SPECIAL REPORT * Arguments over Los Angeles’ breakup aren’t just political. There also are the thorny issues of how to handle sewage facilities and more of . . .

The San Fernando Valley’s potential secession from Los Angeles leads naturally to high-minded debate on the bewildering implications for big issues, such as political representation and public safety.

But secession is not a parlor game. It’s about the practical challenges of dismantling one of the largest local governments in America and providing essential services to the emerging cities. And nowhere are those down-to-earth problems more apparent than in the down-and-dirty confines of the city sewers.

Where would all that smelly sewage flow?

It will never make for cocktail-hour conversation, but that critical question illuminates the difficulty of trying to deconstruct an urban colossus like Los Angeles. Secessionists may be able to redraw the city’s boundaries, but they could find it impractical or impossible to completely separate themselves from Los Angeles’ massive debt and sprawling bureaucracy.

Case in point: Los Angeles owns the largest sewer system in the nation, a 6,500-mile labyrinth of concrete, iron and clay that collects the liquid waste of the city and numerous neighbors--458 million gallons of muck a day--and channels the majority to the monolithic Hyperion plant, where it is treated and pumped into Santa Monica Bay.

A network so large and so centralized cannot easily be broken up, city officials and experts say. Replicating the whole on a smaller scale, or connecting its parts to another sewer system, would cost billions of dollars, pose Herculean engineering problems and clash with federal regulations that encourage consolidation, not fragmentation, to protect the environment.

“One of the problems with waste water is you have to dump it someplace,” said Councilwoman Ruth Galanter, a staunch opponent of secession. “And last I checked, the Valley doesn’t have any ocean.”

San Pedro and Wilmington, also considering breaking away from Los Angeles, might have an easier time by connecting to the county’s main sewer plant in Carson or taking over a smaller city sewer plant on Terminal Island. But that, too, is fraught with obstacles and could prove prohibitively expensive, experts said.

In short, the wannabe cities’ sewage appears hopelessly intermingled with the rest of Los Angeles. Their only option could be to cut a deal with the city for disposal.

No one so far has presented an alternative. As with the Department of Water and Power and other massive city bureaucracies that could be troublesome to divide, secessionists have talked of possibly sharing control of the sewer system with Los Angeles through a joint powers authority. But the city has the right to veto such arrangements, secessionists concede, even if it cannot legally deny seceding areas service or charge them excessive rates.

What, then, would be accomplished by secession?

For the region’s sewage arrangements, at least, the likely result would be to change the Valley’s status from that of part owner to customer--a technical distinction but one without real implications for the service itself. No new pipes, no new treatment plants, no change whatsoever.

But with that change in status would come some loss of representation. That’s because the Valley today is part of the government that owns and operates the system. Valley residents help elect seven of the Los Angeles City Council’s 15 members, and cast votes for mayor, city attorney and controller.

If the Valley seceded, all those people would be elected by the residents of Los Angeles and would, therefore, have no political reason to make the Valley happy. But they would continue to make all important financial decisions regarding management of the sewer system. Ironically, unhappiness with the management of that system is one of the issues motivating secession.

That complication points to an underlying tension in the secession debate. Advocates see breaking up the city as a way to give residents more direct control over the issues that affect their day-to-day lives. But on issue after issue--public safety, water and sewage, to take three prime examples--some of those same advocates concede that their best alternative may be to turn back to the city and contract with it to perform the same services it now provides.

The result, critics say, is that in those and other areas, Valley secession would accomplish exactly the opposite of what its advocates seek. It would diminish representation while failing to enhance services.

Secession boosters dismiss such talk. By leaving Los Angeles, they say, they would gain increased control over the only sewage-related issue that most residents care to ponder: the price they pay to flush it away.

Though Los Angeles’ sewer bills are lower than those in many other big American cities--a 1998 survey found that the average monthly charge of $20.50 is one-third as high as Seattle’s or San Francisco’s--Valley secessionists have highlighted the city’s byzantine sewer rate structure as a top reason for exploring municipal independence.

Valley residents have long complained that they are paying more than their “fair share” for sewage treatment because, on average, they pay more than other parts of Los Angeles.

What’s more, many of the cities at the mercy of Los Angeles to dispose of their waste water manage to offer lower average rates than Los Angeles itself. Beverly Hills, for example, charges an $18.72 monthly flat rate. Secessionists say it is at least possible that the Valley and San Pedro-Wilmington could do the same.

“There has been disgust in the Valley about high sewer fees paid in Los Angeles in general and the Valley in particular,” said Richard Close, chairman of Valley VOTE, the main group that pushed for a study of Valley secession. “They [voters] believe this is the type of thing that needs to be analyzed in detail.”

But the reality coloring the Valley and San Pedro-Wilmington breakup bids involves complex factors that would make significantly lower--or higher--fees unlikely.

Though secession may appear to be just a Los Angeles concern, it carries regional consequences. The impact on the sewage system alone would be complicated by 27 existing treatment deals between the city and other agencies--all of which are required to be charged equally under federal law.

The law, the 1972 Clean Water Act, forced cities everywhere to comply with stricter pollution standards that required a secondary phase of sewage treatment to protect oceans and streams, and provided incentives to build regional sewage plants.

Los Angeles fought for an exemption from the costly regulations but lost, and finally relented in 1987, signing a consent decree to stop dumping sewage sludge into the Pacific by 1998.

