Council Ends Moratorium in Sewage Crisis

The San Diego City Council on Monday lifted its short-lived moratorium on sewer hookups in the city’s booming northern sector, imposed 12 days ago in response to the Thanksgiving spill of 1.5 million gallons of raw sewage from Pump Station 64.

The council voted, 8-1, to terminate the moratorium after construction industry officials predicted “human and economic havoc” and the city manager vowed to immediately staff the troubled Sorrento Valley plant with electricians around the clock.

Mayor Maureen O’Connor urged the council to turn the controversial moratorium question over to the Regional Water Quality Control Board. Earlier in the day, however, that board had opted to defer to the council, saying: “Do your job.”

“I want to hear what they have to say,” O’Connor said of the regional board.

Councilwoman Abbe Wolfsheimer, who cast the lone vote against ending the ban, countered: “They wanted to hear what we have to say.”

The council’s vote means that building permits may again be issued for construction in Rancho Bernardo, Rancho Penasquitos, Sabre Springs, Mira Mesa, Scripps Ranch, North City West, Fairbanks Ranch and Sorrento Valley.

But it also means that the regional water board is likely to schedule a Jan. 23 hearing to consider whether to impose its own ban--a step it has been threatening to take since spring, when Pump Station 64 spilled for the 58th time since 1979.

The board voted at its monthly meeting Monday to wait and see what the City Council would do later in the day. If the council lifted its ban, as City Manager John Lockwood was recommending, the board said, it would put its own ban on its next meeting’s agenda.

Also on Monday, the water quality board agreed to:

- Fine the city approximately $140,000 next summer, when the city is expected to miss a crucial deadline in its time schedule for upgrading Pump Station 64.

- Consider at its Jan. 23 meeting a $1.5-million penalty for the Thanksgiving spill of raw sewage from Pump Station 64.

- Impose an $11,000 penalty for an Oct. 1 spill of 2,000 gallons of sewage sludge from the Fiesta Island sludge-drying facility, a spill that prompted a quarantine in part of Mission Bay.

- Consider action against the city if it fails to meet a Dec. 31 deadline for submitting plans to bring its Point Loma sewage treatment plant into compliance with federal clean-water standards.

- Hold a March hearing on sewage overflows into Mission Bay, and consider a $420,000 fine for a Dec. 2 spill and possibly a sewer hookup ban for the giant area draining into the bay.

Asked how he felt about that threat, Lockwood seemed unfazed.

“That’s fine,” he said. “No problem at all. An appropriate thing for them to do, to have a full gamut of options. That causes me no concern, that they put it on the agenda.”

At the council meeting Monday evening, Lockwood attributed the Thanksgiving Day spill to human error, saying the operator accidentally hit a shut-off switch. However, he acknowledged that the plant could not then be reactivated because a crucial valve had stuck.

Under questioning by the council, Robert Ferrier, a deputy director in the Water Utilities Department, acknowledged that plant workers had been reluctant to test the valve recently, in light of the plant’s “state of siege” and the difficulty of replacing it if it broke.

Meanwhile, Milon Mills, the department’s assistant director, acknowledged that the “reservoir” installed recently to catch overflow in the event of breakdown has a 300,000-gallon capacity that would have held only a fraction of the recent spill.

“There just is no place to put a containment structure that could hold one to two million gallons of overflow, except in the lagoon itself,” Mills said, referring to Los Penasquitos Lagoon, which has served as the unintended catch basin for the plant’s spills.

Finally, Wolfsheimer reported to the council: “I’ve had a report from a staff member who went out there and found the watchman asleep.”

Among the building industry representatives who addressed the council, Kim Kilkenny of the Construction Industry Federation warned that millions of dollars of economic activity “would come to a screeching halt” if the council continued the ban.

“If you affirm the moratorium, it will cause human and economic havoc,” he said. He also argued that “it is not rational to impose a moratorium because of a city staff mistake.”

O’Connor agreed: “In a sense of fairness to the building industry . . . we cannot shut them down because of human error.”

However, residents and Wolfsheimer, who represents the area, countered that the problem was also mechanical. (Earlier in the day, water board executive officer Ladin Delaney had remarked that he and his staff believe the problem “to be electrical, mechanical or capacity.”)

Wolfsheimer urged the council to extend the ban at least until after the water board’s next meeting, when the board votes on the city’s fine for the spill. She contended that public money would be better spent repairing the plant than paying water board fines.

Pump Station 64, which pumps millions of gallons a day to the Point Loma sewage treatment plant, has failed repeatedly since 1979. When a 1-million-gallon spill in April prompted the water board to threaten a moratorium, the city imposed its own, then lifted it.

At that time, Wolfsheimer introduced an ordinance, then passed by the council, that would reimpose the moratorium if and when there was another spill. That spill occurred shortly after noon on Thanksgiving, and Lockwood imposed the moratorium the next day.

On Monday, Water Utilities Department officials amended their estimate of the amount of raw sewage that spilled during that 80-minute shutdown from 1 million to 1.5 million gallons.