VENTURA COUNTY NEWS : State Urges Less Strict Standards for Santa Clara : Pollution: Change would avoid $80 million in upgrades at treatment plants along the river. But more salty water could threaten crops and supplies.

State water officials are proposing to relax stringent pollution standards set to take effect in January for the Santa Clara River, a move that would allow more salty waste water to flow into the river over the long term.

The proposal would allow treatment plants in Santa Paula, Valencia and Saugus to avoid $80 million in upgrades. But there is concern that the waste water could eventually threaten crops and water supplies in Ventura County.

One environmental group quickly criticized the proposal.

“We don’t want them to change from a stringent limit to a more lenient limit,” said Ron Bottorff of Friends of the Santa Clara River.

He advocated holding the sewage plants to more restrictive standards than the dischargers and staff at the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board advocate.

At issue is how far sewage treatment plants should go to reduce chlorides, a grab bag of salty substances from effluent.

Once an exemption expires in January, as scheduled, the plants would be hard-pressed to meet an existing regulatory limit that prohibits them from pumping more than 100 parts of salt per million parts of water. Compliance can only occur if they install costly new filtration systems and pipelines, upgrades that could cost residents up to $30 more on monthly sewage bills.

To avoid that, the water quality agency Wednesday unveiled a compromise standard. It would require the portion of the river near Santa Clarita to achieve a 143-ppm standard while the stretch near Santa Paula would have to attain 100 ppm.

The draft proposal was presented Wednesday in a meeting in Santa Clarita for public comment. A final version is scheduled to be submitted to the water quality board Dec. 9.

Deborah Smith, assistant executive officer for the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board, said the compromise standards that the agency proposed could mean more salt and less protection for the river in the decade ahead, but that the change won’t be enough to significantly compromise farming or drinking water supplies.

Smith said more lenient standards for chlorides are appropriate for the Santa Clarita area because little farming occurs there any more.

Chlorides give drinking water a chalky taste and damage roots of salt-sensitive crops, including avocados and strawberries.

But Ventura County’s water resources manager, Lowell Preston, said more stringent chloride controls must eventually be imposed.

“It’s inevitable the treatment plants are going to have to increase their treatment in the long term as population grows, and it’s better to do it now because it is less expensive,” Preston said.

Despite decades of cleanup, the Santa Clara River continues to rank among dozens of waterways in California that fail to meet standards set by the nation’s Clean Water Act nearly 30 years ago.

Long stretches of the river, including near Santa Paula and Santa Clarita, suffer from excessive salt and other pollutants that pose a long-term threat to crops, wildlife and drinking water supplies, according to state officials.

Each year, the river carries about 16,000 tons of salt from its Angeles National Forest headwaters to an estuary near Surfers Knoll in Ventura.

Some of the salt comes from drinking water imported from Northern California, where it is made brackish after flowing through the San Francisco Bay Delta. Some comes from minerals washed off boulders and cliffs and from irrigated farmland.

Nearly half the salt discharged from the three treatment plants on the river comes from residential water softeners, according to officials.

Water quality officials in both counties are cooperating on a comprehensive study to determine trends, exact amounts and appropriate cleanup limits to address chlorides in the next decade.