Plan for San Joaquin Reservoir Sparks Suit

A Newport Beach environmental group has filed a lawsuit challenging a local water district’s plan to use an empty reservoir near the city to store nearly a billion gallons of reclaimed sewage water, one of the group’s directors said Wednesday.

“We want them to do what’s necessary to assure compliance” with environmental laws, said Bob Caustin, founding director of Defend the Bay, which sued the Irvine Ranch Water District last week in Orange County Superior Court. The suit demands, among other things, that the agency file a full environmental impact report on the proposed project.

“They are trying to sidestep their responsibility,” Caustin said, “by approving it wholesale without having all the mitigation programs in place and properly reviewed.”

A spokeswoman for the water district denied that, saying a mitigated negative declaration--a statement declaring minimal environmental impact and promising to fix whatever impact there is--was sufficient. “With the documentation we’ve done,” Joyce Wegner-Gwidt said, “we have already answered all the questions.”

The environmentalists’ lawsuit, she said, could postpone reservoir refilling, tentatively set for November 2002, by up to a year.

At the center of the controversy is the San Joaquin Reservoir, a 994-million-gallon water storage facility just east of Newport Beach. Until 1994, the reservoir was used to store drinking water, but damage from a landslide has kept it empty since then. The reservoir is owned by eight entities including the water district, which recently proposed using it to store treated sewage water for use in irrigation and watering lawns.

The water district’s plan calls for building a pump station and chlorine gas storage facility, as well as installing new pipe and a 500,000-gallon underground tank.

Environmentalists say the completed project could result in various problems, including accidental chlorine release, damage to sensitive wildlife habitat, uncontrolled discharges, bad odors and insect infestations.

“They need to look at the issues,” Caustin said. “What they have so far is an ‘EIR Lite.’ We want to protect Newport Bay.”

Six of the other owners--Huntington Beach, Irvine Co., South Coast Water District, Mesa Consolidated Water District, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and Laguna Beach County Water District--have agreed to sell their interests in the reservoir, Irvine Ranch’s Wegner-Gwidt said. Only Newport Beach has not yet signed the agreement.

In a written statement this week, Irvine Ranch officials said, “Residents of Newport Beach and Newport Coast communities could continue to look at an unsightly empty hole in the ground because of [the] litigation.”

Paul D. Jones, general manager of the water district, said in the statement that the point of the project “is to provide additional winter storage for reclaimed water, thereby reducing the possibility of future discharges. Frankly, we’re puzzled why Defend the Bay would oppose a project that meets its own objectives.”