By Neil Farrell ~
Perhaps poetically, an open house and official ribbon cutting for the new Los Osos sewer treatment plant is scheduled for the official Earth Day, Friday, April 22.
The County is hosting the public from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. The plant is located at 2270 Los Osos Valley Rd., down a newly-paved road at the eastern edge of the Los Osos Valley Memorial Park cemetery.
There will be a ribbon cutting and no doubt speeches. Since I’m not likely to be asked to speak, here’s my take on this long, sad, tumultuous saga, which I have been fortunate, or perhaps cursed, to have covered since 1992.
It’s the near culmination of a more than three decade fight the community has waged with the Regional Water Quality Control Board over septic systems that were deemed to be polluting the groundwater with nitrates.
That’s a greatly simplified version of what this immensely controversial project has gone through. As we see the light at the end of the sewer pipe tunnel, some will always think it’s an oncoming train.
One thing’s for sure, all the fears over the years will have to be faced now, by everyone. Together. It will remain to be seen if this is a saving Grace or community-destroying development.
I was introduced to the issue long before I reported on it. In June 1988, myself and two friends from Atascadero rented a 3-bedroom house in the 1400 block of 3rd Street in Baywood Park.
I was about to enter Cal Poly and Jonathan worked on the docks at Cordero-Winston Fish Co., (Cathy Cordero is his sister) where Dockside Too is now. That first day, after unloading a rented trailer, we took a bike ride down 3rd and around to Sweet Springs Nature Preserve.
After riding through the trails, we came across a woman tending her garden with a sign in her yard “Stop the Sewer!” We asked her what that was all about?
She said the County was trying to put a sewer system in town. She explained that they were all on septic systems and they don’t feel one was needed.
We introduced ourselves and she was very cordial and gracious, welcoming us to Los Osos. This was several months before the water board set down its septic system moratorium that October. That woman was Gwen Taylor.
I got a job in 1992 at the Sun Bulletin working for Bill Morem on the “Los Osos Valley News,” a section of the paper focusing on Los Osos, and was thrust into the thick of a sewer saga that was already nearly 10-years old and locked in a stalemate, with the County and water board on one side and local residents bound and determined to prove the bureaucrats wrong and save the community from the tribulations of paying for a $42 million project.
That’s not a typo. The first estimate I can recall for the project was $42 million. I would see it rise over the years to $52M, $64M, $72M and then $80M as the County’s final estimate and the one carried over by the CSD when it formed in the late 1990s and took over the project. The CSD’s efforts fell apart after a recall election in 2005.
This final-final County project is now at $183 million. They say that will cost some $165 a month.
The Citizens Against Wastewater Systems (CAWS) was the original anti-sewer group. Led by folks like Wade Brim, Roger Shields, and Ben Squires, CAWS filed suit against the County (and in turn the water board) challenging the justifications for a sewer in the first place. After all, Los Osos sits on a huge sand dune and that soil type is perfect for septic systems.
The CAWS lawsuit produced some scientific findings of its own, especially after Dr. Tom Ruehr, a respected soil scientist at Cal Poly, stepped into the fray.
A series of groundwater tests sampled from directly beneath leach fields was supposed to settle the nitrate pollution question once and for all — is it coming from septics, or was it naturally occurring?
The County Chemist, Percy Garcia, was tasked with setting up the methodology, overseeing the sampling and the testing, looking for nitrates, a substance regulated by drinking water standards. Exposure to nitrates is linked to “blue baby syndrome,” but ironically the lack of such cases in Los Osos was one of many conundrums that haunt the issue to this day.
Of course, when the results came back seeming to counter the water board’s claims, the State produced its own expert who ripped the study to shreds, with the hardest counter-claim to swallow being that surrounding septic systems were “diluting” the samples.
CAWS lost its lawsuit and an appeal, and eventually gave up. I don’t recall ever seeing how much the CAWS lawsuit cost the County but I’m sure it was plenty.
The County had to hire a judge to hear the case, after every local judge recused himself. It seemed no one wanted to touch this mess. Judge Rick Brown (from Ojai?) was brought in, but it was a fixed game.
