Waste-Water Treatment Plant Is Dedicated

About 2 1/2 years and $28 million later, a new waste-water treatment plant dedicated Friday will benefit surfers who frequent The Point near the Ventura River estuary, the environment and even ratepayers.

About 125 local dignitaries and other guests attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony, receiving chocolate bars with such irreverent names as “Sludge Bar Surprise” and “Compost Cluster Surprise” to commemorate the moment.

The Foster Park plant, which became fully operational Aug. 15, replaces an older plant on the same site just north of Ventura. It serves about 25,000 people in the Ojai Valley Sanitation District from the northern reaches of Ventura Avenue to Ojai.

Construction of the state-of-the-art plant began in early 1995 at the state’s behest in an effort to clean up the 2.2 million gallons of discharge a day that were deemed harmful to the sensitive river habitat and made swimming in or near the river mouth inadvisable.

“The level of water purification we have now really takes us out as a pollutant source,” said Ron Sheets, the plant’s operations superintendent.

In addition to health risks for people swimming in the river, a shortage of oxygen that could threaten fish and an overgrowth of plants clogging the waterway were cited in a 1990 study that led in part to the plant’s construction.

To alleviate those concerns, the new plant employs a higher level of filtration than the previous plant and also is the only one in the county with the capability to remove nutrients that encourage plant growth from its effluent, officials said.

The improvements mean the plant removes about 99% of the impurities from the effluent produced, Sheets said.

That’s an increase of only about 4% compared with the previous plant, but the small figure means a big difference, district officials and environmentalists said.

“The significance of it is that you’re going to have much more reliable water quality,” said Carla Bard, spokeswoman for the Environmental Defense Center, a local public-interest law firm.

“It’s critical for fish and wildlife habitat to have this consistent discharge. . . . This plant also will provide good clean flows for when we get some steelhead restoration on the river.”

All this has come at a high cost for long-suffering ratepayers.

The typical customer’s bill has more than tripled since 1985, from an average of about $8.50 a month to nearly $31 today.

The sanitary district’s customers must bear the county’s third highest rates, exceeded only by those in the Rincon and Nyland Acres. After enduring an average rate increase of $10 in the past two years alone, however, further hikes that district officials once forecast to pay for the plant’s higher operating costs are not expected to materialize, General Manager Dave Burkhart said.

“At this point we don’t think they’ll be any large increase in the monthly charges just because the treatment plant is done,” he said.