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::: COMMUNITY NEWS

Agency orders CSD, Country Club to address wastewater problems

Full story published Tuesday, January 31, 2006
News brief publised Thursday, January 26, 2006

In a move that could cost Murietans millions, the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board on Thursday adopted a cease and desist order against the Community Services District and the Country Club, saying their handling of wastewater is an environmental concern.

The agency's action was fostered by development opponents in the community, who have the apparent strategy of challenging CSD operations as a way to limit growth. Still, CSD officials say the issues involved must be addressed whether development continues or not.

CSD President John Merchant called the action "a crossroads to us as a community."

The order deals with four issues -- odor complaints related to golf course irrigation, possible groundwater contamination, storage capacity at the wastewater treatment plant and overflow of golf course irrigation ponds during winter storms.

The overflows are also the subject of an ongoing lawsuit brought by the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, an environmental group that was represented at the hearing, held at the board's offices in Rancho Cordova.

About 60 people attended, including CSD and Country Club directors and staff, developers, attorneys, residents, and members of the Rancho Murieta Development Concerned Citizens Committee, which opposes current development plans.

The CSD and the Country Club are named in the lawsuit and the order because the CSD treats and disinfects water at the wastewater treatment plant and the club stores and uses the treated water to irrigate the golf courses under the same state permit.

The cease and desist order requires the CSD and the club to stop overflows of treated wastewater from the irrigation lakes or get a federal permit for the overflows by 2008. The order gives the CSD 18 months to develop a long-range plan for wastewater storage and disposal, and limits new sewer hook-ups to 180 until additional storage is available in the ponds at the treatment plant.

Previous coverage • CSD calls cease order inaccurate and says it should be withdrawn (November 3, 2005) • CSD, Country Club face legal challenges over handling of reclaimed water (October 27, 2005) • CSD suffered two wastewater spills in June (September 6, 2004) Documents • Cease and desist order and related documents • California Sportfishing Protection Alliance lawsuit

If the carryover storage problem at the wastewater treatment plant is solved, the number of sewer hook-ups would be increased to about 1,000 under the terms of the order. The CSD plans to dispose of the excess reclaimed water this year by irrigating an area rancher's fields and other means.

The district is also required to install additional wells to monitor groundwater quality at the plant.

CSD President John Merchant told the board that the district has a long-standing commitment "to do the right thing" and would comply with the requirements. He asked that the order not be imposed.

In his presentation, Merchant estimated it would cost "tens of millions of dollars" to address the four issues. "Potentially the entire cost would be borne by the community if, in fact, development … did not continue, and that is a very real possibility. The great majority of this has to be fixed whether the community develops or not.

"When you start dividing tens of millions of dollars by 2,500 people, it's a lot of money. It's either going to come from cooperative contributions from developers or it's going to come from the community or it's going to come from a blend of both."

Merchant said the CSD decided to take a "global" approach to the order and consider all the issues together. He said a one-time fix for the overflow problem could involve using tanks and other storage options instead of the lakes.

Merchant estimated the cost to end the spills as the "greater part" of $10 million. The other option, which is part of both the lawsuit and the cease and desist order, is a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit, which would allow the spills.

The permit represents unknown future costs for the district. The permit, which carries mandatory fines for non-compliance, has to be renewed every five years, which typically means the requirements get tighter, CSD General Manager Ed Crouse testified at the regional board hearing.

The fear is the permit requirements could eventually impact the reclamation facility. "Ultimately, it leads back to our treatment plant. … We just don't know where (the permit is) heading in the future," he said.

According to the staff report on the cease and desist order, the Country Club applied for an NPDES permit in 2002, but the regional board did not process its application.

Murietan Bradley Sample, a toxicologist, was present at the hearing and thanked the regional board for its actions. Sample, a member of the RMDCCC, raised most of the issues in the order in 2004, following a RanchoMurieta.com story about the state reporting two spills of reclaimed water. He has continued to investigate the problems and track CSD violations.

