City Picks Four Sites for Sewage Facility

The city of Los Angeles has identified four potential sites for a controversial septic waste collection facility, a move that could spark a war among communities competing to send it somewhere else.

Trucks will bring thousands of gallons of untreated waste each day from septic tanks in semi-rural areas throughout the L.A. area to be discharged into the sewer system.

In a draft environmental impact report released Thursday, the Department of Public Works unveiled three alternative sites to a collection facility built at the Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in the Sepulveda Basin but never opened.

The list included one new site, the Los Angeles-Glendale Water Reclamation Plant near the Golden State Freeway, and two previously proposed sites on San Fernando Road in Sun Valley and on Winnetka Avenue in Chatsworth.

Catching a whiff of the public works department’s intentions for the first time, community leaders and city council members began staking out their positions on what is likely to become a contentious Valley issue.

Gerald Silver, a homeowner leader in Encino, said any plan that includes usage of the Tillman facility is unacceptable.

“That basin’s primary function is flood control and secondarily, recreation,” Silver said.

But City Councilman Richard Alarcon, whose district includes the Sun Valley site, sought to portray Tillman as the best site for the city’s septic waste.

“Short of them saying that Tillman is a bad site, I would encourage maximizing the benefit of the $2 million that we have invested at that site,” Alarcon said.

The environmental study unveiled five alternative plans for handling the septic waste from Los Angeles and surrounding cities. They include Tillman as the sole collection point for the city, the Sun Valley site as the sole collection point, and Tillman in conjunction with the Glendale site. Another scenario would split the sewage between Tillman and the Sun Valley site, while still another would divide it between the Sun Valley and Chatsworth sites.

If Tillman is selected to be the city’s sole collection point, as many as 150 truckloads of sewage would be delivered to the Sepulveda Dam Recreation Area via the San Diego Freeway and Victory Boulevard. The same number would travel on Sun Valley streets if that site were chosen.

The draft environmental impact report--released after almost two years of public participation and work by the city--does not recommend a preferred alternative. A recommendation by the Los Angeles Board of Public Works will come later, after a Feb. 6 public hearing on the report that will be held at the Airtel Plaza Hotel in Van Nuys.

Linda Reponen, a public works manager and project manager for the environmental study, said she hoped the City Council would make the final decision by the end of May. By that time, the development of the draft and final environmental studies will have cost the city nearly $500,000, Reponen said.

Community leaders from the Van Nuys-Encino area predicted that the department’s decision not to take a position at this point will politicize the decision-making process, with all the neighborhoods involved trying to prevent the facility from coming to their area.

“It will pit community against community, and possibly council member against council member,” said Peter Ireland, president of the Coalition to Save Sepulveda Basin.

On Thursday, Ireland’s prediction appeared to have a good chance of coming true.

Francine Oschin, deputy chief of staff to City Councilman Hal Bernson, who represents Chatsworth, said that Bernson would be likely to fight the siting of a septic waste collection facility in his district. City Councilwoman Laura Chick, whose district boundary falls close to the Sepulveda site, will scrutinize any claim made by the public works department that siting the facility at Tillman will have insignificant environmental effects, aide Ken Bernstein said.

The city had nearly completed the $2-million Tillman septic waste collection facility in 1993 when neighbors and environmentalists strongly protested the construction of the project without an environmental study. In November of that year, the City Council decided to put off final approval of the project until the public works department had completed the study. City staff workers and consultants began the environmental impact process a few months later.

However, the City Council’s decision did not spell an end to controversy. In May 1994, residents held a demonstration at Tillman, saying they had been excluded from participating in the department’s decision to narrow a list of 70 potential sites to 19.

On Thursday, however, Reponen praised the four identified sites as being the best candidates in terms of highway and street access, proximity to sewer lines and sensitivity to surrounding land uses.

“There are very few environmental impacts associated with any of the sites,” Reponen said.