Bitter Dispute Sprouts Over Los Angeles’ Sewage Sludge

The heat of another Central Valley workday bounces off the pickup hood as Edd Palla rolls past his sprouting farm fields. Over there is alfalfa. Up a bit stand the sugar beets.

And just down the road is the tail end of the Los Angeles sewer system.

Each day, more than 50 big-rig trucks from metropolitan sewer plants rattle into Kern County loaded with sludge, the goopy final product of urban waste water. One billion pounds is spread annually on the county’s cropland, making Kern the state’s No. 1 destination for sludge.

That distinction rankles Palla and other residents at the southern edge of California’s bountiful farm belt. They feel dumped on by that big, noisy megalopolis just over the Grapevine. As Palla puts it: “We don’t want to be L.A.’s toilet.”

Those are fighting words, and an epic battle is raging in Kern County over sludge.

When the rural county adopted a plan in October to restrict sludge imports, Los Angeles and a powerful pack of Southern California sewage agencies reared up and sued. The sewer folks, dubbed the “sludge six” by Kern wags, worried that disposal costs would soar if they couldn’t ship sludge here.

Los Angeles city officials have been particularly aggressive, whipping out their checkbook to spend $9.6 million this year on a swath of Kern farmland to preserve a home for the city’s sludge.

There also has been a countersuit by Kern, a rash of legislative wrangling in Sacramento and plenty of rhetorical bombast in this most classic of California feuds, a battle of rural against urban, Central Valley versus Lotus Land.

In Kern County, people are casting themselves as David against the Los Angeles Goliath.

Many fear crop sales in the nation’s fourth most prosperous agriculture county could be hurt if Kern gets saddled with a reputation as sludge central. Sludge foes also worry about possible health risks and say the handful of farmers who accept the stuff--seeing it as a cheap way to fertilize flagging cropland--have sold their souls to the sewage agencies.

“The experts can’t agree whether it’s safe or unsafe,” said Gail Ulrich, whose homestead in eastern Kern County is near a sludge site. “Why should we be the guinea pigs?”

Power of Farming Lobby

Such talk irks officials in Los Angeles and Orange County, who say sludge has been battle-tested around the world and proved safe.

The real power in this fight, they say, is a politically connected collection of Central Valley mega-growers driven by misguided worries of declining sales and bad public relations.

“This David and Goliath, it’s a good spin for them,” said Christopher Westhoff, general counsel to the Los Angeles Department of Public Works. “But you name a stronger lobby in California than the farmers.”

Agribusiness demonstrated its political punch last month. A small group of wealthy farmers flew to Sacramento and lobbied against a bill by state Sen. Richard Polanco (D-Los Angeles) that promised to undercut Kern’s sludge ordinance. Facing formidable opposition, Polanco yanked the bill.

“We flew up on Southwest to lobby,” Westhoff said. “The farmers flew up on a Learjet.”

Even with the help of agribusiness, people in the county seat of Bakersfield feel outgunned.

Just look, they say, at the troops massing against them in the lawsuit, set for arguments next month in neighboring Tulare County. Los Angeles can draw on a city attorney’s office with more than 400 lawyers; Kern County’s legal operation has about two dozen attorneys.

“Certainly manpower-wise we’re the underdog,” said James Thebeau, Kern deputy county counsel. “They think their lawsuit is a slam-dunk. But they’re trying to tell us what we can do in our own county. And that gets a lot of people here upset.”

Much of the quarreling seems to be driven by the very essence of sludge: Many people are unsettled by the thought of a mix of human and industrial waste being used on farmland. That anxiety, exacerbated by long-standing regional rivalries, has fanned sludge fights all over the country.

“There’s a smoldering resentment among people in rural areas,” said Jim Willett, president of Yakima Co., which earlier this month abandoned efforts to build a new sludge compost plant in Kern County. “They feel big cities are taking advantage of them.”

At Yakima’s existing operation on the Buttonwillow Land and Cattle Co., trucks roll in from Orange and Los Angeles counties. Six days a week they dump piles of coal-black sludge, packing the scent of week-old garbage. By day’s end, the stuff has been spread by tractors and plowed into the earth of the Buttonwillow farm. The farmers there welcome the stuff, saying it helps grow barley, cotton and other crops on land that would otherwise go fallow.

“See? You can hardly tell it’s in the ground,” said foreman Johnny Lopez, motioning toward a plot of turned soil. “You’re around it a couple days and you can’t even smell it.”

Staff and students at the Semitropic School near Wasco have a different view. When sludge trucks roll past, classrooms swarm with flies, said Principal Michael Rucks. An ammonia-like aroma lingers.

“Yeah, its very lucrative for the farmers who have this stuff dumped,” Rucks said. “But for the schoolchildren you just don’t want it here.”

Dumping in Ocean Banned in 1980s

Sludge has long been a contentious issue in Southern California and across the nation.

For years Los Angeles and other big sewage agencies routinely dumped the sewer byproduct in the ocean, but that practice was banned in the late 1980s because of fears it would taint the water. Initially, sludge disposal shifted largely to landfills, but that trend reversed in the early 1990s as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency adopted rules encouraging use of sludge on nonedible farm crops.