In his brief comments, Sample said he disagreed with Merchant about the CSD's performance. The CSD has "an extensive history of poor compliance," he said.

In an interview Saturday, Sample said the order demonstrated "the water board has come through" and it included "basically everything" he had found by examining records at the regional board's offices.

"I want to see accountability," Sample said.

He added, "This is an ongoing compliance issue, and if you read the documents in the water board files you can see that contrary to what John Merchant says, the CSD has not been forthcoming in resolving their issues and had to be told repeatedly to go back, and they're telling them to go back and do it. We're fortunate that they did not levy fines, because they could have."

A Country Club permit application last year said the lakes are designed to overflow and up to 18 million gallons of mixed reclaimed wastewater and storm water could spill to the Cosumnes River between January and March in an average rainfall year. About 48 percent of the spill would be recycled water, the club estimated.

After the hearing, Merchant remarked that the NPDES permit "basically says that there are allowable discharges to the river. … We're talking about putting the same water in the river whether we do it with a permit and without a permit. And I understand why they say we need one. But in the context of what goes in the river and how evil it is, everybody needs to understand that in any of these conditions some of that recycled water can and will go into the river. It's unfortunate now that the debate over recycled water is always in the context of effluents or sewage. We're not dealing with the same commodity.

"I think overall the community can really be proud of the fact that since the late ‘70s, we have saved billions and billions of gallons of groundwater (by using recycled water on the golf courses). … I think we've done a really good job as a community in protecting the environment."

The CSD applied for a different kind of federal permit in September 2005 to address the spills, relying on the recommendations in a 2004 memo from Celeste Cantu, executive director of the State Water Resources Control Board, to the executive officers of the nine regional boards. The state board is the parent agency for the regulatory boards.

The municipal storm water permit is a "best practices" permit that requires the reduction of pollutants "to the maximum extent practicable," according to Cantu's memo.

The memo proposes ways to regulate the use of recycled water to carry out the state's goal of increasing its use. Under the state water code, recycled water has beneficial uses as a result of treatment and is considered "a valuable resource."

In the Sacramento area, recycled water is used on landscaping at 2,000 homes in the Serrano development, as well as a school, park, golf course and median strips there. It's also used to water landscaping at two Elk Grove Unified School District campuses.

The water that the CSD delivers to the Country Club lakes and Bass Lake from April through October meets the highest standards for recycled water established by the State Department of Health Services under Title 22 of the California Code of Regulations, according to the CSD. Crouse describes the water as "pristine" and has publicly sipped it on occasion to make a point about its quality.

The first draft of the cease and desist order acknowledged the CSD's bid for a storm water permit to address the spills. The regional board then rejected that as a solution in a subsequent revised version of the order because the amount of the overflow from the lakes did not seem consistent with the "incidental runoff" condition of Cantu's guidance memorandum to the regional boards.

The final order proposes the most extreme approach in the Cantu memo -- the lakes would have to be completely drained before the rainy season and the reclaimed water would have to be replaced with river water to be considered for regulation under the storm water permit.

Attorney Roberta Larson of Somach, Simmons & Dunn, who represented the club and the CSD at the hearing, pointed out to no avail that the memo also covers regulating recycled water ponds that are designed to spill during the wet season with a storm water permit.

Impractical as it is, the option in the cease and desist order at least recognizes the possibility of using the storm water permit for regulation, CSD officials noted after the meeting.

Speaking at the hearing, Michael R. Lozeau, attorney for the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance, the group suing the CSD and Country Club, reacted to the lake drainage option by noting that if "an ongoing, even small discharge of reclaimed water" resulted, the municipal storm water permit would not be "a viable option" and an NPDES permit would be required.

Lozeau questioned why the CSD hadn't addressed the overflows years ago, since the club and the district are operating under a state permit that doesn't allow discharges.

When the CSD acquired the reclamation facility from the community's developer in 1986, it inherited the club's irrigation design, Crouse replied.

