Smaller Water Reclamation Plan Appeases Miller Beer

Miller Brewing Company has ended its 2 1/2-year campaign against a San Gabriel Valley water reclamation project after water district officials agreed this week to shrink the plan to half its original size and release the purified sewage water farther away from the Irwindale brewery.

The project has been a public relations nightmare for Miller Beer--which had become the butt of late night talk show jokes as “the beer aged in porcelain”--while at the same time offering valley residents a way to ensure a water supply in the increasingly thirsty years to come.

Basics of the project remain the same: Reclaimed drinking water from a sewage treatment plant in Whittier will be piped into the San Gabriel River just south of the Santa Fe Dam, where it will seep into the ground and eventually supplement the San Gabriel aquifer.

But the new pipeline project will be two miles shorter than the original, which had the recycled water percolating at the Santa Fe spreading grounds in Irwindale.

The new plan, called a “demonstration project,” will use a smaller pipe that will take in enough water annually for 25,000 households, instead of the 60,000 households originally planned. The changes are expected to lower the cost of the reclamation about $15 million, to $10 million.

Although the plan will use only a portion of the water available from the Whittier treatment plant, the San Gabriel Valley will have staked its claim. Water district officials had argued that if it gave up the treated water Whittier was offering, neighboring communities would grab it for their own dry years to come, cutting the valley off from a valuable supply.

“We were offered a chance to build a project that would use reclaimed water, although a smaller project than we originally would have liked,” said Bob Berlien, general manager of the Upper San Gabriel Valley Municipal Water District. “I think it’s better than spending more money on litigation and spending a lot of time with an uncertain result at the end.”

“We’ve reached a good compromise,” said Miller spokesman Victor Franco. “We live in a drought-prone area and have always agreed that water reclamation projects are necessary. Our concern was the design of the project and the scale of the project.”

During the protracted battle, which cost the district $400,000 in legal fees, water officials stressed that reclaimed water has served millions of people for more than 30 years in 50 communities in Los Angeles and Orange counties. The Whittier plant, they said, has sent treated waste water to homes in 43 Los Angeles County communities since the 1960s.

Miller, which annually uses about 860 million gallons of water to make more than 5 million barrels of beer, countered that the project would “irreversibly pollute” the basin and contaminate their water supply.

The brewery filed suit against the district in 1994, stalling the $25 million project that water authorities billed as the answer to the valley’s ever-growing thirst and a chance to reduce dependence on expensive water piped in from Northern California and the Colorado River.

More than that, the plan was conceived to secure for the San Gabriel Valley a portion of the 50 million gallons of treated water that is piped into the ocean daily.

“I don’t believe that either side caved in,” said Marvin Cichy, a member of the district’s board of directors. “[Miller has] literally untold amounts of money to be able to continue fighting this and other cases ad infinitum.”

Environmentalists across the county said the San Gabriel district took the best option offered to them.

Lynne Plambeck, a member of the Angeles chapter of the Sierra Club, said moving the pipeline farther away from Miller was an excellent idea; scaling back the project was not.

“Reclaimed water is going to be a very much needed resource in Southern California,” Plambeck said. “I think what the water district was concerned about was that the continued PR campaign by Miller Brewing would upset the public--if you put out enough bad press, people start to believe it, whether it’s true or not.”

Dr. Forrest Tennant, the former mayor of West Covina and head of Citizens for Clean Water, led citizen efforts against the project--but now says the new deal is a fair one.

“I don’t think the volume of water they are talking about or location poses any health risk,” Tennant said. “I think it was size of the prior project that was disconcerting.”

Cichy and water district officials said they still hope to complete the full project. They refer to the revised plan as “Phase 1,” saying that once a pipeline is in place they will better be able to assuage the fears of the public and educate them about water recycling--this time with Miller working with them.

“What we’re doing is planning for a more reliable future water supply,” Berlien said. “By having a smaller project, that doesn’t give us the increased reliability we would have liked to have. Over time, we hope to increase.”

Franco, of Miller Brewing, said the company would consider any proposed expansions.

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Times correspondent Richard Winton contributed to this story.