City to Reconsider Vote on Public Participation in Sewer Improvements

Swayed by political realities and an ill-timed federal lawsuit, the San Diego City Council abruptly agreed Tuesday to reconsider a decision to spend $1.5 million on a program informing residents and seeking their participation in its sewage-treatment and water-reclamation efforts.

The unanimous vote marked a big victory for Councilman Bruce Henderson, who led the opposition to the project and lost a separate 5-4 council vote on the project July 25.

The council voted then to pay three consulting firms $1.5 million to organize a series of public hearings, presentations and meetings with government agencies to garner public support and comment on the city’s $1.5-billion effort to upgrade its sewage treatment.

Both the upgrade to “secondary sewage treatment”--which would remove 90% of suspended solids from sewage instead of the 75% removed now by the city’s “advanced primary” system--and the information campaign were mandated by the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Broke Off Negotiations

But, two days after the vote, the EPA broke off months of negotiations with the city over its failure to adopt a building schedule for the massive sewage-treatment project. It also filed suit against the city for repeatedly discharging raw and inadequately treated sewage into the ocean and local waterways since 1983.

Henderson then asked for reconsideration of the public information project. With public criticism in the form of media editorials and constituent phone calls already making them uncomfortable, the five council members in favor of the program--Ron Roberts, Gloria McColl, Ed Struiksma, Wes Pratt and Judy McCarty--quickly obliged.

Council adoption of the public information campaign “didn’t seem to have any impact in mitigating the suit,” said Roberts, who formally made the motion to reconsider the program. “In other words, to hell with them.”

“I think that what the community did was to get council members to think about the numbers,” said Henderson, who told his colleagues last week that the 18 scheduled public workshops would cost the city $365,100, or $20,283.33 a workshop.

“Now is not the time to go out with an expensive public participation program,” Henderson said. “Now is just the time to let peoople know what’s going on.”

Henderson has proposed doing that by inserting mailers in sewer bills.

Although Roberts declined to commit himself to switch his vote and form a majority against the public participation program when the council reconsiders it Sept. 12, Henderson said that “the votes are there” to defeat it for good.

Deputy Mayor McColl also revived the idea of investigating whether the city could still seek a waiver from federal requirements that every coastal city in the nation install the costly secondary-sewage treatment system.

In 1987, the city gave up fighting for the waiver on the advice of Mayor Maureen O’Connor, who said she had been promised federal money for the treatment project, described as the biggest public works project in city history.

But O’Connor said there is no hope of winning a waiver now, and repeated her determination to fight the lawsuit unless the city is given federal aid for the project. Assistant City Atty. Curtis Fitzpatrick, who took part in the months of negotiations with the EPA, also said that obtaining a waiver now is impossible.