Mayor Jerry Sanders announced his intention to seek a waiver from upgrading to Secondary Treatment processes for the Point Loma Wastewater Treatment Plant.
During an Oct. 10 press conference at City Hall, Sanders said his decision was based on a report from the scientific review committee comprising experts from Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Jacobs School of Engineering.
The mayor asked the group to analyze data collected from around the Point Loma Wastewater Treatment Plant outfall about 4.5 miles off the west coast of the Peninsula.
Headed by Paul Linden, professor of environmental science and engineering and director the sustainability initiative at University of California, San Diego, the team released its final report at Wednesday’s conference.
“The team of scientists from UCSD and San Diego State and myself thoroughly reviewed all the data available from the City [outfall] monitoring program,” Linden said at the conference”We found no indication that there was any harmful impact of the outfall on the local oceanographic environment. There seems to be no reason for concern about the outfall at all.”
The mayor’s decision to pursue the waiver hinged on the report as the City approaches the EPA’s December deadline for the waiver application. The waiver is good for five years.
While maintaining that he made the decision based primarily on the environmental data, Sanders also cited economic factors.
He said that the potential $1.5 billion cost of the upgrade is an expense that is “simply not needed and the ratepayers cannot afford.”
The $200,000 study analyzed data collected within the last five to ten years in and around coastal and near-shore areas of the outfall, according to the report.
Part of the scope of study includes a review of the shoreline to check for signs of wastewater effluent, said Tim Bertch, director of the Metropolitan Wastewater Department. Researchers also looked at the composition and quality of water column and sediment samples from as deep as 310 feet below the water’s surface, he said.
In addition to physical and chemical compositions, the committee also studied data about the ocean life, including bottom-dwelling fish, crustaceans, worms and other organisms, Bertch said.
The report concludes that there are “no indications of significant impacts on the Point Loma bottom community.”
But while the report reveals no significant effects of the outfall, the report also admits the team’s conclusions were constrained by time and scope of the project. The review committee collected no new samples, did not conduct fundamental research and performed limited analysis of observational data, according to the report.
The committee also makes several recommendations in the report, including further analysis of the area’s microbiology, sediment chemistry and pollutants consumed by fish and bacteria that enter the food chain.
Complications also arise when reviewing data from the Point Loma outfall because of the large area being affected by natural forces over time, according to the report. Addressing those concerns has been a major recommendation of a previous Point Loma Outfall Project report.
The City is currently involved with several comprehensive studies, including the Sediment Mapping Project of the Point Loma and South Bay outfall regions and analysis of deeper ocean habitats, according to the report.
If the City acquires another waiver, several factors could affect future decisions about the plant, Bertch said.
When the decision was first made in 1987 to seek a waiver, he said, the cost to upgrade to Secondary Treatment was about $3 billion. Cheaper and better technology has allowed the cost to come down, he added.
“Five years from now, it could be a whole different evaluation “¦ secondary treatment might seem more like the right answer, it might seem even less like the right answer,” he said. “So to prejudge that and commit the ratepayers to an eventual bill that may not be required is not what we decided to do.”
The Point Loma Wastewater Plant treats about 175 to 180 million gallons per day of wastewater generated by the city’s 2.2 million residents, according to the department’s website.
For general information on the city’s water department, visit www.sandiego.gov/water.