Gingrich Stirring Troubled Waters : Pollution: Criticism of sewage regulations as government overkill escalates fight in San Diego between officials and environmentalists.

The battle has raged for 23 years--the last seven of them in a federal courtroom. The players are a city hoping to avoid billions of dollars in capital expenditures; an environmental group sounding a warning cry about years of pollution, and the U.S. government trying to enforce the strict standards of the Clean Water Act.

What they are fighting over is sewage, or how to best dispose of the 180 million gallons of effluent generated daily by the nation’s sixth-largest city and 15 surrounding communities.

In January, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) cited San Diego and its ongoing sewage war as a classic case of governmental overkill, and rhetorically speaking, gasoline was poured on a smoldering fire once again.

Gingrich’s involvement in San Diego’s sewage war may also have a direct bearing on Los Angeles, which has lobbied for years to relax requirements for more advanced treatment of sewage discharged into the ocean. Potentially, it could affect every city in the country.

In 1988 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sued San Diego, seeking to upgrade its sewage treatment from “advanced primary” to “secondary.” The improved treatment process removes more suspended solids from waste but could cost up to $10 billion more.

So much money has been spent by the warring parties that one of the attorneys involved compares the case to Charles Dickens’ “Bleak House,” in which a probate matter lingers 10 years, by which time everyone involved is penniless.

If Gingrich succeeds in pushing through legislation that would exempt San Diego from the federal mandate of secondary treatment, seven years and millions of dollars of litigation would become a moot point.

And, of course, such legislation would apply well beyond San Diego, even to cities--such as Los Angeles--that adopted secondary treatment years ago. Gingrich’s involvement has had the effect of putting every fiscal conservative in Congress in San Diego’s corner.

For California environmentalists, the proposed legislation looms as a reversal of hard-won gains in a decade-long battle to make coastal waters safe for humans and marine life.

“Santa Monica Bay is the loser,” said Mark Gold, executive director of Heal the Bay, citing one possible casualty if secondary treatment is abandoned.

Despite secondary treatment being the national standard as ordered by the Richard Nixon Administration’s Clean Water Act of 1972, Gingrich has called the federal mandate stupid.

He cites the claim of some oceanographers--most notably, one from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego--that secondary treatment would do little more than advanced primary in protecting the environment.

“If you have the federal government doing something truly stupid, the current federal attitude is, unless we change the entire law--which is almost impossible and cannot be done in a timely manner--it is impossible to stop the federal bureaucracy from being stupid,” Gingrich said.

Gingrich made San Diego’s sewage situation the first item on his monthly “Correction Day,” set aside for speedy House action on narrowly written laws designed to eliminate specific problems.

He endorsed legislation introduced by rookie Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-San Diego) that would grant the city a permanent exemption from secondary treatment. This month, the EPA is expected to begin considering whether to grant a $1-million waiver that would free the city from the secondary requirement for five more years.

The legislation, approved Wednesday by a House subcommittee, is part of a broader national effort to ease some of the more costly burdens of the Clean Water Act. The full House is not expected to vote on the issue before May.

Officials say that the bill, if approved, could save water customers in Los Angeles several hundred million dollars--the estimated cost of sewage treatment improvements that the city and county agreed to make in settling lawsuits brought by the EPA and several environmental groups.

Bilbray said an exemption--and not a waiver--is the only insurance San Diego can get against “massive over-regulation.” Although the political tide may be turning in his favor, the battle is far from over.

The EPA took away San Diego’s previous waiver in 1985, then filed the suit three years later. In October, President Clinton signed into law a bill that was necessary to make even the request of a waiver possible.

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Using the advanced primary system, the city boasts that its system now removes 82% of the total suspended solids, as opposed to the 70% of previous years. Secondary treatment is said to remove at least 85% of the total suspended solids.

But environmentalists say there is a great deal of difference between a temporary waiver and a permanent exemption and warn that the latter would allow other cities to follow in San Diego’s footsteps by cutting corners that could harm marine life and the ocean.

