A Failure of Leadership

When storm floods burst a pipe and sent more than 60 million gallons of raw sewage coursing down to the sea, Thousand Oaks’ briefly-contained flood of political blame-swapping and finger-pointing broke free as well.

The ruptured pipe, just above the city’s Hill Canyon Wastewater Treatment Plant, was to be replaced this summer as part of a $75-million overhaul of the 35-year-old plant. Those repairs have been discussed for a decade but were delayed for the past two years by a political deadlock on the City Council.

So is council politics to blame for this environmental disaster?

Yes, it clearly is.

Although the five council members work together effectively much of the time, in this case their unwillingness to set aside their differences and do what needed to be done has left them all hip-deep in this smelly mess.

The broken 30-inch-diameter concrete pipe has spewed out untreated sewage at the rate of 6 million gallons a day since Feb. 3, polluting Conejo Creek, Calleguas Creek, Mugu Lagoon and the Pacific Ocean and forcing the closure of nearly 30 miles of beaches in two counties.

The city attorney, fearing a similar gusher of negligence claims, warned the council members not to talk about reasons for the spill and what role their actions might have played. But that hasn’t stopped both camps from assigning full responsibility for the spill to the other.

The result is like trying to figure which 10-year-old with a bloody nose started the fight. All you get is both kids claiming they are innocent.

The bottom line is that the leaders of Thousand Oaks failed in a big way.

The two-year delay in overhauling the treatment plant was a central issue in last year’s recall of Councilwoman Elois Zeanah, who with Councilwoman Linda Parks voted against the improvements out of concern that enlarging the plant’s capacity would open the way for a growing population, and over their desire to make developers pay for the work. What may have begun as a legitimate, if dubious, strategy to put more roadblocks in the way of development turned into an unnecessary stall as Zeanah insisted on study after study before finally, with the recall election just two months away, joining the council majority to approve the sewer plant upgrade essentially as it had been proposed all along.

Parks, to her credit, successfully introduced a proposal to split the pipe repairs away from the major overhaul, but disagreement over how to pay for them continued. Either Zeanah or Parks could have provided the fourth vote required to raise sewer fees and get the work going sooner.

But it takes two sides to make an impasse. Council members Andy Fox, Judy Lazar and Mike Markey could have heeded increasingly dire warnings from city staff and found ways to pay for replacing the aging pipe that didn’t depend on resolving the sewer fee deadlock.

None of that makes much difference now to the flora, fauna, farmers and others downstream. Hindsight always makes it easy to see what should have been done. The pipe should have been replaced--if not in 1987 when it was first listed on the city’s to-do list then after it broke in 1989 or certainly after it broke again in 1995. Why wasn’t it? At this point, assigning blame is far less important than making sure it never happens again.

But voters in Thousand Oaks are tired of their council’s inability to work together and sickened by this most dramatic consequence. It is long past time for the council members to stop wasting their energy blaming each other and concentrate on taking care of the city’s business.