Judge says Hollister can build but not fill storage ponds;
environmental review process to start immediately
With no rapport left with which to negotiate, two county
agencies filed lawsuits Tuesday to stop the City of Hollister from
constructing a sewage storage pond without an environmental study
of its impact. The move came the day after the city council
defiantly voted that the project would begin despite pleas from the
other agencies.
Judge says Hollister can build but not fill storage ponds; environmental review process to start immediately
With no rapport left with which to negotiate, two county agencies filed lawsuits Tuesday to stop the City of Hollister from constructing a sewage storage pond without an environmental study of its impact. The move came the day after the city council defiantly voted that the project would begin despite pleas from the other agencies.
As bulldozers moved earth at the city sewage plant, Judge Harry Tobias was set to hear arguments for a temporary restraining order, but handed the case to Judge Steve Sanders because his brother is on the county water board, one of the plaintiffs. On Wednesday, Sanders the former county attorney, allowed construction of the project to continue, but issued a temporary restraining order to prevent the city from filling them.
It means the city can go ahead and build the storage ponds in order to beat a deadline which if unmet carries a $150,000 fine, but may have to tear the $132,000 construction job down depending on what happens at a hearing set for Dec. 12.
The city is to start an environmental review of the project’s impacts immediately. That process could take months to complete.
“I need to balance the harms,” said Sanders. “And I think the harms are grave without further environmental review.”
The city wants to excavate the storage ponds and deepen two existing percolation ponds. Now the courts will decide whether the city was right in moving forward without an environmental assessment.
The issue ended up in court after the Hollister Council disregarded requests by the San Benito County Board of Supervisors and San Benito County Water District to study potential environmental impacts on the aquifer and on downstream water sources under the California Environmental Quality Act.
At a meeting Monday, Cass told the council that the state water board already had approved the project.
State officials said Tuesday that isn’t so.
The design concept of the plan has been approved, said Matt Fabry of the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board. CEQA requirements, he said, are another matter. They are a part of state law and are enforced by the courts.
Hollister officials have maintained they can dig the 12-acre ponds, move 81,000 cubic yards of dirt and avoid CEQA requirements because an emergency exists. A decade of overbuilding has left the city’s sewage treatment ponds over capacity and the state water board has placed the city under a complete building moratorium. City officials say they fear heavy rains this winter will overburden the system, hence the “emergency.”
The city faces $1.2 million in state fines for a 15-million gallon sewage spill into the San Benito River in May, and the storage ponds are part of a self-imposed mitigation plan that will lessen the fine by $150,000 if it is built by Hollister’s self-imposed Jan. 1 timetable that has been approved by the state.
The county argues, however, that the term “emergency” is narrowly defined and relates to acts of God such as earthquakes, fire and flooding. Neglecting to plan for the future, officials say, does not constitute an “emergency” under the law.
“I think there’s plenty of evidence that the city’s wastewater issues have been going on for a number of years,” said Fabry. “It didn’t happen overnight.”
County officials are also frustrated that the city used a similar tact in 1996, when it argued before the county planning commission for permission to use temporary wastewater disposal ponds because “an emergency is imminent.”
“This monster has been on your shoulders for six years,” said planning director Rob Mendiola in a meeting last Thursday between county officials, water board representatives and council members Tony Bruscia, Pauline Valdivia and City Manager George Lewis that was called in an attempt to avert the court action.
The city has come under heavy criticism from citizens for moving ahead full-speed with market-rate housing development when officials knew the system was at or over capacity. They reacted on Election Day by passing a strict growth cap approved by 70 percent of the voters. Two years ago the state water board placed Hollister under another building moratorium, but lifted it when Hollister officials said the city needed low-income housing. Since then none has been built in the city, while market-rate housing construction continued.
This perceived bad management by the council and city manager has frustrated the county and water district, charged by the state legislature with protecting the groundwater supply, which is close to the surface near the sewage ponds.
“The community needs to know this isn’t jurisdictional,” said Supervisor Richard Scagliotti. “This is for the health and safety of this community. They’re not even telling us what they’re putting in there – raw sewage? Primary treated sewage?”
The county attorney delivered a writ of mandate to City Hall at 5:55 p.m. Monday. A half-hour later the Hollister City Council voted unanimously to ignore it.
“We need to move ahead,” said Councilwoman Pauline Valdivia. “If those folks don’t want to buy into what we’re doing, what else can we do?”
Councilman Brian Conroy, who has a better rapport with the county than most other city officials, said the city “needs to move on.”
“We’ve got to go ahead and start building it,” said Conroy. “The state EPA is ordering us to do it. I want to work with the county, but this thing just has to work itself out.”
On Tuesday, the San Benito County Water District joined the fray by filing a separate suit seeking a retraining order against the city.
The ponds are supposed to act as storage basins for wastewater during the rainy season, when the existing sewage ponds don’t percolate as rapidly.
In 1996, the city asked the county planning commission to use emergency ponds west of Highway 156, then discovered when they put them into use that a clay layer exists beneath them and percolation is minimal. Lewis, then a city engineer, told the planning commission at the time that the system was out of capacity and the city was in an emergency situation.
County officials are now upset that the city wants to rush another project into existence without proper assessment.
“Digging a hole out there just because you feel like it ain’t gonna work,” said county water district President Ken Perry.
The dispute over pond construction prompted a rash of emergency meetings throughout the week on numerous local government levels. Tensions between Hollister and San Benito County, never good because of what the county perceives as Hollister’s irresponsible growth in the face of a crumbling infrastructure, have heated up once again.
At one meeting, Council Member Tony Bruscia said he is frustrated because he wasn’t on the council in 1996, but county planning director Mendiola was clearly exasperated with what he sees as a perpetual pattern of non-accountability.
“Tony, you need to build more than a sewage plant,” said Mendiola, “you need to build credibility. I’ve never heard an apology to this community for the disaster you laid at its feet. I haven’t heard George (Lewis) say, ‘I should have been in charge.'”
Attorney Cass said the county is behaving like “CEQA-police,” and Mayor Tony LoBue has publicly said the county is “bullying” the city. The statements have only provoked county officials.
“It’s too bad the mayor doesn’t know what’s really happening with this,” said Supervisor Bob Cruz. “He’s making stupid statements again because he doesn’t know the history of this mess.”
The dispute over the sewage pond comes after the county and water district have complained that they weren’t consulted when the city developed its plan for a new sewage system, due by June 2005.
John Gregg, head of the county water district, is concerned by a larger percolation system’s impact on groundwater, which is turning increasingly saltier as water softener residue pollutes effluent.
“There’s a lot of energy being poured into this one item,” said Gregg, “But it’s part of a much bigger picture.”
Gregg, Mendiola and other county leaders maintain that the city’s bypassing of environmental reviews for the ponds is a repeat of 1996.
“Word for word it’s a repeat,” said Cruz. “We said we needed an EIR when they wanted to build more ponds. They said, ‘Oh, absolutely.’ They never did those EIRs. And here they are six years later repeating it all over again.”
