Water board says parts of Hollister’s proposed wastewater
treatment plan won’t work
State water officials have warned the city away from building a
proposed wetland to dispose of millions of gallons of treated
wastewater under the proposed new sewage treatment plan.
The city had proposed building a wetland to store treated
wastewater from a new sewage treatment plant before it flows into
the San Benito River. City officials hope the plant will come on
line in 2005, though they must have a viable alternative for
disposing of the water first.
Water board says parts of Hollister’s proposed wastewater treatment plan won’t work
State water officials have warned the city away from building a proposed wetland to dispose of millions of gallons of treated wastewater under the proposed new sewage treatment plan.
The city had proposed building a wetland to store treated wastewater from a new sewage treatment plant before it flows into the San Benito River. City officials hope the plant will come on line in 2005, though they must have a viable alternative for disposing of the water first.
Staff at the Regional Water Quality Control Board effectively nixed the idea – among others – in a 21-point bulletin “Comments on Long-Term Wastewater Management Plan For The Domestic Wastewater Treatment Plant.”
Staff at the state level said that if the city wants to build a wetland, it opens itself up to long-term bureaucratic scrutiny by state, federal and inter-regional agencies. The idea was floated to the water board staff in a report prepared in September by a consulting firm, accepted by the council and opposed by county agencies upset they weren’t allowed to give input on a project with a potential wide-ranging impact.
The variables making the idea unfeasible include everything from possibly harming endangered red-legged frog habitat to how the city would remove nitrates from the treated wastewater before it entered the river. Both could derail a new sewer plant from coming online for years, which would mean no new toilet hookups as the city suffers under a state-imposed indefinite building moratorium.
“It definitely makes things less complicated if they do all percolation,” said Water Resource Control Engineer Matt Fabry.
Fabry means percolation as in percolating all that treated wastewater into the ground like a giant coffee maker. Most cities on the Central Coast get rid of their treated wastewater via percolation, Fabry said.
That city staff will have to find a new way to get rid of its wastewater has been fairly clear, said Councilman Tony Bruscia, though it was not brought up for discussion at Monday’s council meeting. However, city staff hasn’t exactly embraced the percolation route either as a long-term solution to managing its treated wastewater.
“I doubt that we will be looking for any surface discharge at this point,” said City Manager George Lewis. “What I would like to do is figure out a way to do 100 percent reuse.”
Lewis said the ideal solution would be to build a plant to treat the water to a high enough quality that it can be piped to farmers and golf courses. The neighboring South County Regional Wastewater Authority in Gilroy, for example, pipes its wastewater to a power plant, where the water evaporates as it cools turbines.
Lewis concedes that finding customers for 100 percent of the treated wastewater could be difficult. The logical customer, San Juan Oaks, plans to use its own wastewater from its proposed housing development on its links.
If the city has to percolate a lot of water, it must buy new land to do so, Fabry said. The city has about 50 acres for percolation ponds but would need up to 200 acres, Fabry said, to make percolation an effective alternative to the wetland and river disposal option. If the land is not available next to the proposed plant, then the city would have to build some kind of a pipeline to another site, he said.
Whatever the city decides to do with its treated wastewater in the future, it must be decided quickly. While the state has not set a deadline in its $1.2 million fine schedule for a wastewater management plan, other deadlines cannot be met without it, and Lewis said city officials will have some kind of a solution within three months. They are not frazzled by the water board staff’s commentary, he said. In fact, the case is just the opposite as the city has been looking for input on its wastewater treatment plan, he said.
In the meantime, Lewis and other city officials are not quite sure what’s going to be considered next.
“It’s something we’re going to take and review,” he said.
