Connect the dots
Even though a taxpayer’s lawsuit against Toilet-to-Tap was filed on November 22 last year, Toilet-to-Tap has moved forward again. You may have seen yesterday’s UT article about connecting San Vicente reservoir to all the other reservoirs. I’ll connect the dots below:
Dot #1 – City of San Diego staff have for years banked on satisfying the federal Ocean Pollution Reduction Act’s mandate to reuse 45 million gallons of wastewater per day by dumping “Toilet-to-Tap” water into San Vicente reservoir.
Dot #2 – San Vicente is now being connected to all the other reservoirs ostensibly so people everywhere in the county can have lot of water even during a drought.
Dot #3 – After the June Council elections, city staff will tell Council that the EPA is forcing the city to satisfy OPRA and that Toilet-to-Tap is the only available option.
Dot #4 “” Everyone in the County becomes a guinea pig for city staff’s experiment.
While city staff vehemently swears there is no Toilet-to-Tap program until Council approves it, they spent a lot of effort in their recent “Water Reuse Study” making sure it was the only option that made it through the review process supposedly of all San Diego’s water reuse options, as ordered by City Council on January 13, 2004.
But staff did not even consider “Residential Water Reuse” in their million dollar review process, and they’ve known full well about Residential Water Reuse since at least 1999, the first time the City Council ordered them to stop pushing Toilet-to-Tap.
Residential Water Reuse is where the City requires all new landscaping to use the City’s “reclaimed” water for irrigation everywhere it is cost effective, generating needed cash for the city, and greywater (shower, tub, bathroom sink, and laundry water) for irrigation everywhere else, which is paid for through water and sewer savings.
Staff knows EPA is going to revoke the City’s sewage discharge permit if it doesn’t satisfy OPRA. After the June Council elections, they’re going to ask Council to choose Toilet-to-Tap, and once built, every man, woman, and child in the county who can’t afford to drink bottled water all the time will be a guinea pig in staff’s first-of-it’s kind experiment that they swear can’t go wrong because they have redundant systems. But the Challenger had triple redundant systems and it still blew up.
Please connect the dots for the public before it’s too late.
Stephen Wm. Bilson
San Diego

Use airport’s existing runway
The San Diego airport issue can be presented as a news item that would appear to the reader as recent. As a San Diego native of 59 years, I would like to comment on this high priority issue. The airport was never designed for the traffic we have today. During WWII the runway was built some eight feet thick to accommodate bombers such as the B24 and later the B36 as a runway for departing manufactured bombers.
Lighter commercial aircraft were few in comparison to today. For at least 59 years, San Diego has had vast land available to build a large airport. Year after year the developers pushed politicians towards hotels, motels, shopping centers and housing projects to include golf courses and parks. Now we are flat out of enough land, it’s that simple.
Taking the Marine Corps Recruit Depot would not even come close to a second runway, but it could make more developers money for hotels and a few houses or maybe a shopping center. Don’t be fooled by the people who say they are looking into the airport issue and the millions of needless dollars spent to search. North, South and East Counties are out period.
We need to use the existing runway for short flights in California and to other cities in California for connections to flights to other states and overseas. This worked with no problem in the earlier years and will work now.
Paul Daughtery
San Diego