Sewage Treatment Rates Unfair to L.A. Users : Unlimited quantities of waste from other communities that rely on septic tanks are hauled to the city and dumped free of charge.

When Mayor Richard Riordan took office, he declared that one of his goals was to run the City of Los Angeles as efficiently as a business.

When it comes to sewage treatment, his goal has not been reached. In a cost-cutting move, Riordan has proposed doing away with the court-mandated secondary treatment of the wastes being dumped into the ocean from the Hyperion treatment plant. But a larger issue--who bears the burden of the cost of sewage treatment in Los Angeles--has been largely ignored. That aspect of our government is being run more like a welfare office for surrounding suburbs.

A well-managed business capitalizes on its assets to make a profit for its owner. Our sewer treatment facilities, including the Hyperion plant in Playa del Rey and Tillman here in the Valley, are an expensive asset. In effect they are being seriously undervalued in the “marketplace” because they are being used by areas outside the city for next to nothing. We the rate-paying “owners” suffer the loss of income by having to pay higher fees.

To understand what I am talking about, take out your DWP bill. About halfway down you will find a “Charges Imposed by Non-DWP Agencies.” Under that heading you will find an item called “Sewer Service Charge.”

This is what the city is charging for what your household discharges into the sewer system. The amount is based on your water usage. Keep that figure in mind.

Many articles in The Times recently have dealt with Valley residents’ complaining, with just cause, about skyrocketing water and sewer service fees. A Scott Harris column in March pointed out that Valley sewer service charges have gone up 400% since 1987. The reason most often given by city bureaucrats for the increases is that the costs of sewage treatment have risen due to population increases, state and federal treatment requirements and so on. All this may be true, but what is overlooked is that city taxpayers are paying to treat other cities’ wastes for free or almost free.

It happens this way:

Places without sewer systems--generally mountain, foothill and beach areas--typically rely on septic tanks. These tanks are emptied by private waste haulers, who naturally find the most economical way to dispose of the wastes. They pump it from their trucks into a number of manholes set up for this purpose around the metropolitan area. The sewage then goes to treatment plants where an obliging City of Los Angeles processes it for nothing.

(A proposed consolidation of all the manholes into a single facility in Sepulveda Basin has aroused strong opposition among residents and a restudy of the location, but no one has challenged the underlying economics of letting non-residents dump into the system.)

To get an idea of the fiscal impact, I examined records for just one area that our facilities serve indirectly: Malibu.

The City of Malibu has long and successfully fought against putting sewers in the city. It remains a city of septic tanks and package treatment plants that need to be serviced by private waste haulers.

Publicly available records such as the 1992 Malibu Wastewater Management Study disclose that private waste haulers pump about 1 million gallons of sewage a month out of Malibu and into the L. A. city sewer system for treatment.

This costs the L. A. taxpayers a lot. Depending on pre-treatment, it costs anywhere from 2 cents to 11 cents per gallon to treat wastes in Southern California. We in the Valley are paying it. What do Malibu residents pay the City of Los Angeles for the treatment of their waste? Nothing, zero, nada , zilch.

If Los Angeles charged 5 cents a gallon for accepting other municipalities’ wastes, Malibu’s 1 million gallons a month would generate $50,000 in revenue, an impressive $600,000 a year, in fees. And this is just from one city; there are waste haulers servicing dozens of areas doing the same thing.

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I chose Malibu as an example because the relevant records are available. Other areas that all or partly lack sewer systems include Topanga, La Crescenta, Tujunga, La Canada-Flintridge and Sierra Madre.

Currently, the only fees the city recoups from all of this dumping is the extremely nominal permit fee of $1,704, per truck, per year, that is charged to the private waste haulers. This gives them the right to dump unlimited quantities of waste into our sewer system. What a bargain.

Every other sanitation agency in the Southern California area owning a treatment facility charges a per-gallon fee to accept wastes. That is why the waste haulers flock to Los Angeles from as far away as San Bernardino County.

This increases the volume and, therefore, the costs of running our treatment plants. The city cannot tax the residents of these other areas for the additional costs involved, so they just raise our fees.

These inequities should be addressed with a complete overhaul of our sewer service fees, including those charged by the city to private waste haulers who bring non-L. A. wastes into our system. The treatment and disposal costs should be shared equally by direct and indirect users of the system.

Our treatment facilities should be viewed as major city assets that should operate to the residents’ benefit, not a free ride for the surrounding cities and a burden on the citizens of Los Angeles.