L.A.’s Sewer Ills Could Bring Limit on Building

Los Angeles is considering a limit on new development--advocated in the past only by clean-water activists--to protect Santa Monica Bay from added pollution through the aging and trouble-plagued sewers, interviews with city officials disclosed Thursday.

The problem is not sewage spills, which have brought grief to Mayor Tom Bradley’s Administration in recent years. The latest trouble comes from rapid growth, which engineers said threatens to flood the city sewer system by 1991 with more effluent than it can safely treat.

Bradley, who returns this weekend from an 18-day trip to Asia, has summoned top city officials to a City Hall meeting next Monday to update him on the sewer problem. Deputy Mayor Mike Gage said Thursday that the possible limit on new construction will be a main topic.

For more than a year, environmental groups and Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica) have called for limits on any new building that would add to sewage flows. But the idea was rejected by federal appeals court Judge Harry Pregerson, who oversees a settlement requiring Los Angeles to clean up its discharges into the bay, and by the state board that monitors the quality of water in the bay.

Quietly Ordered Study

Nonetheless, Bradley quietly ordered city engineers last July to analyze whether sewer capacity is a pressing problem. They found that the sewer system could reach its limit before a key treatment plant is expanded in 1991 if growth continues at its current fast pace, Gage said.

About 400 million gallons of sewage are now handled daily by the system, about 10 million gallons more than a year ago. Some increase is from new connections to the system by newly opened office buildings and apartments, while some has been traced to the growing population of immigrants in inner-city neighborhoods. In some areas, large families are living--and creating extra sewage--in homes that two decades ago were occupied by elderly couples and small families.

The main trunk sewers beneath Los Angeles streets, which could reach to New York and back, have enough capacity. But engineers are concerned that the city’s four treatment plants, including the huge Hyperion treatment plant near El Segundo, might become so overtaxed that sewage would not be adequately sanitized. When flow into the plants becomes too great, the sewage must be rushed through the treatment process. In rush situations, the sewage does not spend enough time undergoing treatment to remove all the fecal matter.

The Bradley Administration prefers to reduce the flow of sewage by persuading residents to conserve water, which can have a major effect, but people have resisted urgings to conserve, Gage said. It now appears that some limits on new sewer connections are needed, although with minimum disruption to developers and others whose plans might suffer delays, he said.

Opposition could be heavy from the building industry and others who fear that the plan could slow the Los Angeles economy.

But on the other side, Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, co-sponsor of last year’s ballot measure to limit high-rises, got a head start on Bradley on Thursday when he called on the City Council to step in first and limit construction.

Yaroslavsky, who plans to run against Bradley in the 1989 mayoral election, said he was not aware that Bradley was also considering a plan to control new supplies of sewage into the system.

The mayor’s office and Yaroslavsky agreed that any limits on new construction would only be needed until an expansion of the Tillman water reclamation plant in Van Nuys is finished. The Tillman plant, which removes water from raw sewage and returns the solid material, or sludge, into a pipeline for treatment at the Hyperion plant, is due to be finished in 1991.

Both the mayor’s office and Yaroslavsky also agreed that any effort to limit new sewer connections must include the more than 20 nearby cities that dump their sewage into the Los Angeles system.

Yaroslavsky also called on the city Thursday to speed up a $2.3-billion construction program to modernize the sewers and the Hyperion treatment plant. Money is available to pay for converting the Hyperion plant so that “secondary treatment,” which produces cleaner effluent, can be performed on all sewage that arrives at the plant before a 1998 federal court deadline, Yaroslavsky said.