Then-County Supervisor Bud Laurent, after the verdict, implied that Judge Brown was pretty much bought and paid for by the County. I don’t think CAWS ever really had a chance. They did however, raise questions and point out numerous contradictions in the evidence that supported the water board’s position — questions that persist today.
Among the more interesting developments during the “Roaring ‘90s,” was a visit by Jim Kreisel, a Federal EPA septic systems expert, who was taken on a grand tour in a school bus.
Kreisel’s report, which took forever to be released, recommended that if the town was concerned about its groundwater, it should just treat the groundwater. It was one of several instances when this reporter thought the sewer issue might be at long last dead. But that report was also ignored.
The water board’s role is interesting, having started the issue off in the late 1970s just a few years after being formed with passage of The Porter-Cologne Act, California’s Clean Water Act.
The RWQCB (that’s an acronym I’ve written probably 15,000 times) issued a “Cease and Desist Order” or CDO (No. 83-13) in October 1983. The County made little headway and indeed the growth in Los Osos took a quantum leap, as people rushed to build before it was cut off.
The hammer fell in October 1988 with a moratorium on any further septic systems being added to the town. That order came under the watch of Bill Leonard, the water board’s executive director at the time. Leonard was the arch-nemesis of the CAWS folks and when he died, I asked one of them about how they felt. I don’t recall the exact quote but it was less than sad at his passing.
That produced an angry call from one of his staffers, who reamed me a new one for the insensitivity of it. Actually, Bill Morem suggested I get a quote, so I wasn’t in trouble or anything.
Leonard was replaced by Roger Briggs, who was determined to see the board’s orders obeyed. Briggs was a hard man with regards to this issue and never backed down, going so far as to bring CDOs against 45 specific homeowners — “selected at random” — after the 2005 CSD recall fiasco and abandonment of a project already underway.
That whole recall and rejection of the Downtown site for a treatment plant, led to the CSD’s default on a State loan, a $6 million water board fine, bankruptcy, and ever deepening divisions in the community.
It was fueled by another catchy slogan — “Move the Sewer!” — and produced perhaps the ugliest day in Los Osos’ history, when CSD directors gathered to break ground for the mid-town treatment plant and were met by a mob of angry protestors, countered by an equal mob of angry supporters. I recall thinking that this could easily turn into a riot.
State Sen. Sam Blakeslee stepped in and pushed through legislation giving the project back to the County. I sat down with Roger Briggs and another staffer soon after that, and asked if he saw it as a second chance for Los Osos? He basically said Los Osos had already used up its second chance when the CSD was formed.
Briggs has since retired and I have no doubt that the whole agency saw Los Osos as a challenge to its authority. After all, from the initial fight against the need for a sewer, to the lawsuits that delayed it two decades, to the ’83 CDO and the ’88 moratorium, and through all the threats of $10,000 a day fines, the water board had become a laughing stock amongst government types.
Los Osos also became famous in anti-establishment circles (numerous towns have fought similar ‘sewer wars’ in California and across the country) and infamous in the big public works project circles.
The issue outlasted the tenures of County Engineer Clint Milne, Deputy Engineer George Gibson, Paavo Ogren and countless others. No matter the issue, the sewer has overshadowed everything in this town.
I recall LOCAC asking why the streets were in such horrible shape, this was probably 1993 or ‘94. Milne stood up and basically said they were not going to repair the streets until after the sewer project first tore them all up. More than 20 years later, the streets are finally being fixed.
Politically, politicians used the sewer controversy, claiming to be the ones who could solve the issue. But it outlasted Dist. 2 Supervisors Steve McElvaine, Bill Coy, Bud Laurent, and Shirley Bianchi. Bruce Gibson will be the one to finally see it completed — mid-way through his third term.
It’s been a nasty, uphill-downhill roller coaster of a hot button issue that at times turned neighbors against each other and their government, tested friendships and even put family members at odds. Could it really be almost over? I for one dearly hope so.
Neil Farrell is Managing Editor of The Bay News. He worked from April 1992 to January 2004 for the Sun Bulletin/Tribune and for The Bay News since February 2004. He has written untold hundreds of stories on the Los Osos sewer issue over the past 24 years and looks forward to the day he never has to write another one.