Hollister’s Sewage Saga: how did we get here and why isn’t it
built yet?
The scene was a raucous local government meeting, packed
wall-to-wall with fed-up citizens and bickering elected leaders.
The topic: should we approve another big housing development or
wait until services catch up?
– and the debate was fierce between development proponents and
those who cautioned that the city’s overburdened infrastructure
couldn’t take much more.
Hollister’s Sewage Saga: how did we get here and why isn’t it built yet?
The scene was a raucous local government meeting, packed wall-to-wall with fed-up citizens and bickering elected leaders. The topic: should we approve another big housing development or wait until services catch up? – and the debate was fierce between development proponents and those who cautioned that the city’s overburdened infrastructure couldn’t take much more.
This may sound like it happen last week in Hollister, but it actually took place four years ago. Last week the council voted unanimously to quadruple residents’ sewage bills by 2009 in order to pay for a future $123 million sewage facility that was supposed to have been built a year ago.
The debates happened over and over again in the weeks and months building up to that fateful day in May 2002, when those who cautioned about the overly stressed infrastructure were proved right, as one of the city’s overloaded sewage ponds busted loose, pouring 15 million gallons of wastewater into the San Benito River.
It’s not like there were no warning signs, as former Hollister Councilman Brian Conroy recalls.
“There were sewage line breaks, crap backing up into people’s homes, pipes busting,” Conroy told The Pinnacle in an interview this week. “Right before the levee broke we made (Lloyd) Bracewell [whose engineering company was in charge of maintaining the sewage ponds] come before the council and give reports, and he swore up and down that nothing was wrong.”
It was an alleged ground squirrel hole that broke the levee’s back on Pond No. 6.
To understand why Hollister has been deluged with sewage problems – going on six years now – one has to know the city’s history in how it’s dealt with housing developments.
Throughout the 1990s, Hollister city councils approved massive developments at a breakneck pace, and housing projects sprouted profusely on the west and south ends of town. Real estate was hot and greed seemed to know no bounds. The population nearly doubled in a decade, from 20,000 residents to 37,000 residents, according to the 2000 U.S. Census.
Big money was made in real-estate deals and the city racked in building fees that big developers paid up front – but with little thought given to how that growth affected the city’s infrastructure, such as streets, parks and, yes, the sewer system.
By that time residents of San Benito viewed their elected leaders as being in one of two camps: pro-development or slow growth.
Just before the sewage pond broke in May 2002, the debate over unbridled growth turned nasty. Pro-growth advocate and Hollister Councilman Joe Felice posted a list of his managed-growth adversaries linking them to vulgar Web sites. He was later successfully sued.
Two Hollister Councilmen were discovered to have accepted gifts – including an expensive political dinner and pro baseball tickets from a major developer. They later voted for the project.
County officials and others said repeatedly that the community was feeling the affects of the breakneck growth with inadequate fire protection, insufficient water and sewage systems, and a lack of police and schools.
The decision to recommend annexation pitted county leaders against city leaders; the county warned that the city’s infrastructure and services were at the point of failing because of rampant development, while the majority of city leaders claimed the slow-growth county was being hyperbolic about the issue.
It was 2002 and the volume on the growth controversy was turned way up. People were calling the newspapers with reports of ruination when the city’s sewage system started backing up into residents’ homes.
Then in early May, the unthinkable happened. Sewage pond No. 6 broke and poured 15 million gallons of wastewater from the cannery’s industrial treatment pond into the San Benito River, a tributary to the Pajaro River, which flows into the Monterey Bay Sanctuary.
The wastewater flowed for a mile down the riverbanks. A week before, it was discovered that one of the municipal ponds holding household waste had been leaking into the river for 10 months.
There was worse to come. Three months later, the sewage breach was the top agenda item during a nine-hour meeting before the state Regional Water Quality Control Board, held in Salinas. The already financially strapped city faced a $600,000 fine for the spill and a potential building moratorium. For hours, city officials – including Mayor Pauline Valdivia, Councilman Tony Bruscia, then City Manager George Lewis and Public Utilities Director Clint Quilter – begged the nine-member board to be lenient with the city. On the other side of the aisle, county leaders sat silent.
Bruscia left early, but not before instructing his attorney to read a note to the board in parting, which the lawyer did, reluctantly:
“If we send (the fine money) off to the state, the people would be unfairly punished for something which they did not do … Double the fine, if you must, but let’s put the money to work accomplishing good!,” the attorney read.