To get to the fields, the sludge first goes through a three-week process at sewage plants. Sifted from the waste water stream, the sludge is dumped in big tanks where it heats up and most of the germs are killed. The end product is a nitrogen-rich mix known as biosolids.

Under Kern’s new rules, such biosolids would be banned in 2003 from its farm fields. Instead, sewer agencies would have to take additional steps to rid the stuff of any disease-causing microbes. The typical method is to compost it with tree trimmings, wood chips and other green waste.

But that additional step, sewage officials say, takes time and money. Moreover, composting reduces the nitrogen content, making the end product less useful for farmers, the most consistent market.

Searching for a Destination

Even before the fight in Kern, finding the right burial ground for sludge wasn’t easy.

Initially, much of Southern California’s sludge was trucked to Arizona, but transportation costs proved daunting. Next, urban sewage agencies focused on the desert community of Blythe, but residents there grumbled. Then people in the windblown Antelope Valley raised a ruckus over sludge disposal. Like the infamous New York garbage barge, sludge has gone hunting for a home.

By the mid-1990s, the focus shifted to Kern County. Each year, big-rig trucks growl over the Grapevine 20,000 times to deliver a mountain of the muck to Kern, twice as much as to any other California county. A full one-third of the sludge produced in California is sent to Kern County.

At first, no one complained. A few local farmers welcomed the sludge as cost-free fertilizer, and their neighbors hardly took notice.

But problems erupted in Cantil, a tiny enclave set amid the high desert sagebrush on the county’s dry eastern edge. In 1997, a whopper storm hit this normally parched country, sending waves of sludge and silt cascading off a neighboring farm field and onto Bill and Doris Pappas’ 40 acres.

Like a snowdrift out of season, the sludge remains to this day, piled against a weather-beaten redwood fence out back. Even now, Bill Pappas takes care as he pokes at the sun-baked remnants with a stick, keeping his distance.

“It really gripes me, these people dump their stuff up here,” he said. “I don’t see them growing a whole lot with it. Yet I see the trucks continually dumping sludge. That’s our conclusion--that they’re dumping it.”

Although sludge is applied only on nonedible crops such as cotton, sludge foes question whether the sewage byproduct--laced with a residue of viruses, heavy metals and other toxic substances from urban society--might taint their ground water and foul the air.

In March, Congress held hearings on charges that sludge rules adopted in the early 1990s by the EPA are a product of politics and pose health and environmental risks. Meanwhile, an audit at the EPA found oversight of sludge operations lacking.

“The science behind this is poor,” said David Lewis, an EPA research microbiologist at odds with the agency. “Scores of scientists who first reviewed it were concerned.”

Supporters Say Sludge Is Safe

But sludge boosters insist the weight of science supports the current practices.

Germs that survive treatment die within days in the soil, sewage officials say. Meanwhile, dangerous heavy metals in sewer water are a fraction of levels present a few decades ago because of exhaustive efforts to clean up Southern California industry. Lauren Fondahl, an EPA environmental engineer in San Francisco, estimated it would take 400 years of plowing sludge into the earth to reach dangerous levels for heavy metals in soil.

“There is no conflicting science, there is no magic to this,” said Westhoff, of Los Angeles. “This is nothing more than Kern County’s attempt to ban a product, the same as if they kept cornflakes off the shelf.”

The so-called Sludge Six includes the city and county of Los Angeles; Orange County; the California Assn. of Sanitation Agencies; the Southern California Alliance of Publicly Owned Treatment Works and Responsible Biosolids Management, a sludge hauler.

The city of Los Angeles is by far the biggest sludge exporter to Kern County. And sanitation officials seem intent on sinking roots. The city recently closed escrow on a 4,700-acre farm in southern Kern where for the past five years nearly all the city’s sludge has been sent to fertilize sorghum, feed crops and cotton.

“There’s certainly an arrogance by L.A. in all this,” said Jeff Green, attorney for Bakersfield-based Grimmway Farms, one of the nation’s largest carrot growers. “They go ahead and buy 4,700 acres to spread sewage sludge, brushing aside the ordinance.”

Westhoff said the land deal was a business decision “to control our own destiny. It was sold very easily at council.”

If shut out of Kern, sewage officials say other options are few.

Many communities are closing their doors to sludge. In recent years, 16 California counties--most of them in the Central Valley--have adopted laws ranging from mild restrictions to outright bans. Sludge producers worry that every county within striking distance could shut them out. And hauling to more distant spots would prove pricey.

Sewage officials say their best hope is to win in court, where they will show that the practice is safe and makes environmental sense.

“This is a pretty big ship to try to turn around,” said Bob Horvath, technical services head at the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts. “And you have to ask yourself: Should we be spending money to fix something that’s not broken?”

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Getting Rid of Sludge

Sewage sludge, the human and industrial solids strained from waste

water, has long been a disposal problem for urban America. In Southern California, sewage agencies have funneled it into the sea, made it into compost and dumped it in landfills. Today, much of the sludge--known as biosolids in its processed form--is spread on farmland as fertilizer. But that practice has raised a ruckus in rural regions such as Kern County, which wants to limit the amount of sludge it receives. The result is a battle between urban sewage agencies and the rural county.

Sources: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, state Water Resources Control Board, Kern County, Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts and Times staff reports