Gilroy
– A six-year legal battle to determine whether South County
cities can pipe their highly treated wastewater to the Pajaro River
during the wet season ended Friday, with South County cities’ water
board officials coming out on top.
Gilroy – A six-year legal battle to determine whether South County cities can pipe their highly treated wastewater to the Pajaro River during the wet season ended Friday, with South County cities’ water board officials coming out on top.
The South County Regional Wastewater Authority – which handles the disposal of wastewater from Gilroy and Morgan Hill – received unanimous approval from the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board for a five-year seasonal water discharge permit.
Jay Baksa, Gilroy city administrator and executive officer of SCRWA, confronted the regional water board at the meeting in San Luis Obispo, which lasted roughly three hours and also dealt extensively with land disposal requirements. Baksa deemed the permit agreement a landmark victory for the authority.
“The bottom line is that in the end, everyone got they wanted, which is the sign of a good negotiation,” Baksa said.
The permit specifies that wastewater can only be discharged to the river November through April, California’s wet season. It must be treated by a tertiary treatment process, a high level of treatment that releases wastewater into the river at a much higher quality than the river water itself, Baksa said.
Also, the river must have a minimum flow rate before wastewater can be discharged. In dry years, when the rate is below the minimum standard and downstream flooding becomes a concern, wastewater will be directed to reclamation and land disposal. The new permit also sets concentration limits for acceptable amounts of salts in wastewater.
The permit will eventually expand the current practice of distributing South County cities’ treated wastewater into the ground or using it to irrigate some South County parks, golf courses and farms, Baksa said. Until now, South County’s wastewater management plan, created in 1984, covered only reclamation and land disposal. Seasonal discharging is the third leg of that plan.
Charles Morales, Gilroy city councilman and member of the authority since 1992, said the board’s approval is a major victory both for the authority and residents of Gilroy and Morgan Hill. Those cities are close to reaching capacity at the sewer plant, said SCRWA board chairperson Hedy Chang, and the new permit ensures that additional sewage treatment measures will be able to accommodate future growth.
Morales said the bounce-back exchanges between the authority and the regional water board over the past six years have been tiresome and frustrating, and he’s glad the issue didn’t see yet another courtroom.
“It’s been like a volleyball game: back and forth and back forth and so on,” he said.
The quest to secure the permit dates back to 1984 when the authority created its general plan, and litigation was pursued in 1998. A May 2003 Santa Clara County Superior Court decision granted the authority the right to the permit, but the ruling did not set any specific terms and regulations. The Santa Clara Valley Water District supported SCRWA through the litigation.
Authority members say the proposal is a proactive plan to pump small amounts of relatively clean water into the Pajaro without significantly impacting downstream communities. The extra capacity is especially important during the winter, authority officials claim, when wastewater flows increase but the water table rises and the need for treated wastewater for irrigation declines sharply, making traditional disposal inadequate.
But the regional board – which protects the water along the coast from South County to Santa Barbara – and the State Water Resources Control Board argued that the authority hadn’t done enough to address environmental and flooding concerns before filing the lawsuit.
Morales said the authority has been “very responsible” thus far in obeying regulations set forth by the regional water board regarding land disposal and reclamation, and the same compliance will be honored in this agreement.
The authority will submit a report to the state and regional water boards providing monthly tertiary activity, Morales said. Should the authority fail to meet the guidelines, it will submit a letter to the regional water board explaining why, he said.
Santa Clara County Supervisor District 1 Don Gage, who served as Gilroy’s mayor in the early 1990s during the water authority debate, said Friday’s decision is a good thing even for downstream city residents.
“Those folks say they don’t want to see the wastewater, but that’s really not even an issue,” he said. “This is this tertiary water. During the summer, that water will clean the aquifers and will keep the creek open for fishing and other activities.”
Chang said she’s especially proud of the authority’s stringent tertiary treatment process, and she thinks the regional water board granted the permit partly because it understood how diligent the authority will be in that process.
“That’s a really important point to me, that we’re working to improve the environment while resolving the issue,” she said.