The cease and desist order says the man-made lakes are designed to spill during the winter.

"The definition of recycled water is still wastewater," Crouse said after the meeting, referring to what's called "the one-molecule rule," which says water that contains even one molecule of recycled water is wastewater. "Science can re-characterize it, but until somebody changes the definition, that's the heart of the matter," Crouse said.

Paul Klein, president of the California chapter of the Water ReUse Association, a national conservation organization, testified at the hearing that the regional board's action was "a significant impediment to the use of recycled water" and contrary to the state's goals. Klein said the intention of the recycled water use task force established by the Legislature in 2001 and the Cantu memo was "to rebut" the one-molecule rule.

Ruben Robles, a principal civil engineer with the Sacramento Regional County Sanitation District, testified that the sanitation district is developing a water recycling master plan with the goal of recycling a large amount of water. "One of the things we're looking at is golf courses, and the challenges of having zero overflow from golf course ponds is extremely difficult and costly," he said.

Robles read a section from the Cantu memo that calls requiring an NPDES permit "problematic … because it renders the use of recycled water undesirable for many parties." He concluded by asking the board to move in the direction of the memo and away from the one-molecule rule.

In addition to Sample, RMDCCC members Candy Chand and Janis Eckard were among the half-dozen residents who spoke. The comments included two complaints about golf course irrigation and lake odors. All of the speakers have been publicly involved in the RMDCCC cause, either as part of the RMDCCC team in last year's county talks, writing letters to the editor or speaking out at public meetings.

The staff report on the order said there was strong community sentiment to enforce it.

The final order was supported in a letter and e-mails written in mid-November by five Murieta residents. All five have publicly backed the RMDCCC effort; four of the five wrote dozens of letters to RanchoMurieta.com and the River Valley Times in 2005 in support of the group's work.

When asked about his findings being used in an effort to fight development, Sample, the toxicologist, replied, "It wasn't necessarily the goal. The whole idea is if there are problems you cannot go ahead and build … and exacerbate the problem. I recognize the place is going to be developed. That's going to happen. But I want it to be development that is consistent with and in accordance with what is already here and maximizes the quality of life that we have here."

In a letter Monday to RanchoMurieta.com, Chand wrote, "Of course, the RMDCCC has used every possible environmental condition to show why this development, as proposed, is not sound -- sewage being one of those concerns. However, this was not news to the state Water Board. Quite the contrary. We actually got our information from the Water Board's own file on CSD. We simply informed the community (who were not being warned) and we informed the county (who were not talking to the state) so that the county would consider those facts in their development decisions."

CSD officials have claimed they were working with the water board to address the issues when the cease and desist order emerged last year.

Merchant, the CSD president, said the dialogue could have continued if the board hadn't been "pushed by forces with another agenda." He added, "We might have been able to work (the issues) out in a way that would have had less financial impact."

The CSD and the Country Club have until June 30 to decide on an alternative for addressing the overflows. They have shared the cost of the engineering study that will provide alternatives to end the spills. It's part of about $200,000 that Crouse estimates has been spent on studies, legal fees and other costs for the cease and desist order.

"I think (the club) has a role to play here financially," said Merchant after the hearing. Crouse sees it as a major role -- the $10 million cost of the zero-discharge alternative. The CSD's role is to deliver the water "and that's all," he said.

Crouse described the $10 million figure as "an order of magnitude -- a best-guess, worst-case kind of thing," admitting, "It's too premature to speculate where we're headed and how much it will cost. … I would say (the costs are) frighteningly large."

How that will play out with the club remains to be seen.

"We're happy to be working shoulder to shoulder with CSD," Country Club General Manager Bob Johnson said in an interview Saturday. "Until the state changes or until the Clean Water Act changes, we're always going to have these things to consider if we don't want to get an NPDES permit."

Johnson said it's "yet to be determined" which organization will bear the costs. "No one knows what the impact will be. … I'm not going to be throwing around numbers."