Sierra Club Offers Plan to Reduce Sewage Flow

The Metropolitan Sewerage System could reduce sewage flow by 80 million gallons each day and cut the cost of the city’s planned sewage treatment plant expansion by at least $450 million by replacing standard toilets, shower heads and faucets with water efficiency devices, the Sierra Club said Thursday.

The organization, which has been named a third party in the federal government’s lawsuit to force the San Diego City Council to upgrade its treatment system, will detail the plan to U. S. Magistrate Irma Gonzalez on Tuesday when lawyers for all three sides meet at a settlement conference, club officials said at a news conference.

The proposal would add a new wrinkle to talks between the city and the federal Environmental Protection Agency, which are trying to settle the EPA lawsuit before a Dec. 5 date in federal court. The agency last year sued the city, which operates the Point Loma sewage treatment plant, to force it to upgrade treatment to so-called secondary standards, as required by federal law.

To comply, city planners and consulting engineers are designing a $2.6-billion to $2.86-billion sewage treatment system that would treat 240 million gallons of sewage daily at an expanded Point Loma treatment plant, new South Bay and North City plants, and six satellite water-reclamation facilities by 2010.

Lower Water Use

But Sierra Club officials insisted Thursday that such extensive construction would be unnecessary with the modifications they propose--replacing every toilet, shower head and faucet in the region with fixtures that use less water and building a much smaller treatment network.

“We feel that the city has overlooked something that is so obvious and so basic in the equation,” said John Reaves, chairman of the Sierra Club’s water resources subcommittee. “And that is that the city has assumed that water conservation will not play a significant role in solving the city’s sewage problem.”

Reaves offered no figures on how much it would cost to replace every toilet, shower head and faucet in the Metropolitan Sewerage System, which includes the city of San Diego and 15 other municipalities and water districts from Del Mar to San Ysidro. By his own rough estimate Thursday, the cost could be $280 million for new low-volume toilets alone.

Nor did he propose a solution to the problem of treating and removing millions of gallons of Mexican sewage that pours into the United States each day if the South Bay plant and outfall are not built.