Hike in Sewer Fees Is Planned

Sewer fee increases of $24 over the next four years have been proposed to pay for systemwide improvements needed, in part, to comply with stricter environmental regulations, officials said Monday.

“The standards that we met are becoming more stringent,” said David Bruns, who heads the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts’ department of financial planning. “As they become more stringent, we have to construct facilities, and once they are constructed, we have to operate them.”

The sanitation districts -- comprising 25 agencies working under a joint agreement -- channel, process and dispose of sewage and wastewater for most of the county’s cities and unincorporated areas, serving about 5.4 million people. The notable exception is Los Angeles, which has its own system that serves the entire city, plus most or all of Santa Monica, Culver City, Beverly Hills, El Segundo and several other communities.

The sanitation districts’ typical, single-family home sewage and wastewater bill now is about $84 a year, plus local collection fees from individual communities that raise the total to about $130 a year. The fees are paid as a part of property taxes.

Bruns said that under the proposal by the districts’ board of directors, that total would climb to about $136 in the 2004-05 fiscal year, rising another $6 a year to an eventual total of about $154 in 2007-08.

He said the city of Los Angeles currently charges about $256 a year. The sanitation districts’ costs are lower, Bruns said, because the county was more aggressive in getting federal funding for projects that the city has had to finance through user fees.

Public hearings on the proposed fee increases will be held Feb. 11 at 1:30 p.m. at the districts’ headquarters in Whittier.

Bruns said that among the districts’ improvement projects is a major upgrade at the main treatment facility in Carson. The new air filtration system will reduce odors emanating from the solid waste treatment system. The upgrade cost $400 million, “and it costs us an extra $10 million a year to operate,” Bruns said.

One of the planned projects is the addition of a third, 10-foot-diameter tunnel to carry effluent from the Carson plant to ocean-floor outlets about two miles off White Point in San Pedro.

Bruns said that the two existing tunnels seem to be working well, but that because they’re operating near capacity, neither can be shut down for inspection.

“A third tunnel would give us a backup, so we could rotate them for maintenance,” he said.

The third tunnel, which would take a decade to design and build, would cost about $750 million, officials said.