Even EPA Director Carol M. Browner echoed that concern in a recent letter to Mayor Susan Golding. Although the EPA is expected to approve the five-year waiver--which Browner calls a “cost-effective plan that provides the necessary measure of public health protection”--she also noted: “I am aware that some members of Congress are seeking to bypass the Clean Water Act entirely.”

“Granting them an exemption would be like telling a burglar out on probation, ‘You don’t have to worry about reporting to your probation officer,’ ” said Robert Simmons, an attorney for the Sierra Club, which was allowed into the federal lawsuit as co-plaintiff in 1989.

The impassioned Simmons has been a relentless critic of the city, which he calls an enemy of the environment “and a bad actor in a drama that has carried on far too long.”

The Regional Water Quality Control Board slapped an $830,000 penalty on the city for not properly reporting sewage overflows in 1993. That penalty was followed by a $2.5-million fine for discharging excessive solids through its ocean outfall. Both are being appealed.

City officials defend their record, saying they adhere to EPA rules in operating the E.W. Blom Wastewater Treatment Plant in Point Loma. All of the sewage from the Greater San Diego area empties into the sea from the Blom plant’s outfall pipe.

Some oceanographers say the length and depth of the outfall reduce its impact on the environment and, in some cases, may even be beneficial to marine life by providing nutrients on the ocean floor that otherwise would not exist.

But Scott Jenkins, a coastal engineer, faulted Gingrich and others for using the institution to bolster their claims for an exemption.

It was one oceanographer--Mia Tegner--who concluded that the outfall had failed to harm the region’s kelp beds, but her specialty, Jenkins said, is limited to kelp ecology, “and that’s looking at only a small part of the problem.”

However, Tegner recently went public with her opposition to the proposed legislation, saying that while she opposes secondary treatment, an exemption to the Clean Water Act would give the city an unprecedented license to pollute.

Even now, Jenkins said, the outfall’s “bubbly, turbid plume” often rises to the surface of the water and is pushed ashore by the waves and the wind. He recently testified in a lawsuit brought against the city by a surfer, who incurred a rare fecal streptococcus bacterial infection that he blamed on leaks in the outfall.

“We uncovered a number of secret reports that the city withheld from the public, one of which revealed that 42% of the joints in the outfall suffer from serious deterioration and leaks,” Jenkins said. “The city withheld this information (which it obtained in February, 1991), even though required by law to report it. But the America’s Cup trials were going on, and they needed to project that image as ‘America’s Finest City.’ ”

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Further studies have shown 3,000 leaks in the city sewage system since 1984, with more than 400 having reached public waters, Jenkins said. He argues that the problem is not the method of treatment but “a city that grew much, much faster than its sewage system.”

But city official Schlesinger said critics are mistaken about the lack of oversight and the city’s overall performance when it comes to sewage. Even with an exemption, San Diego would still have to comply with the California State Ocean Plan, which Schlesinger called far more stringent than any federal guideline.

Schlesinger said the state--one of the original plaintiffs in the federal suit--last year dropped its opposition, noting that the extended outfall pipe, which was lengthened from about two miles to 4 1/2 miles and placed deeper on the ocean floor, poses less of an environmental risk.

At one time, state officials maintained that discharge from the pipe was endangering kelp beds off Point Loma and placing marine life at risk. Their concern was heightened in 1992, when the pipe ruptured, spewing 180 million gallons a day of partially treated effluent.

In the most recent hearing before U.S. District Judge Rudi M. Brewster, the EPA cited sewage spills, high bacterial counts and beach closures as a chronic problem from Tijuana to Oceanside--and one that not even a waiver would fix.

As for the state, its official position is that the cost of advancing to secondary treatment is far too exorbitant, not to mention the problem created by the disposal of the sludge created in the process.

Simmons believes the President would never support an exemption and would veto the legislation.

But others are not so sure. One of the co-sponsors of the legislation backed by Gingrich and San Diego’s Republican delegation is a Clinton ally, Rep. Bob Filner (D-San Diego).

As Filner said when the bill was introduced: “I have been fighting this nonsensical requirement for more than five years. Last year, the Congress unanimously passed my bill that allowed San Diego to apply for a waiver from rigid requirements of the Clean Water Act. (The exemption) will ensure that San Diego will not have to jump through any more hoops.”