Laguna to Pay $60,000 for Sewage Spills

Laguna Beach will have to pay a $60,000 penalty to the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board for a string of sewage spills that closed beaches, officials said Wednesday. The fine will bite into funds earmarked for televised inspections of aging sewer lines.

“It’s counterproductive,” said Kenneth C. Frank, Laguna Beach city manager. “We want to improve the sewer system. . . . To take money away that was being used for [improving] sewer services doesn’t achieve the objective.”

The board voted to approve the fine after a 30-minute public hearing in San Diego on Wednesday. The city has 30 days to pay the fine. Frank testified in support of the board staff’s recommendation that his city be penalized for 23 sewage spills over 18 months, including eight that closed beaches. But he had hoped that the city would be allowed to use the money to fund local environmental projects.

The $60,000 will be paid for with funds from a rate hike that the City Council approved in July. The city expects to receive $200,000 from the first year of the sewer fee increase, and planned to use the money to pay for inspections of nearly all of the city’s sewer mains with a video camera. Now, Frank said, workers will not be able to inspect as many lines.

Frank said the city proposed three projects that would allow the money to be spent locally:

* water testing of urban runoff at six storm drains,

* re-stenciling around gutters to include warnings in Spanish that certain drains flow directly into the ocean, and

* implementing a beach cleanup program to study how much trash collects along Laguna Beach’s seven miles of coastline, where it comes from and when it is the heaviest.

Water quality control board Chairman Wayne Baglin, who is running for City Council in Laguna Beach, said the board could not allow the money to be spent on these projects because they failed to meet state guidelines.

Appropriate projects would have to be related to stopping sewer spills, be near areas affected by the spills, and cover work that the city is not obligated to do, Baglin said.

“When we looked at projects that were proposed for Laguna, they did not meet that criteria,” Baglin said.