The city’s waste treatment plant sure can clean up.
The city’s waste treatment plant sure can clean up.
For the second year in a row, the South County Regional Wastewater Authority received the Plant of the Year Award for the Monterey Bay region from the California Water Environment Association, according to a city press release. Morgan Hill and Gilroy jointly run the plant at 1500 Southside Drive, which will enter the statewide competition this April.
“The SCRWA team will use this honor as a catalyst in raising the bar to continue improving our systems and efforts,” Senior Managing Engineer Saeid Vaziry said.
In addition to Plant of the Year award, SCRWA also received honors for its safety programs and Oscar Baltazar won Operator of the Year and his colleague, Jesus Luna, took home the Laboratory Person of the Year award.
“Due to exemplary work of the involved employees and the SCRWA Manager, and because of staff’s commitment and dedication to the SCRWA, the facility is held in high regard by California’s regulatory agencies,” the press release said.
The plant can handle 8.5 million gallons a day during dry times and 11 million gallon during the wet season, and those numbers will grow by 2015, when a $102 million expansion project will wrap up, according to city public information officer Joe Kline.
The awards also show how much progress the city has made in 35 years, when it was tarnished by a sewage dumping scheme known as Sewergate.
In 1983, three weeks after former City Administrator Jay Baksa joined the city, news broke that his predecessor and other top-level employees had orchestrated and covered up sewage dumping into a local creek after two years of heavy rain overwhelmed the system. Baksa soon found himself interviewing city employees under oath to learn what they knew about the situation, and within three months, the state imposed a building moratorium on Gilroy.
Throughout the next few years, Baksa testified in front of district attorneys, the state attorney general and countless other agencies as he struggled to clean up an environmental mess and repair City Hall’s tarnished reputation. The building moratorium that hobbled Gilroy financially through the 1980s was finally lifted in 1991, and crews finished building the $39 million Southside Drive plant three years later.
