San Juan Bautista
– Natural Selection Foods is on its way to receiving a new
wastewater discharge permit and paying a fine for violations,
regional water board officials said Thursday.
San Juan Bautista – Natural Selection Foods is on its way to receiving a new wastewater discharge permit and paying a fine for violations, regional water board officials said Thursday.
The Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board fined the company $95,000 in April for discharging almost four times its allowed wastewater for the 2005 and 2006 growing seasons. Natural Selection Foods was using an average of 274,000 gallons of chlorinated water per day to rinse and clean its fresh produce.
Part of the fine is due today, according to the regional water board’s complaint against Natural Selection Foods.
“We won’t have paid it by (today), but that’s because we’re talking about where that money is going,” said Samantha Cabaluna, a spokeswoman for Natural Selection Foods.
Since Natural Selection Foods waived its right to a public hearing, the board is negotiating the fine with the company, said Matt Thompson, resource control engineer with the board’s code enforcement division.
The company will still be on the hook for the full amount, but at least half will go to a wastewater reclamation project in San Juan Bautista, Thompson said.
“Rather than just paying the penalty, we are allowing them to direct that to a good environmental project in that community,” Thompson said.
San Juan Bautista has been working find a way to dispose some of its treated wastewater through irrigation of landscaping, Thompson said.
The project’s cost is estimated to be between $50,000 and $100,000, City Manager Jan McClintock said.
The city has plenty of customers, including the San Juan Cemetery, located next to the wastewater treatment plant at the end of Third Street, McClintock said.
Using treated water would also cut costs for the cemetery district, McClintock said.
“It saves them money, which is another public agency,” McClintock said.
McClintock said roadway medians are another way to recycle the city’s treated wastewater.
Once the details of the fine are agreed upon, the company will have 30 days to pay the city and the state, Thompson said.
A new wastewater discharge permit is in the works, regional water board officials said.
Instead of updating Natural Selection Foods’ 8-year-old permit, the regional water board will approve a new agreement at a July 6 meeting in Watsonville, said John Robertson, a geologist with the board’s northern permit division.
In the meantime, Natural Selection Foods is disposing of its excess wastewater through the city’s wastewater treatment plant, said Cecile DeMartini, a water resource control engineer with the board’s northern permit division. Under its 1999 permit, the company is allowed to dispose of 70,000 gallons per day onto alfalfa fields surrounding its plant.
The new permit should allow Natural Selection Foods to dispose up to 465,000 gallons of wastewater per day, DeMartini said. The maximum one-day discharge during the company’s violations was 582,307 gallons.
The company will be able to dispose of its wastewater through the city’s facilities in addition to its own disposal fields, she said.
DeMartini said the company has upgraded disposal equipment, expanded its disposal fields and created a 100-foot buffer between the fields and San Juan Creek to prevent spillage.
“At this point the only thing they have to do is verify the current flow rate to their disposal fields,” DeMartini said.
During the course of the company’s violations, wastewater discharge from Natural Selection Foods spilled from the alfalfa fields into the San Juan Creek, according to the board’s complaint against Natural Selection Foods. The creek is a tributary to the San Benito River, which flows into the Pajaro River. The high chlorine content of the wastewater could threaten wildlife, the complaint stated.