The board did just that. It doubled the fine to $1.2 million, imposed a building (sewer hookup) moratorium until a new sewage facility was built, and gave the city a timeline to fix its sewage woes. The new facility was to be up and running by December 2005. The city faced more fines if they didn’t make the deadlines.
“They asked for it and they got it,” said then Supervisor Ruth Kesler, a slow-growth advocate who attended the water board meeting. “It had to happen.”
The meeting was reminiscent of an April 2000 meeting in San Luis Obispo between Hollister officials and the state water board. At that time, Hollister leaders begged the board for more permitted flow capacity so they could build “special needs” housing for seniors and low-income families.
Board member Russell Jeffries asked how many building permits had been issued since then, and the number was 588 – not 176 permits which the city had originally thought. And few – if any — had been for special needs, city officials acknowledged.
“Hollister is trying to pull the wool over our eyes again,” Jeffries remarked.
It’s September 2006, and not one shovel of dirt has been moved to make way for a new sewage facility.
The biggest holdup in the project has been, not surprisingly, a disagreement between city and county officials, said Conroy. Toward the end of Conroy’s term in 2004, little had been accomplished, despite new city manager Clint Quilter’s efforts.
“For at least a full year the entire group wasn’t talking about it,” Conroy said.
That group consisted of members of the city council, officials of the county and city water districts ,and county supervisors.
“The city had a plan to discharge the wastewater into San Juan Valley, and the county and water district went nuts and were going to sue,” he added. “It came down to that. What the city does affects the region.”
Another problem, according to City Manager Clint Quilter, was a tangled state process complying with the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA. It calls for public input into the project and allows anyone or any agency to challenge the design and manner of treatment and disposal.
“When you get done with the process someone can disagree with you – the public, officials, whatever – and we would have to address that,” Quilter said a year ago. “But CEQA does ensure transparency in government.”
During his last year in office Conroy joined the Inter-Government Council, made up of city and county officials, in an attempt to iron out arguments between the two entities. They made headway, he said, but the stalemate over disposal of the treated water persisted. In the meantime, Conroy visited the city of American Canyon to check out a wastewater system that nearly purified sewage water.
“They had this membrane system, and the neat thing about it is the water goes through this tank with an ultra violet light treatment,” Conroy said. “The water was treated to tertiary standard – called Title 22 – and it was so crystal clear it went into a creek that fed Napa Valley vineyards. Think about that when you have an out-of-county glass of wine.
“But we can’t do that here because we have too much salt in the water from softeners,” he added.
And you can’t get salt out, as county Water District director John Gregg has been telling everyone for years – which is why he and the county went ballistic over the city’s plan to drench San Juan crops with treated water.
Today, Hollister City Hall offers a “fact sheet” on the city’s plans for a new wastewater treatment facility. In the literature, it reads, “What are the reasons for the current building moratorium? (A:) In 2002, Hollister’s Wastewater Treatment Plant reached its design capacity and the California Regional Water Quality Control Board required the City to impose a building moratorium….”
There is no mention of the building boom, the rampant project approvals, or the embarrassing sewage spill that occurred in 2002 and any subsequent environmental damage it caused. It doesn’t sit well with resident Ruth Erickson, who has been a fixture at City Council meetings for years.
“Do you read anything into that sentence about someone screwing up? That the sewage spill even happened in 2002, that no one was checking?” Erickson commented. “This is pure poetry.”
Sewer Timeline
Dec. 2001 – Domestic sewage pond starts leaking into San Benito River.
Jan. 2002 – Sewage starts backing up into homes.
March 2002 – Water and sewer mains begin breaking throughout city.
May 2002 – Sewage Pond No. 9 breaks, spilling 15 million gallons of industrial sewage into San Benito River.
Oct. 2002 – Regional Water Board imposes hookup moratorium and $1.2 million fine on Hollister.
2003 – 2005 – City wants to irrigate San Juan Valley with treated wastewater, salted; county and water district say no.
Oct. 2005 – State’s deadline to have new treatment plant built passes.
Sept. 2006 – City Council votes to raise sewage bills from $31/month to $124/month by 2009. No treatment plant built and no contract awarded.
Dec. 2008 (or 2009?) – Newly revised dates for completion of treatment plant.
