GARDEN GROVE : Officials Fear Effects of County Sewage Fee

A new county sewage fee may be a barrier to future investment in the city, some officials maintain.

House Foods, a Japanese food-processing company that plans to move a plant to Garden Grove, learned in August that it would have to pay an unexpected $1.4 million for excess sewage flow from its operations.

“This sort of stifles development in our community,” Mayor Bruce A. Broadwater said. “I’d sure hate to see [House Foods] break this off and go somewhere else. And it’s sure easy enough for them to do.”

Akio Watanabe, manager of House Foods in Los Angeles, said, “Our understanding was that we will be required to pay the county for hook-up charge based on square footage.” That fee was estimated to be about $75,000, City Manager George Tindall said.

“We were surprised to hear about the excess charge in August,” Watanabe said. “Before that, the county did not seem too open to the public about their calculation formula for the excess charge.”

The fee is similar to those in San Diego and Los Angeles counties and the city of Los Angeles, said Nancy Wheatley, director of technical services for the county Sanitation Department. It covers the costs of equipment to treat waste water from facilities that release large amounts of sewage each day.

Until now it was imposed on a case-by-case basis, Wheatley said, but recently half a dozen very large operations have applied for sewage permits, prompting the county board to make the fee universal for all companies that release more than 50,000 gallons of sewage a day.