The city met its obligations in part by accepting millions of dollars in federal grants to upgrade the Hyperion plant. But in taking that money, Los Angeles became saddled with another consequence of the act: It is now the official sewage treatment provider for much of the area.

Same Formula for Users Outside L.A.

As such, Los Angeles is bound to charge all outside customers according to the same formula it uses for itself. That ends the favorable arrangements a few customer cities enjoyed that allowed them to offer lower rates. Burbank, for instance, was getting its sludge treated by Los Angeles for next to nothing under a century-old deal.

And the federal law prevents Los Angeles from charging higher sewer fees to seceding areas, or denying them service.

However, the fees will continue to be based on whatever Los Angeles says it costs to run the network. If L.A. wants to install platinum sewers and pay its entry-level workers $100,000 a year, none of its customers can object, as long as all are evenly bearing the burden.

“The city of L.A. makes clear that it owns the system, the pipes, everything,” said Beverly Hills public works official Dan Webster. “They can make decisions about how to spend the money in their own system, and we have no say about that.”

Another challenge for secessionists: Areas breaking away from Los Angeles would be bound under state law to take on their proportionate share of the city’s debt, including part of the recent $1.6-billion upgrade of the Hyperion plant and a spate of other costly improvements to the sewer system.

Those financial liabilities, which make up a large portion of Los Angeles’ sewer bill--and will continue to do so for decades--would also make it extremely difficult for the Valley and the harbor area to provide much different rates.

“That is the irony of all this,” said Judy Wilson, director of the city’s Bureau of Sanitation, which runs the system. “I know the Valley has not been happy. But under a secession, their situation would not change.”

More objective sewer experts also believe the chances of the Valley or San Pedro-Wilmington emerging from a secession with better rates than Los Angeles are slim.

“If anything, their fees may increase if they go away,” said Ronald R. Blair, the official in charge of monitoring sewer fees for the State Water Resources Control Board. “It would probably not be too much higher, but I don’t think it would be any lower.”

Sewer fees have long been a point of political friction between the Valley and older, poorer sections of the city. Those tensions boiled over three years ago, when Valley and Westside council members joined to alter the city’s controversial sewer rate formula--a move that led council members from central, southern and eastern Los Angeles, where residents wound up paying higher fees, to storm out in disgust.

Valley politicians and activists led the charge against the existing sewer rates, arguing that they unfairly burdened suburbanites who had large lawns and swimming pools because they were based on water usage. Inner-city council members countered that the change was a blatant money grab by the haves at the expense of the have-nots.

The rates now are based on water usage during the wet winter months, when swimming pools are typically not filled and lawns are not watered. Nevertheless, many Valley residents still consider the system unfair, and politicians and secession-minded activists continue to claim that their part of Los Angeles is being bilked.

Sewer rates came to symbolize discontent with city government, “a rallying cry for why we should consider being our own city,” Valley VOTE President Jeff Brain told The Times in 1998. Yet despite the major role the sewer system played in sparking the current breakaway movement, advocates of a study and possible vote on Valley secession have yet to articulate any specific plans for it.

They argue that detailed proposals can only come later, after Los Angeles divulges data on city operations to the Local Agency Formation Commission, the little-known state panel that will conduct the study, which is set to begin this spring.

Complicating the Issue

But secessionists have said they believe buildings and other hard assets in the Valley and San Pedro-Wilmington should become property of the new governments, and Los Angeles should keep the rest.

The complications arise when that principle is applied to the “amalgamated system,” or regional network, which is owned and operated by Los Angeles to treat sewage but whose stakeholders extend beyond the city limits.

For the sewer issue, the secessionist philosophy would appear to favor a change of two significant city sewer assets: transferring the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in Van Nuys to the Valley city, and the Terminal Island plant to the harbor city.

Neither could be easily severed from the system.

The Tillman plant is one of two major upstream plants--the other is in Glendale--that provide initial sewage treatment to much of the waste that is eventually piped to Hyperion. It is not configured to function on its own, cannot handle sewage sludge, and would require major expansion to become an all-purpose plant able to dump into the adjacent Los Angeles River.

That would be extremely expensive, because environmental constraints on dumping treated waste water into rivers are much tougher than rules governing dumping into oceans, and could prove politically difficult because of not-in-my-backyard opposition.

The Tillman plant, the site last summer of a 3-million-gallon sewage spill during a city Y2K test, is surrounded by the environmentally sensitive Sepulveda Dam Recreation Area, the Valley’s most popular park.

Moreover, the Tillman plant does not treat any of the sewage from the southeastern third of the Valley, which now goes directly to Hyperion. Redirecting that flow would literally be an uphill battle, because those areas are at lower elevations than the Tillman plant.

The Terminal Island plant, by contrast, is a full-service facility able to provide all stages of sewage treatment. Even city officials say it could operate alone.

But Terminal Island currently serves numerous communities and industrial zones outside the relatively small San Pedro-Wilmington area now pondering secession, and could prove difficult to separate financially. That is because state law requires breakups to be “revenue neutral” for the new city and the area being left behind--a problem for smaller areas that include major government facilities such as the Terminal Island plant.

Not a concern, say some harbor-area secessionists. By taking over the plant, they would continue to serve neighboring communities on a contract basis.

Just like Los Angeles.