By Neil Farrell ~

A new group of citizen activists is rising up to fight the new site selected for a sewer treatment plant, organizing to make their displeasure known at the next Morro Bay City Council meeting.

Tina Metzger, who lives near the eastern edge of the City, is circulating an email, “call to arms” to local residents in the areas of Nutmeg Avenue, Laurel Lane, Ironwood, Avalon and others, and going door to door to talk about the City’s efforts to build on the Righetti Ranch property, which is just past the Ironwood/Hwy 41 intersection.

At a Feb. 25 neighborhood workshop, led by the City’s consultants, Rickenbach Inc., the project managers were attempting to discuss the new preferred site and the issues they saw with it.

Instead they got a steady drum beat of dissention from about 100 residents, who complained about everything from potential bad odors, to ruining their views and increased traffic creating a dangerous left turn for City vehicles (the City also wants to move its corporation yard to the site)

Some even questioned why the City doesn’t go back to the original plan to build a new plant right next door to the old one on Atascadero Road.

John Rickenbach, the project manager, tried to explain that site was unavailable after the Coastal Commission’s 2013 denial of the old project. Michael Nunley, an engineer also consulting on the project, tried to explain that their current thinking is to place the plant entirely inside a building (made to look like a barn) and have scrubbers to remove odors before they escape to the air. They were even planning on back-up scrubbing systems just in case.

That didn’t, indeed nothing they said, placated the crowd, which questioned just about every aspect of the project.

Apparently not satisfied with what she heard, Metzger, and others are organizing another session of dissent for the City Council this time, which plans to discuss the Righetti Ranch site at its Tuesday, March 8 meeting (6 p.m. Vet’s Hall).

In her mass email, Matzger said, “To locate a sewage treatment plant adjacent to an established neighborhood is very poor city planning. The City has other site options to locate the sewage treatment plant.”

For the past year or so, the City has been focused on the Rancho Colina site, which lies just past Righetti Ranch (the Rancho Colina MHP is between the two proposed sites). But negotiations with the property owner went south when he told the City he would sell no more than 8 acres of his property and did not want a city corp yard put out there.

So the Council and its Water Reclamation Facility Citizen Advisory Committee (WRFCAC) met in early February to discuss switching preferred sites. The workshop on the 25th was the follow up to that and intended to start the public outreach effort to get residents on board.

The City has hired a company to design the plant, which is steering towards a batch reactor technology instead of oxidation ditches. Such plants need less land but are generally more expensive to operate. Right now, the City most current cost estimate for a new plant plus the water treatment facility for advanced filtering and eventual reuse is $102 million.

That’s about $74 million for the sewer portion and $27 million for the advanced treatment. But that estimate was made a couple of years ago and was for the oxy ditch technology.

With still so much left to be decided with the project, the Council could face a determined opposition at Tuesday’s meeting.

“Time is of the essence,” Metzger wrote, “as the Council is rushing this decision to go ahead with the nearby Righetti site with their vote on March 8. We cannot let them do this. They need to hear from us loud and clear.”