Judge Spares City $28 Million by Not Requiring Special Sewage Treatment

In a decision that will save San Diego $28 million, a federal judge ruled Wednesday that the city does not need to disinfect its sewage before pumping it into the ocean, despite federal and state warnings that the treatment is needed to upgrade water quality.

Only six days after he fined San Diego $3 million for environmental harm caused by its inadequate waste-water treatment, U.S. District Judge Rudi Brewster sided with the city in another phase of its long-running battle with the federal and state governments over its sewage program.

Brewster’s ruling stemmed from a dispute over whether San Diego should be ordered to add chlorine or another disinfecting agent to the nearly 190 million gallons of treated sewage that it discharges daily into the ocean off Point Loma.

The disinfectants were necessary, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials argued, to remove dangerous bacteria from the sewage, which sometimes floats back toward the coastline after being discharged from an underwater pipe 2.2 miles offshore. Among other concerns, the sewage-borne bacteria pose health hazards to scuba divers in the Point Loma kelp beds and other recreational water users, federal and state officials said.

San Diego officials, however, said that the City Council’s $145-million plan to extend the so-called outfall pipe by about 2 1/2 miles would eliminate that problem by the mid-1990s. To compel San Diego to disinfect the sewage in the meantime, the city’s attorneys argued, would simply add $28 million to the overall price tag while doing nothing to permanently improve the ocean environment.

Agreeing with the city, Brewster ruled that the proposed pipe extension, scheduled to be completed by 1994, is sufficient to protect the marine environment off Point Loma.

“It was a substantial and welcome victory for the city,” said Ted Bromfield, chief deputy city attorney. “It’s going to save the city and ratepayers a lot of money.”

Under a 1990 agreement that the city signed with the federal government in an effort to avert the current lawsuit, San Diego would have been required by January, 1992, to remove more bacteria from the sewage than is eliminated through the existing advanced primary treatment at the Point Loma plant.

Given that the pipe project could not be completed that quickly, the only practical way to meet those stringent guidelines within 10 months, city officials said, would be to treat the sewage with chlorine or double-strength bleach to kill the bacteria.

Although the EPA and the state Regional Water Quality Control Board favored that approach pending completion of the pipe extension, some oceanographers, Sierra Club officials and City Council members complained that the disinfectants could cause more environmental problems than they solved.

Critics noted that chlorine can irritate skin, eyes and lungs, and Point Loma residents worried about accidental spills as trucks hauled the chemicals through their neighborhood to the sewage-treatment plant.

City attorneys also emphasized during a four-day hearing that there is an inherent--and costly--irony in the proposal to chemically treat the sewage. Because of chlorine limits in the California Ocean Plan, the city would have had to first chlorinate the sewage to remove the bacteria, then remove the chlorine before the waste-water was pumped through the pipe, 220 feet beneath the ocean surface.

“Basically, it was going to cost us to undo what we felt didn’t need to be done in the first place,” Deputy City Atty. Bromfield said.

EPA officials did not return a reporter’s telephone calls Wednesday.

Wednesday’s ruling represents a reversal of fortunes from Brewster’s decision last week, in which the judge fined the city for “causing significant harm to the marine environment” through its consistent violations of clean-water laws and refusal to enact a secondary sewage treatment plan.

Brewster’s earlier ruling, which followed a seven-week trial, could eventually force San Diego to proceed with a $2.4-billion-plus secondary sewage treatment program to comply with the 1972 Clean Water Act’s requirement that cities remove 85% of suspended solids from sewage. The city’s existing treatment methods remove about 76% of the solids from waste water before it is discharged into the ocean.

Mayor Maureen O’Connor and other council members were gratified, however, that Brewster ordered only $500,000 of the city’s $3-million penalty to be a direct payment to the U.S. Treasury, with the remaining $2.5 million being allocated for a “credit” water conservation project aimed at retrofitting homes with water-saving devices such as low-flow faucets and toilets. Federal attorneys had requested a $10-million fine, with all of the money going to Washington.

Some key details about the specifics and timing of the upgrading of San Diego’s sewage program will not be spelled out until a hearing later this spring, when Brewster reviews the proposed consent decree between the city and the federal government.