Clean Water Program Advanced Planning Report, came to light when community activist Gerald A. Silver found a reference to it in a draft environmental study for a proposed sewer system repair project. At Silver’s request, the city sent him the section of the plan dealing with Tillman.

The Times asked Smith and half a dozen current and former public works officials about the discrepancies between the long- and short-term plans beginning in early July. Until mid-October, when the department admitted that mistakes had been made, officials did not provide a clear explanation of the inconsistencies.

One common response was to downplay the long-term plan as merely a flexible outline of projects that they could choose, or not choose, to pursue. They said the long-term plan was not officially adopted by the City Council, as was the short-term plan, known as the Wastewater Facilities Plan.

Smith said he believes the mistakes occurred because planners drafting the Tillman section worked in isolation from planners preparing other sections. Asked what projections the Tillman section planners had based their 2010 expansion figure on, Smith said, “I honestly don’t have a clue.”

But why did it take more than three months to recognize the inconsistencies between the long-term and short-term plans?

Smith offered a simple explanation: Public Works officials did not look into the matter until recently, and because of a “general reluctance on the part of government workers to explain that something is wrong.”

As for Silver, the way in which the department has dealt with the issue--and the repeated references in the long-term plan to expanding Tillman before 2010--have raised suspicions in his mind that the prediction was not faulty at all.

It is his belief, he said, that the department thinks that 2010 sewage levels will require an expansion, but is loathe to admit that because it doesn’t want to face the predictable public furor.

Silver, president of Homeowners of Encino, pointed out that Tillman was built in 1984 to accommodate 40 million gallons of sewage a day, and just seven years later, it was expanded to 80 million gallons a day. Common sense dictates that Tillman would need to be expanded again 19 years later, in 2010, not stay the same, he argued.

But Smith counters that predicting sewage capacity is not as obvious as it seems.

Smith said Tillman was quickly expanded to 80 million gallons a day to catch up to the demand. Now that that demand has been met, future expansions will happen more slowly. In fact, he said, the amount of sewage generated per day in the Tillman service area, which includes most of the San Fernando Valley, has decreased from 78 million gallons a day in 1985 to 71 million or 72 million gallons a day today, mainly due to water conservation efforts.

Of that amount, Tillman treats 67 million gallons a day, Smith said, with the rest sent to other plants for treatment.

The official said he believes sewage levels are artificially depressed now by about 10% and will rebound as people become less careful about using water, and that they will rise--driven mainly by population growth--at a rate of 1% to 1.5% per year.

Such growth would bring the sewage levels in the service area to between 90 million and 100 million gallons a day by 2010, although the level could be affected by economic and development fluctuations.

Those numbers would appear to buttress Silver’s claim that projected sewage flows require the department to increase Tillman’s capacity or build another treatment plant to serve the Tillman service area by 2010. But Smith, once more, said that simple math doesn’t provide the whole picture.

If sewage levels do indeed go beyond Tillman’s 80-million-gallon daily capacity, the excess sewage could be sent to other treatment plants. In deciding not to expand Tillman by 2010, the department took into consideration not only the anticipated sewage levels in the Tillman service area, but also cost and environmental factors, Smith said.

Tillman is part of an interconnected system of sewage treatment plants, Smith said, and there is no rule that says Tillman must process all of the sewage generated in the Tillman service area. However, he conceded that it is more expensive to send Valley sewage elsewhere to be processed.

And so it goes, as it has for years. Silver and other critics question other aspects of the long-range plan, and the Public Works officials answer them away as well. But there are two things that cannot be reconciled for Silver: He did indeed spot errors in the document, and Public Works officials failed to address them for months.

His trust in the officials running Tillman, never high from the start, he says, has only deteriorated further.

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* VALLEY BRIEFING: Treatment plant has longtime air of controversy. B5