Town Still Divided on Sewer Project After 30 Years

Developed 80 years ago as a retreat for Central Valley residents, this coastal village remains a place where rich and poor, retirees and young families and service workers and professionals can live side by side, near the ocean.

Curbs, gutters and streetlights are absent in these unincorporated neighborhoods, but residents still can put kayaks into the water and paddle out into Morro Bay.

Yet, tranquil as the area appears on the surface, tolerance, democracy and even common civility between neighbors have a tendency to break down over a 30-year-old debate over building a sewer.

Opponents of the $85-million project worry that costly hookups, averaging $4,500 each, and monthly fees of $110, will be the final straws for low-income residents.

The arguments are nothing if not emotional. Raucous meetings of the Los Osos Community Services District, which has proposed building the sewer, have prompted code-of-conduct rules prohibiting “slanderous, profane, impertinent or personal remarks.”

The proposal calls for construction of a sewage treatment system to replace more than 5,000 septic systems. It would include miles of sewer pipe, a downtown sewage treatment center near the park and Catholic Church, and a system for discharging treated water back into the soil to replenish groundwater.

The project is expected to be completed by March 2006, and is intended to address 30 years of concern by state officials that leaking septic tanks are contaminating groundwater.

Los Osos is built on low-lying dunes on the southern and eastern edges of Morro Bay. It was put under a building moratorium in 1988 by the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board because septic tanks were failing.

Since then, the regional board has threatened fines and sanctions against the community if it did not build a sewer.

“The issue is density,” said Sorrel Marks, a staff member for the regional board. Neighboring Baywood Park, particularly, has as many as eight residences per acre in some places.

“There’s not even room in some areas for standard leach fields,” Marks said. “They have seepage pits of 15 to 20 feet of gravel. But with the rising groundwater, some of these pits are actually sitting in groundwater.”

The strongest opponents of the sewer project maintain that it would cost twice the $85-million amount budgeted by the local district board, leading to higher monthly fees.

Ken Difenderfer, 79, has lived in the same house built by his father since 1932, when the area population was 35. Today, it’s 14,300. “I’m on Social Security,” he said. “I figure it will run me $5,000 to hook up this thing, maybe $15,000 by the time you figure in removing the old septic system and everything else. How am I supposed to afford that?”

Even now, a small two-bedroom home here can cost $230,000. Rents exceed $800 for a one-bedroom unit. Officials acknowledge that 22% of the people living in the sewer zone qualify as low-income, according to the Census Bureau. But they stress that they are still required by the state to build the sewer.

Members of the Los Osos Community Services District board are strongly behind the current plan as the final workable solution after years of fighting over alternatives.

Board member Frank Freiler has worked for years on a proposal to continue using septic tanks, as the community has for its entire history.

“We came up with a recommendation to do little on-site wastewater treatments systems on each house. Test 100 of them to see the longevity,” he said of one proposal from the 1990s. There were others as well, including a pond management system for wastewater.

But the state Regional Water Quality Control Board said there was no evidence that such a system would remove the nitrates in groundwater.

While sewer opponents are an extremely vocal group here, they don’t win elections.

In the November race for the local community services district board, 10 candidates ran for three seats. The three who supported the $85-million sewer were elected, while the seven opposing it lost.

“We sort of shot ourselves in the foot then,” said Julie Tacker, a 32-year resident of Los Osos and one of the strongest opponents of the sewer. She received the largest number of votes among those who lost. Tacker said she voted to form the local services district in 1998 -- as did 87% of the town -- precisely because planners promised to be innovative. She said nobody supports placing the wastewater treatment facility near the center of town.

Thomas A. Salmon is an engineer who also opposes the project. “I think we need to do something to deal with the septic tanks, but in the middle of town and at this cost is crazy,” he said. “One thing we don’t want is to take our seasoned citizens and force them to make a decision to move out or not because of this project.”

Los Osos, like other small communities, missed out on the gravy train for such massive capital projects, which existed until the mid-1980s. Federal grants for as much as 87.5% of the costs of sewer projects were available to small towns. But in the 1970s and early 1980s, many in Los Osos viewed a sewer as a project pushed by developers who wanted to build out the community. It built out anyway, growing 312% from 1970 to 1990, according to Census Bureau figures. The population has remained static at just above 14,000 since 1990, in part because of the state’s moratorium.

Gordon Hensley was elected to the newly formed Los Osos Community Services District board in 1998, and is still a member. A biologist for an environmental group in San Luis Obispo, Hensley said he once supported finding an innovative alternative to a traditional sewage system. “The word we got from the state is that we could do that if we wanted,” he said. “We’d just have to do it with our own nickel.”

To qualify for low-interest state loans, Los Osos was told it had to do something tried and true. “A lot of pathways have been blocked to us,” Hensley said. “We have been left with one option on the table.”