Officials: Costs up due to rules

Costa Mesa’s sewer fees — the money the Sanitary District charges residents and businesses to dispose of liquid waste — have almost tripled in the past eight years after staying constant for eight years before that.

The Costa Mesa Sanitary District Board of Directors is expected to increase fees by another 9% at the end of July.

“Even with this increase that we’re talking about, of the jurisdictions in Orange County we’re the lowest if not the next-to-lowest,” said Thomas Fauth, the district’s assistant manager.

A typical home in Costa Mesa is charged a little more than $5 per month in sewer fees. That’s much less than the state average of more than $30 per month, according to state water board spokesman Bill Rukeyser, although the state average includes small remote towns and big cities alike. Orange County’s average is much lower.

Fauth attributes the rapid increases to stricter county and state controls on waste disposal passed down at the beginning of the decade that districts have had to either obey or face potential fines.

To reduce the amount of human refuse and waste water spilled from Costa Mesa pipes, the district has had to expand drastically, Fauth said.

Since 2000, its number of employees has jumped from four to 12, its headquarters moved out of City Hall into a $1.5-million building on 19th Street, it purchased a $920,000 piece of land to store equipment on Wilson Street and it overhauled the pump station off of Irvine Avenue for $700,000. The district has a roughly $10-million annual budget.

Countywide, though, there is evidence that the stricter controls are working. The Orange County Health Care Agency, which keeps records of local sewage spills, has seen a decrease in spills since the new regulations went into effect. After peaking in 2001, the number of sewage spills reported to the agency has decreased, and the number of spills in 2008 is the lowest since then, said the agency’s environmental health Program Manager Larry Honeybourne.

“The trend has been down in the last five years. We’re actually seeing a much lower number of sewage spills reported to us and the volumes are down,” Honeybourne said. “All of the agencies have been doing a better job of looking at their pipelines.”

In fact, sewage spills have decreased by about 90% in volume since 2002, when the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board adopted its tougher standards, according to regional board engineer Ken Theisen.

“Most agencies had to spend more money so they had to raise rates to take better care of their systems in terms of operating and maintaining them to prevent sewage spills,” Theisen said.

Public outcry due to a three-month-long closure of Huntington Beach because of dangerously high levels of bacteria in 1999 was one of the big driving forces behind the rules that were first adopted by the regional board and then picked up by the state in 2006.

Costa Mesa has replaced aging pumps, instituted a program to reimburse homeowners for repairing their sewer pipes and purchased equipment like emergency power generators to prevent sewage overflows during power outages.

They haven’t come cheap, though. Sewer fees in the city have gone from $23 per year to more than $60 per year during that time for a normal residence. They still remain much lower than nearby cities like Newport Beach and Irvine, which both charge more than $100 per year and the state average of more than $300 per year.