EPA Will Help Laguna Fix Sewers

Laguna Beach, one of the cities in Southern California most prone to sewage spills, will receive a major grant from the federal government Monday to help implement its recently proclaimed “zero tolerance” policy toward spills.

“It’s critically important,” Mayor Wayne Baglin said of the $873,000 check that will be handed to him by a representative of the Environmental Protection Agency during a 1:30 p.m. ceremony in a gazebo overlooking the ocean. “The money will be used to repair 40 different deficiencies we’ve located within the system--this is a start.”

The funds--which the city will add to for a total of $1.6 million--were written into the federal budget by Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) after a 2001 study ranked Laguna Beach as second-worst among 30 California cities graded for sewage spills. The only city experiencing more than Laguna’s 18 spills that year, EPA spokesman Mark Merchant said, was Avalon on Catalina Island.

“We attribute [Laguna Beach’s spills] primarily to roots and grease,” Merchant said. “It’s the capacity of their system, some of which dates back to the 1930s. Newer cities can handle that material, but Laguna is old enough so that it can’t.”

The city got a wake-up call two years ago, Baglin said, when it was fined $60,000 by the regional water quality board for numerous spills and beach closures during the previous 18 months. “The citizens began asking what we were doing paying a fine,” the mayor said. “ ‘Shouldn’t the money be spent on improving the sewer system?’ ”

As a result, Baglin said, Laguna Beach began documenting sewer-system problems, eventually adopting a plan for spending $25 million to $35 million over 20 years. Monday’s grant, Baglin said, will start that plan by funding repair of the 40 most critical deficiencies within the 90-mile system’.

Extensive videotaping of the system completed last year “found collapsed lines, bad connections, fence posts driven through sewer lines and roots in the main lines,” Baglin said. “All of these things are certainly the first stages of sewer spills about to happen.”

The city hopes to pay for the rest of the upgrades and repairs, he said, through a combination of grants, low-interest loans from the state and income derived from municipal sewer fees.

“First we’re going after known problem areas,” Baglin said, “then we will be attacking each problem sequentially to keep sewer spills from happening.”