Ridgemark’s water district must decide if it will piggyback onto
Hollister’s future sewage facility
State water authorities don’t want the Sunnyslope Water District
in San Benito County to wait for a gopher to decide the fate of its
future sewage needs
– as such a rodent did when it built a hole near the berm of a
Hollister sewage pond in 2002, causing a catastrophic sewage
spill.
But the small water district that serves Ridgemark Estates,
Quail Hollow and Oak Creek subdivisions off Airline Highway as well
as parts of Hollister has to hurry up and wait to make a decision:
should the district hook up with Hollister’s future facility, which
has been repeatedly delayed, or create its own bigger, better
sewage plant and remain autonomous?
Ridgemark’s water district must decide if it will piggyback onto Hollister’s future sewage facility
State water authorities don’t want the Sunnyslope Water District in San Benito County to wait for a gopher to decide the fate of its future sewage needs – as such a rodent did when it built a hole near the berm of a Hollister sewage pond in 2002, causing a catastrophic sewage spill.
But the small water district that serves Ridgemark Estates, Quail Hollow and Oak Creek subdivisions off Airline Highway as well as parts of Hollister has to hurry up and wait to make a decision: should the district hook up with Hollister’s future facility, which has been repeatedly delayed, or create its own bigger, better sewage plant and remain autonomous?
It’s a matter of money and time.
“If we go on our own or go with the city of Hollister, either way it’s going to be expensive,” said Bryan Yamaoka, General Manager of the Sunnyslope Water District. “We have no choice. Sewage rates could triple or quadruple.”
That means in a few years, residents of Ridgemark and Sunnyslope’s other jurisdictions can expect their sewage bills to go from about $27 to $112.
For decades the Sunnyslope Water District has been operating on a nine-pond percolation system, similar to that of Hollister’s, which sports 16 disposal ponds. But ponds can be big or little. Hollister processes 2.7 million gallons of wastewater a day, whereas Sunnyslope deals with 250,000 gallons.
“They’re about a tenth the size of us,” said Clint Quilter, Hollister City Manager.
Sunnyslope just finished penning a state-mandated wastewater management plan that looks at the pros and cons of a half dozen alternatives for handling its future wastewater, from creating a batch plant to building a membrane bioreactor facility to digging sewage lines that piggyback onto Hollister’s future plant, slated to come on-line in December 2007. If Sunnyslope officials decide to add to Hollister’s wastewater, the city is prepared.
“We’ve included capacity for that [in our plans] if that’s the way it goes,” Quilter said. “They’re proceeding on parallel paths [for either piggybacking onto Hollister or creating their own], so if it doesn’t work, they’ll still be OK.”
The path to going it alone splits could go in different directions. A sequential batch reactor is a sludge system that treats water in a single tank, but it does not remove salts – a problem farmers in the county have had to grapple with for years. It would cost $7.5 million with an annual operating cost of $648,000. A membrane bioreactor is more complicated, uses three basins to treat wastewater and would remove nitrates, ammonia and total suspended solids – but again, the process does not address salinity and assumes users have cut down on their water softeners. The system would cost $15-19 million with an annual operation coming to about $1.5 million.
In May of 2002 Hollister officials were blindsided when a gopher hole became the camel’s straw in an overfilled sewage pond system. It only took about 15 minutes for that rodent hole to became a massive gap that breached the brimming pond, dumping 15 million gallons of partially treated sewage into the San Benito River. The state water board, otherwise known as the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board, stepped in, declared a moratorium on sewage hookups and ordered Hollister to build a modernized facility that could handle an added capacity through 2023 or face a $1.2 million fine.
Hollister has pushed back the deadline for getting the new plant on-line several times. While city officials lay partial blame for the delays at the door of state environmental law, there still has been no groundbreaking, a design is only now being drawn and the state water board says it will no longer extend the patience it has to this point. Sunnyslope Water District is faced with the weighty decision of latching on to Hollister’s seemingly unsure future or making its own.
“I can’t say which way we’re going to lean because the city [Hollister] is a moving target right now,” Yamaoka said. “At some point we have to make a decision. New regulations are coming down. We’re coming into the 21st century.”
Ultimately, Hollister’s sewage breach was blamed on unchecked growth throughout the 1990s, which city politicians allowed with few upgrades to civic infrastructure. Now officials of the Regional Water Quality Control Board say if Sunnyslope doesn’t become proactive on expanding its sewage capacity, it’s headed down the same gopher hole-pocked road that Hollister took.
“At first, they thought we were coming down on them pretty hard,” said Matt Keeling, district representative for the CCRWQCB based in San Luis Obispo. “But in light of what has happened in Hollister, we felt Sunnyslope was on a similar track toward failure.
“On paper if you look at the design of that system, they seem to have excess capacity,” Keeling added. “But if you look at the type of facility and some of its shortcomings, if we started having more hookups, they are at capacity. It couldn’t handle any more. So we’ve reduced their overall flow limits.”
More hookups are inevitable. The corridor from Union Road to Tres Pinos, south of Hollister city limits, has been circled by county planners as the most logical area for future development in the county. It’s an area still close to city services, within the “sphere of influence,” so it’s capable of eventually supporting growth and meeting the county’s state-mandated housing needs. One of the last actions former planning director Rob Mendiola and his staff did before he left the department in mid-2005 was change the zoning in parts of the corridor from agricultural to rural residential, specifically for that purpose.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that Sunnyslope Water District would be the water czar for any future development of the area. Homes on more than half an acre of land must be built with a separate well and septic tank; homes on less than half an acre must be part of a community system. Developers of multiple home tracts usually propose a separate wastewater disposal system in their plans. But as the Sunnyslope-connected suburban communities of Ridgemark, Quail Hollow and Oak Creek continue to add a home here, a home there, to their footprints, Sunnyslope officials are discovering there is a finite amount of wastewater capacity in its antiquated “perc pond” system.
The Sunnyslope wastewater facility is made up of nine ponds – five ponds (called RM1) on the northwest edge of Ridgemark Estates, built in the mid-1970s, with another four ponds (RM2) added in 1989 to the southern tip of the secluded golf suburb. The system includes three monitoring wells and three wastewater pump (or lift) stations.
If Sunnyslope decides to join forces with Hollister, the smaller water district’s cost to piggyback onto the new facility would be $13 million, with an annual cost of $1 million – with most of the bill footed by Sunnyslope residents. The cheapest route for Sunnyslope to take would be to merely build more sewage ponds, which would cost $5.8 million and an annual cost of $512,000.
There’s a $40 difference between the two most extreme plans, when translated to ratepayers’ costs. Hooking up to Hollister’s future facility would cost each ratepayer an estimated $112 per month, versus $72 per month for more sewage ponds. The latter solution may be cheaper, but aesthetically it is far less popular because of the potential for odors, the marring of viewsheds and the premium placed on open space.
The district plans to hold public meetings at Ridgemark on the wastewater plan throughout the year, “so that they can see what we’re facing,” Yamaoka said. He added that it will take about a year and a half for the district, state water board and the public to decide which course is the best. Sunnyslope’s new wastewater management plan will be formally submitted to the state water board Jan. 30, and the state usually takes about three to four months to start making recommendations and changes to the plan.
“Quite honestly, we should have been looking at Sunnyslope a long time ago,” Keeling said, adding that state water quality control representatives, like himself, are spread thin throughout the state.
