Twenty-one years after South County cities first made plans to
pump highly treated wastewater into the Pajaro River they will
finally be allowed to do so.
Twenty-one years after South County cities first made plans to pump highly treated wastewater into the Pajaro River they will finally be allowed to do so.
The State Water Resources Control Board has dismissed a complaint lodged by Santa Cruz County to prevent the South County Regional Wastewater Authority from discharging into the river during the rainy season. Unless Santa Cruz County takes the SCRWA to court, a legal battle that began in 1998 is over.
Santa Cruz County officials have maintained that the discharge will pollute water there and make the area more prone to flooding, but water resources coordinator John Ricker said Thursday that the county is not likely to sue.
“I would say that’s the end of it,” Ricker said. “If the state board doesn’t want to consider our appeal, we’re willing to concede.”
The SCRWA is a joint project operated by Morgan Hill and Morgan Hill. Gilroy City Administrator Jay Baksa said Thursday that he expected the decision, which validated a five-year discharge permit issued by the central Coast Regional Water Resources Control Board last year.
“We’ve been proceeding with our planning process, assuming this was all going to turn out fine,” Baksa said. “We’re very satisfied that the state board found no problems with our approach or the regional board’s. We always thought we had a very tight permit.”
The permit specifies that wastewater can only be discharged to the river November through April. It must be treated by a tertiary treatment process, a high level of treatment that releases wastewater into the river of an often higher quality than the river water itself.
Also, the river must have a minimum flow rate before wastewater can be discharged. In dry years, when the rate is below the minimum standard and downstream flooding becomes a concern, wastewater will be directed to reclamation and land disposal.
The permit is part of SCRWA’s efforts to overhaul the way it disposes of wastewater. The agency has just begun construction on a $28-million project to recycle twice the amount of South County wastewater for use in parks, golf courses and farms. Baksa said SCRWA will begin to discharge to the Pajaro near the end of the decade.
The quest to secure the permit dates back to 1984 when the authority created its general plan. Authority members say the proposal is a proactive plan to pump small amounts of relatively clean water into the Pajaro without significantly impacting downstream communities. The extra capacity is especially important during the winter, authority officials claim, when wastewater flows increase but the water table rises and the need for treated wastewater for irrigation declines sharply, making traditional disposal inadequate.
Matthew Keeling, an engineer with the regional board, said that tertiary-treated wastewater poses no threat to the Pajaro when it runs freely during the winter months.
“In many cases, the water that they are going to discharge into the river is going to be of better quality that’s what’s in the Pajaro River,” he said.
But the regional and state water boards balked at SCRWA’s original plan, and in 1998 the SCRWA sued the boards for the right to discharge into the Pajaro. A May 2003 Santa Clara County Superior Court decision granted the authority the right to the permit, but the ruling did not set any specific terms and regulations. The Santa Clara Valley Water District supported SCRWA through the litigation.
“SCRWA has been working really hard on this, putting a lot of effort into planning and good facilities,” Tracy Hemmeter, a water district senior project manager, said. “This permit is the fruition of all that work and meets the needs of the community and the environment.”
Santa Clara County Supervisor Don Gage, who was Gilroy’s mayor at the start of the permit battles, said the highly-treated water is cleaner than the water already flowing through the Pajaro.
“We’ve showed that the water we would put into the Pajaro is better than the water that’s in there,” Gage said. “It’s ironic with Santa Cruz [County]. They’re always trying to be the savior of the Monterey Bay, but at the same time they weren’t doing it much good.”
